Fourteen years ago, Pat Buchanan published a book titled Suicide of a Superpower, whose subtitle posed a simple question: “Will America Survive Until 2025?”

Well, here we are, alive and kicking.

But Buchanan’s premise — that America is disintegrating, that the “one Nation, under God, indivisible” of our Pledge of Allegiance has been rendered meaningless, and that our country would be largely unrecognizable to our ancestors — was certainly prescient. At the time of the 1960 Census — which was the last one taken before the Democrats rammed through, against the will of the American people, the ruinous Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 — 21 of the 50 states were more than 95% white. Sixty years later, one need only look around to see a vastly different landscape, one indelibly changed by what Buchanan calls “the diminution and displacement of the European majority.”

While Hart-Celler pushed legal immigration from non-European countries, much of the displacement is due to illegal immigration, most of it streaming unchecked across our southern border. Compounding this has been the belief among illegals, supported by Democrats and pro-immigration leftists, that if they can just get across the border and bear children, those children would automatically gain birthright citizenship — and chain migration and “family reunification” would take it from there.

On his first day in office, Donald Trump’s executive order on “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” sought to end the constitutionally dubious notion that birthright citizenship was meant to apply to the children of those who enter our country illegally.

The following day, 22 blue states ignored their constituencies and sued to block Trump’s order, claiming that birthright citizenship “is settled law and that while presidents have broad authority, they are not kings.” (As an aside, we seem to have missed the dissent from the Democrats when King Barack Obama was unconstitutionally giving amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegals with the stroke of a pen, and when King Joe Biden was unconstitutionally trying to buy millions of votes by forgiving student loan debt.)

The language at issue is from Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified on July 9, 1868, and which sought to ensure citizenship and equal protection to newly emancipated slaves. The amendment states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

But what does “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” mean? Not what the open-borders Left wants you to believe it means.

In a New York Times op-ed, two constitutional law professors — Georgetown’s Randy Barnett (who literally wrote the book on the original meaning of the 14th Amendment) and Minnesota’s Ilan Wurman — argue as follows:

The Supreme Court has held, in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, that children born here to permanent residents are citizens. But it has never squarely held that children born to those illegally present are citizens. When the court addresses that question — which it almost certainly must — it should consider the 14th Amendment’s original purpose and the common-law principle of “jus soli,” or birthright citizenship, which informed the original public meaning of the text. Both relate to the idea of social compact and contradict today’s general assumption that the common-law principle depends solely upon place of birth.

Again, the Supreme Court has never ruled that children born to those illegally present are citizens. So a court case is undoubtedly coming, and it’ll make clear just how many of the Court’s six Republican-appointed justices are of an originalist bent. Original intent matters here, and the authors of this amendment would no doubt be stunned today to see how their words and intent have been perverted.

As Barnett and Wurman point out, “It is widely agreed that ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ excluded the children of diplomats, Native Americans subject and with allegiance to tribal authority … and members of invading armies. The common-law principle of jus soli also excluded these groups.”

Given these exclusions to “the jurisdiction thereof,” why would anyone think that the children of people who entered our country illegally should somehow be included and thereby rewarded for breaking our immigration laws? We here in our humble shop have maintained this position all along.

Barnett and Wurman conclude: “The Supreme Court has, in a footnote, presumed that the 14th Amendment’s jurisdictional phrase applied equally to people who are here illegally, but the issue was neither briefed nor argued in that case; nor was it material to its outcome. When they finally consider this question, the justices will find that the case for Mr. Trump’s order is stronger than his critics realize.”

It sounds like the Supreme Court has some unfinished business to attend to.