Democrats are gearing up for the 2028 election and preparing a list of policy priorities—dubbed “Project 2029″—should they retake the White House. The first Project 2029 proposal is not about affordability, healthcare, or foreign policy. No, the Democrats’ first proposal concerns children’s online safety: the issue fueling lawmakers’ bipartisan push to impose greater government control over the internet.
Semafor‘s Nicholas Wu first reported on the “Kids Over Clicks” proposal on Monday. The proposal, Wu wrote, advocates for “narrowing protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that shield platforms from some liability,” banning social media accounts for kids under 16, “designing safer internet platforms,” and more.
Supporters of the proposal include the author and social scientist Jonathan Haidt, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.), and New Jersey Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill, according to the outlet. Sherrill’s involvement comes as no surprise, as she has made online safety a main focus of her gubernatorial agenda. The first-term governor has proposed creating both an Office of Youth Online Mental Health Safety and a Social Media Research Center in New Jersey. The Kids Over Clicks proposal was written by Rishi Bharwani, the U.S. director of Reset Tech, a group dedicated to “countering digital threats to society.” Bharwani previously co-chaired Sherrill’s children’s online safetypolicy team and led Booker’s tech policy team.
The proposal claims that America is witnessing a “tobacco moment,” this time for social media and AI companies, and the government must intervene as it did with the tobacco industry to prevent harm. But this is a fraught comparison, as Reason has pointed out, because tobacco is a physical product with measurable side effects, and social media is a vehicle for speech. The distinction matters because any policy regulating speech should be evaluated based on First Amendment grounds, not on its potential to reduce harm.
The Kids Over Clicks proposal’s call to impose age restrictions on social media sites presents a particularly chilling threat to free speech. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation has warned, age verification laws “violate all internet users’ rights to access information, impinge on people’s right to anonymity, and exacerbate their data and security risks.” In the U.K., the Online Safety Act has exposed the problems with age verification, as users must fork over their data when they want to view age-restricted content, effectively censoring wide swaths of the internet for children and adults. The censorship implications have not deterred the U.K. government from imposing more regulations, as the country prepares to implement a social media ban for teens, which will likely take effect next year. It appears that Project 2029’s authors are eager to import similar policies from abroad, citing Australia‘s social media ban—which many teens have been able to skirt—as a successful case study in online safety.
It may seem odd that Project 2029 is making its debut by advocating for censorship policies, but Semafor reported that the project authors “wanted to start with kids safety because it’s among the least politically polarizing topics.”
This sentiment is, unfortunately, correct. Children’s online safety has become a bipartisan issue that lawmakers have used to crack down on personal freedom. Red states, including Texas and Florida, have enacted online safety laws in the name of protecting children. And on Monday night, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act, a bundle of online safety bills that includes a version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). The House’s version of KOSA does not include a duty of care provision, making it slightly less restrictive than the Senate’s KOSA bill. Still, digital rights groupssuch as Reclaim the Netwarn the KIDS Act raises significant concerns “about government overreach, privacy erosion, and the expansion of online surveillance.” If passed, the KIDS Act would also allow states to enact their own laws regulating social media and AI companies, according to the bill’s co-author, Rep. Frank Pallone (D–N.J.).
Democrats may be fractured internally, but the party is certainly unitingover a winning position in Washington: advocating for more government control over the internet. As Monday night’s vote demonstrated, they will find Republican allies who want to regulate the internet, too. If this pro-censorship coalition works diligently enough, it may achieve the goals of the Project 2029 proposal well before the next election.
Critics of the growing plant-based meat business say that unless a burger began with a heartbeat, it has no right to be called “meat.”
Even as cattlemen-backed state laws on the topic arebeing struck down by courts, bothfederal lawmakers and theircounterparts in Europe are contemplating legislation to ensure that “meat” is a label reserved for foods carved from once-living creatures. As Florida legislator Dean Black (R–Nassau), a cattle rancher,put it: animal-free meat “is not meat…it is made by man, real meat is made by God Himself.”
History is full of examples of established companies pleading with the government to intervene when a new technology disrupts their market. It is protectionism dressed up as consumer protection. Labels like “plant-based burger” or “vegan sausage” don’t hide the ball. They tell consumers exactly what they’re buying. The real question is whether the government should let incumbent industries monopolize ordinary words.
When Ice Was ‘Artificial’
More than a century ago, another incumbent industry tried to defend its turf by insisting that a new technology could imitate nature but never deserve nature’s name. The product was ice.
America’s lucrative natural ice industry was being disrupted by a cheaper, cleaner, more reliable competitor: manufactured ice, or as its detractors insisted it be called, artificial ice.
The incumbent industry fought back with a message that sounds remarkably familiar today: the new thing was an imitation, an artificial product masquerading as nature’s own.
The industry even formed the Natural Ice Association of America. In 1910, at the association’s second annual convention,its president declared: “It is high time for us to stand up for our rights and advertise throughout the country that we stand for what is wholesome and pure, namely, natural ice….Man can imitate God but he cannot improve upon Him. Man can imitate Nature and make ice but he cannot improve upon the works of Nature.”
The anxiety soon extended beyond ice itself to the foods kept cold by the new technology, which were derided as unnatural and unsafe. Natural ice-makers even tied artificially cooled foods to cholera and cancer, a view held by many public health authorities at the time.
To show that refrigerated food was safe, the nascent artificial-cooling industry hosted a 1911 banquet in Chicago consisting entirely of refrigerated foods. Historian Nicola Twilley notes that the first-of-a-kind meal was widely covered and mocked; one Chicago newspaper previewed it under the headline “To Dine on Embalmed Food.” The Journal of the American Medical Association, meanwhile, had already warned that cold storage posed public health challenges, including “well-known abuses.”
Of course, the campaign against human-made ice eventually melted away. Today, nobody opens a freezer and asks whether the cubes are “real ice.” The source changed, while the name remained the same.
Had the natural ice industry persuaded lawmakers to reserve the word “ice” for frozen water harvested from ponds, consumers would not have been protected; competitors would have been.
Are Consumers Actually Confused?
Will something similar happen to meats made from plants and fungi? Already, very few people have a hard time understanding that coconut milk didn’t come from a cow, or that peanut butter doesn’t contain dairy. As plant-based meats improve, many are now rated inblind taste tests either as good as or even better tasting than their animal counterparts. With less saturated fat, zero cholesterol, and more fiber, it’s no surprise this is now a billion-dollar industry.
That is how innovation often works: the experience arrives before the vocabulary catches up. New technologies almost always borrow the language of what they replace before becoming ordinary in their own right.
The best we could do for “cars” at first was to call them “horseless carriages,” but today, no one thinks our vehicles are “fake carriages” any more than we think digital pictures are “fake photographs.” The idea that one could read a book without holding a bundle of papers in their hands would be foreign to past generations too, but no one thinks they’re reading a “fake book” when enjoying a novel on their Kindle. And the supercomputer in your pocket certainly isn’t an “imitation telephone.”
Plant-based burgers and meatballs are following the same pattern. For thousands of years, the experience of eating meat required cutting it from an animal’s body. Now, human ingenuity has found new ways to deliver much of that same culinary experience without the slaughter.
Of course labels should be clear: plant-based meat should say it is plant-based, just as oat milk says it’s made from oats and doesn’t pretend to come from a cow.
Let the Market Decide
Consumers buy plant-based meats for different reasons: taste, price, health, environmental concerns, animal welfare, or simple curiosity. In any case, they know what they’re buying. Real confusion comes when old production methods claim ownership of words and new technologies are forced to use descriptors consumers won’t recognize. A package labeled “plant-based meat” is not a trick; it is a disclosure. If a label is truthful and clear, the government should not ban it merely because an incumbent industry dislikes the comparison.
Ice doesn’t have to come from a pond. Transportation doesn’t have to come with horses. Photos didn’t have to come from film. Books don’t have to be printed on paper. And meat, increasingly, does not have to come from a slaughtered animal. All disruptive technologies sound fake right up until the moment everyone starts using them. That’s how progress works. The government can’t—and shouldn’t try—to stop them.
The left keeps claiming that its candidates purport to speak for working-class people and advance working-class interests, only to discover that supporters of democratic socialism are disproportionately affluent and elite-educated. It’s true in New York City—where two democratic socialists just won their primaries—and it’s also true in Maine, where Democratic nominee Graham Platner hopes to defeat incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Platner’s campaign rhetoric often includes dramatic statements about how working people in Maine are falling in love with his extremely progressive economic policies and agree with his tactic of incessantly demonizing the wealthy.
“We have watched this state become essentially unlivable for working-class people, and it makes me deeply angry,” he said in his campaign announcement video. “The enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out.”
But according to New York Times polling, Platner actually trails Collins by roughly 21 points among non-college-educated respondents. Platner’s voters are much more highly educated than Collins’ voters, and thus far less likely to be members of the working class, broadly defined.
If democratic socialism is once again having a moment, it’s not because throngs of working-class voters have finally decided that greater—or even total—government control of the economy and mass wealth redistribution would make their lives better. Rather, it’s wealthy and elite-educated leftists inflicting Platner’s politics on the rest of their party.
When the 14th Amendment was introduced in the U.S. Senate in 1866, the first senator to speak out in opposition to it was a Pennsylvania Republican named Edgar Cowan. He objected in part because the Citizenship Clause of the proposed amendment would make American citizens out of the U.S.-born children of unwelcome immigrants. “Is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race?” Cowan asked. And what about the “Gypsies” that he claimed were present in his own state? “These people live in the country and are born in the country. They infest society,” he declared. Yet the 14th Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship would cover them, too. “If the mere fact of being born in the country confers that right,” Cowan said, “then they will have it; and I think it will be mischievous.”
Cowan’s objections were answered by another Republican senator, John Conness of California. “I beg my honorable friend from Pennsylvania to give himself no further trouble on account of the Chinese in California or on the Pacific coast,” Conness said. “We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.”
In a 5–4 decision issued on Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the original understanding of the Citizenship Clause that was voiced by Conness.
“At issue in this case,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Trump v. Barbara, “is whether the Constitution guarantees citizenship to children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States.” The Court rightly held that the Constitution does indeed guarantee birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of such parents.
This result has been a long time coming. Eleven years ago, I wrote about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship under the headline, “Trump vs. the Constitution.” “If the courts follow the Constitution,” I argued, Trump’s efforts to undermine the 14th Amendment “will surely fail.”
Trump v. Barbara makes the failure official. “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,'” the Court held in Barbara. “We keep that promise today.”
Writing in dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the 14th Amendment should be read narrowly to guarantee birthright citizenship only to those newborns whose parents are “subject to the jurisdiction of the government of his domicile.” But that is not what the text requires. The text of the 14th Amendment says: “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.”
To be “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” means to be subject to the laws and authority of the United States. This meaning was well settled at the time of the 14th Amendment’s drafting and ratification. For instance, the 1865 edition of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Languagedefinedjurisdiction, in the context of a government, as meaning the “power of governing or legislating,” “the right of making or enforcing laws,” and “the power or right of exercising authority.”
Both illegal immigrants and lawful temporary visitors are “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” under this original meaning because the U.S. government has “the right of making or enforcing laws” that apply against such persons when they are present on U.S. soil. Such persons may be arrested and prosecuted under our laws when they are here. That makes their U.S.-born children birthright citizens under the original meaning of the constitutional text. The majority in Trump v. Barbara was therefore right to reject the nontextualist and unhistorical reading promoted by Thomas and others.
The Supreme Court does not always get it right in cases of such magnitude. This time it did.
Today the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Barbara, the birthright citizenship case. A 6-3 majority struck down Donald Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship status to children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States, and those born to non-citizen parents here on temporary visas. I think the Court got this extremely important decision right. In so doing, they saved hundreds of thousands of people from being subject to deportation – often to a lifetime of poverty and oppression.
The dissenting opinions by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito mishandle key points. Most notably, they overlook the reality that their positions would have denied birthright citizenship to large numbers of freed slaves and other Blacks, thus negating the central purpose of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The Citizenship Clause states that “[a]ll 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.” The Trump administration claims that children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa-holders are not “subject to the jurisdiction.” For many decades, the dominant interpretation of this phrase was that “subject to the jurisdiction” covers all children of parents who are required to obey US law. For example, they can be prosecuted if they commit a crime.
The majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts rightly endorses this approach. It traces this rule back to British traditions of birthright citizenship later adopted by the US:
In 1868, as today, “jurisdiction” (in the context of a sovereign) refers to the “[p]ower of governing or legislating.” N. Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language 732 (C. Goodrich & N. Porter eds. 1865)…. To be “subject to” the jurisdiction of the United States, then, is to “liv[e] under” its “dominion,” J. Worcester, Dictionary of the English Language 1435 (1860), a meaning reinforced by the Clause’s territorial focus on those born “in” the United States. The Citizenship Clause uses jurisdiction in its ordinary sense—referring to the power of the United States to govern those within its territory….
The scope of that power was well settled in 1868, largely by “the celebrated case” of Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon, 7 Cranch 116…. Expounding on “general principles,” Chief Justice Marshall explained that “jurisdiction” referred to “the full and complete power of a nation within its own territories.” 7 Cranch, at 136. That “absolute” power was “susceptible of no limitation not imposed” by the nation itself. Ibid. All sovereigns, however, were understood to have impliedly waived their jurisdiction in “certain peculiar circumstances”—in essence, where exercising jurisdiction would “degrade the dignity” of “foreign sovereigns.” Id., at 136–137. As in the context of jus soli, those peculiar circumstances arose most frequently in the case of “foreign ministers.” See id., at 138–139. “[E]very sovereign would hazard his own dignity,” after all, if his officials abroad were made to “owe temporary and local allegiance to a foreign prince.” Id., at 139….
The ordinary legal meaning of the text of the Clause thus neatly captures the common law rule, with its broad reach and narrow exceptions. The same groups included (and excluded) by jus soli were included (and excluded) by the conventional understanding of jurisdiction. Excluded by both were the children of foreign ministers and members of 19th- century Indian tribes over whom the United States had ceded a part of its territorial jurisdiction to preserve its relationship with a foreign sovereign (or quasi-sovereign).
No such intersovereign concerns apply to children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States….
As the Court points out, this approach was reinforced by the Supreme Court’s ruling United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which held that birthright citizenship applies to allchildren of noncitizens born in the United States, with the exceptions of children of foreign diplomats, those born on foreign “public ships” in U.S. territorial waters (which remain under the sovereign authority of their home governments), Native Americans born under the rule of tribal governments, and children of soldiers in invading armies occupying U.S. territory.
I think this is basically right. And it is reinforced by the main purpose of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment: granting citizenship to then-recently freed slaves and other Blacks. The 1857 Dred Scott decision had ruled that Black people (even those who were not slaves) could never be citizens of the United States. The Citizenship Clause was intended to reverse this terrible decision. As I explained in a Lawfare article, every argument offered by the Trump Administration and its supporters would also have denied citizenship to large numbers of freed slaves, their children, and other Black people.
In a lengthy dissent partly joined by Justice Gorsuch, Justice Clarence Thomas argues that “subject to the jurisdiction” excludes children people who are not “domiciled” in the United States, and undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders do not have such domiciles. But, as Thomas himself recognizes, the main purpose of the Citizenship Clause was “ensuring that all black Americans, both the newly freed slaves and those who were free before the war, would be treated as citizens of the United States and of the States in which they lived.” His domicile theory is at odds with that objective.
As explained in my Lawfare article, many thousands of slaves were brought into the United States illegally after the US banned the slave trade in 1808. If illegal entry is enough to vitiate domicile, these people and their descendants would not – under Thomas’s approach – be entitled to birthright citizenship. In the article, I point out this and other related flaws in the domicile theory:
If “domicile” simply means living in the United States, then both slaves and illegal migrants obviously qualify. If it means living in the U.S. legally, then undocumented migrants can be excluded. But the same goes for slaves brought in illegally. And… there were many such illegally transported slaves.
Moreover, to the extent that the Supreme Court has held that “domicile” matters for jurisdiction, it also requires that any legal change of domicile must be voluntary. For example, in a 1989 case involving a conflict between state and tribal jurisdiction over the adoption of Native American children, the Court ruled that “[o]ne acquires a ‘domicile of origin’ at birth, and that domicile continues until a new one (a ‘domicile of choice’) is acquired.” Nineteenth century jurists held similar views. For example, in the 1890 case of Penfield v. Chesapeake O. & S.W. R. Co., the Supreme Court held that “No length of residence, without the intention of remaining, constitutes domicile” in a case where state jurisdiction over a case turned on residency…. Most, if not all, slaves forcibly brought to the U.S. obviously had no “intention of remaining” but would have preferred to be returned to their original homes. On this theory, undocumented migrants actually have a stronger claim to domicile than slaves did, since the former come voluntarily and generally have every intention of remaining indefinitely.
In sum, either children of undocumented migrants and temporary visa holders satisfy any relevant domicile requirement, or that requirement would exclude all or most slaves and their descendants.
In his separate dissent, Justice Gorsuch raises an additional criticism of Thomas’ theory (which explains why he joins Thomas only as to the status of children of temporary visitors):
Perhaps Wong Kim Ark does not squarely foreclose the government’s position. After all, that case addressed a child born to parents who lawfully resided in this country. Still, I wonder: Is a child born here to parents who have long chosen to make this Nation their permanent home not a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment solely because his parents’ presence violates statutory law? If those parents are not domiciled here, then where are they domiciled? And if the answer is nowhere, how can we reconcile that conclusion with this Court’s longstanding recognition that every person is domiciled somewhere?
This is correct. But worth nothing that slaves, of course, did not choose to make their homes in the US at all.
In a separate dissent, Justice Alito argues that the Citizenship Clause “confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.” Children of illegal migrants and temporary visa-holders, he contends, may owe allegiance to their parents’ countries of origin. As I explained in my article, this theory, too, would deny birthright citizenship to freed slaves:
If, as this theory assumes, people owe allegiance to the government of the country they are born in, it obviously applies to virtually all freed slaves as well, even those brought into the U.S. legally.
Africans captured and sold to slave traders owed “allegiance” to the rulers of their homelands just as much as illegal migrants or temporary visa-holders do. Indeed, the former likely had stronger ties of allegiance than the latter, since captured slaves—unlike migrants—had no desire to leave their homelands and live under the rule of the U.S. government instead.
Contrary to racist stereotypes, many West African rulers of the 18th and 19th centuries had considerably developed states…. And even more primitive tribal rulers could still claim allegiance from their subjects, as the U.S. government recognized in the case of Native American tribal governments.
This is part of the reason why children born on Native American reservations run by such governments are among the few categories of people born in the United States who were not historically understood to be given birthright citizenship by the Citizenship Clause….
The Trump administration and some of its amici, such as Ilan Wurman, combine the “allegiance” argument with the idea that illegal migrants are not under U.S. jurisdiction because they are not under the “protection” of the U.S. government. Randy Barnett and Wurman have argued that birthright citizenship applies only to the children of people who have entered into a “social compact” and an “allegiance-for-protection” exchange with the U.S. government.
But, as I pointed out in an earlier critique of the Barnett-Wurman argument, slaves obviously were not part of any social compact under which they traded allegiance for protection. Far from protecting them, state and federal governments facilitated their brutal oppression at the hands of their masters. Indeed, illegal migrants and temporary visa holders actually get far more protection from the U.S. government than slaves did. While undocumented immigrants are subject to deportation, U.S. authorities still, at least to some extent, protect them against enslavement, forced labor, and assault. Temporary visa holders get still more protection, as they can seek protection from law enforcement without fear of getting deported.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Kavanaugh argues that the Trump executive order is illegal under a federal law enacted in 1940, but not under the Fourteenth Amendment. He contends that illegal migration was a problem largely unknown in 1868, and that the Citizenship Clause should not be understood in a way that precludes addressing this supposedly “new and different circumstance.” But, as already noted, illegal entry of slaves was not a novel issue at all, and the Citizenship Clause was intended to cover such people. Moreover, even if there were few federal immigration restrictions prior to 1868, many state governments did have such restrictions, and it is notable that the Citizenship Clause grants state citizenship as well as the federal kind. Illegal entry was no obstacle to the latter, and the same logic applies to the former.
Kavanaugh also states that the “only apparent principle unifying the four disparate exceptions listed by the Court in Wong Kim Ark—especially in light of the exception for tribal American Indians—is that the parents in all of those varied circumstances were not U. S. citizens and were citizens of other nations, whether tribal or foreign.” He claims this unifying principle also covers children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders. In reality, these four exceptions are also unified by their exemption from many or all US laws. In addition, as already noted, any theory under which the latter two categories could be added to the list of exceptions would also cover numerous freed slaves and other Blacks.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson rightly emphasizes the links between the Citizenship Clause and Black Americans lengthy struggle for freedom and equal rights. She explains how the Citizenship clause is based on a “universalist approach” to liberty and equality, as opposed to one limited to a specific group.
I think she is generally right on this, and there are many eloquent quotes and notable historical points in her opinion. But it is worth noting that the Citizenship Clause itself does not fully live up to these universalist aspirations. As I explained in a post on why birthright citizenship is a “second-best” policy, the Fourteenth Amendment makes citizenship dependent on morally arbitrary circumstances of location of birth, which is not entirely dissimilar to the rules based on race and ancestry that Jackson and nineteenth century advocates of racial equality rightly condemned. A fully universalistic policy would eliminate such distinctions entirely.
That said, the moral limitations of the Citizenship Clause do not vitiate its legal validity. And today’s decision is vastly preferable to one that would have upheld Trump’s executive order, thereby subjecting hundreds of thousands of people to deportation.
With the birthright citizenship opinion handed down, I thought we were done for the term. But at 10:51 ET, NPR posts a story with Nina Totenberg’s byline: “Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, retires.”
The story had no actual details about the retirement, but included a lengthy profile of Justice Alito. It seems this piece was pre-written just in case of a retirement.
About 15 minutes later, the story was taken down. (I preserved a PDF.) There is now an Editors Note;
Editors Note: Earlier today we erroneously published a story saying that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was retiring. He has not announced his retirement and we have retracted the story.
Why was it published? Did someone make a mistake an erroneously click “submit.” Or did Nina Totenberg green-light the story? I think NPR should provide an explanation of what happened here. These sorts of announcements can move markets and have a huge impact before they are corrected.
This mess-up brings to mind the faulty reporting about NFIB v. Sebelius in 2012.
Update: Mediaite has more details on the retraction.
I correctly predicted that Coach Kavanaugh would have the transgender sports cases and the Chief would write birthright citizenship. I was wrong about Alito authoring NRSC, but that means he did not write anything in December, which gives weight to my theory that Alito lost the majority opinion in Hamm v. Smith.
I will have much more to say about today’s cases, and yesterday’s cases, and last week’s cases, in due course.
Critics of the growing plant-based meat business say that unless a burger began with a heartbeat, it has no right to be called “meat.”
Even as cattlemen-backed state laws on the topic arebeing struck down by courts, bothfederal lawmakers and theircounterparts in Europe are contemplating legislation to ensure that “meat” is a label reserved for foods carved from once-living creatures. As Florida legislator Dean Black (R–Nassau), a cattle rancher,put it: animal-free meat “is not meat…it is made by man, real meat is made by God Himself.”
History is full of examples of established companies pleading with the government to intervene when a new technology disrupts their market. It is protectionism dressed up as consumer protection. Labels like “plant-based burger” or “vegan sausage” don’t hide the ball. They tell consumers exactly what they’re buying. The real question is whether the government should let incumbent industries monopolize ordinary words.
When Ice Was ‘Artificial’
More than a century ago, another incumbent industry tried to defend its turf by insisting that a new technology could imitate nature but never deserve nature’s name. The product was ice.
America’s lucrative natural ice industry was being disrupted by a cheaper, cleaner, more reliable competitor: manufactured ice, or as its detractors insisted it be called, artificial ice.
The incumbent industry fought back with a message that sounds remarkably familiar today: the new thing was an imitation, an artificial product masquerading as nature’s own.
The industry even formed the Natural Ice Association of America. In 1910, at the association’s second annual convention,its president declared: “It is high time for us to stand up for our rights and advertise throughout the country that we stand for what is wholesome and pure, namely, natural ice….Man can imitate God but he cannot improve upon Him. Man can imitate Nature and make ice but he cannot improve upon the works of Nature.”
The anxiety soon extended beyond ice itself to the foods kept cold by the new technology, which were derided as unnatural and unsafe. Natural ice-makers even tied artificially cooled foods to cholera and cancer, a view held by many public health authorities at the time.
To show that refrigerated food was safe, the nascent artificial-cooling industry hosted a 1911 banquet in Chicago consisting entirely of refrigerated foods. Historian Nicola Twilley notes that the first-of-a-kind meal was widely covered and mocked; one Chicago newspaper previewed it under the headline “To Dine on Embalmed Food.” The Journal of the American Medical Association, meanwhile, had already warned that cold storage posed public health challenges, including “well-known abuses.”
Of course, the campaign against human-made ice eventually melted away. Today, nobody opens a freezer and asks whether the cubes are “real ice.” The source changed, while the name remained the same.
Had the natural ice industry persuaded lawmakers to reserve the word “ice” for frozen water harvested from ponds, consumers would not have been protected; competitors would have been.
Are Consumers Actually Confused?
Will something similar happen to meats made from plants and fungi? Already, very few people have a hard time understanding that coconut milk didn’t come from a cow, or that peanut butter doesn’t contain dairy. As plant-based meats improve, many are now rated inblind taste tests either as good as or even better tasting than their animal counterparts. With less saturated fat, zero cholesterol, and more fiber, it’s no surprise this is now a billion-dollar industry.
That is how innovation often works: the experience arrives before the vocabulary catches up. New technologies almost always borrow the language of what they replace before becoming ordinary in their own right.
The best we could do for “cars” at first was to call them “horseless carriages,” but today, no one thinks our vehicles are “fake carriages” any more than we think digital pictures are “fake photographs.” The idea that one could read a book without holding a bundle of papers in their hands would be foreign to past generations too, but no one thinks they’re reading a “fake book” when enjoying a novel on their Kindle. And the supercomputer in your pocket certainly isn’t an “imitation telephone.”
Plant-based burgers and meatballs are following the same pattern. For thousands of years, the experience of eating meat required cutting it from an animal’s body. Now, human ingenuity has found new ways to deliver much of that same culinary experience without the slaughter.
Of course labels should be clear: plant-based meat should say it is plant-based, just as oat milk says it’s made from oats and doesn’t pretend to come from a cow.
Let the Market Decide
Consumers buy plant-based meats for different reasons: taste, price, health, environmental concerns, animal welfare, or simple curiosity. In any case, they know what they’re buying. Real confusion comes when old production methods claim ownership of words and new technologies are forced to use descriptors consumers won’t recognize. A package labeled “plant-based meat” is not a trick; it is a disclosure. If a label is truthful and clear, the government should not ban it merely because an incumbent industry dislikes the comparison.
Ice doesn’t have to come from a pond. Transportation doesn’t have to come with horses. Photos didn’t have to come from film. Books don’t have to be printed on paper. And meat, increasingly, does not have to come from a slaughtered animal. All disruptive technologies sound fake right up until the moment everyone starts using them. That’s how progress works. The government can’t—and shouldn’t try—to stop them.
The left keeps claiming that its candidates purport to speak for working-class people and advance working-class interests, only to discover that supporters of democratic socialism are disproportionately affluent and elite-educated. It’s true in New York City—where two democratic socialists just won their primaries—and it’s also true in Maine, where Democratic nominee Graham Platner hopes to defeat incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Platner’s campaign rhetoric often includes dramatic statements about how working people in Maine are falling in love with his extremely progressive economic policies and agree with his tactic of incessantly demonizing the wealthy.
“We have watched this state become essentially unlivable for working-class people, and it makes me deeply angry,” he said in his campaign announcement video. “The enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out.”
But according to New York Times polling, Platner actually trails Collins by roughly 21 points among non-college-educated respondents. Platner’s voters are much more highly educated than Collins’ voters, and thus far less likely to be members of the working class, broadly defined.
If democratic socialism is once again having a moment, it’s not because throngs of working-class voters have finally decided that greater—or even total—government control of the economy and mass wealth redistribution would make their lives better. Rather, it’s wealthy and elite-educated leftists inflicting Platner’s politics on the rest of their party.
When the 14th Amendment was introduced in the U.S. Senate in 1866, the first senator to speak out in opposition to it was a Pennsylvania Republican named Edgar Cowan. He objected in part because the Citizenship Clause of the proposed amendment would make American citizens out of the U.S.-born children of unwelcome immigrants. “Is it proposed that the people of California are to remain quiescent while they are overrun by a flood of immigration of the Mongol race?” Cowan asked. And what about the “Gypsies” that he claimed were present in his own state? “These people live in the country and are born in the country. They infest society,” he declared. Yet the 14th Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship would cover them, too. “If the mere fact of being born in the country confers that right,” Cowan said, “then they will have it; and I think it will be mischievous.”
Cowan’s objections were answered by another Republican senator, John Conness of California. “I beg my honorable friend from Pennsylvania to give himself no further trouble on account of the Chinese in California or on the Pacific coast,” Conness said. “We are entirely ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.”
In a 5–4 decision issued on Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the original understanding of the Citizenship Clause that was voiced by Conness.
“At issue in this case,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Trump v. Barbara, “is whether the Constitution guarantees citizenship to children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States.” The Court rightly held that the Constitution does indeed guarantee birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of such parents.
This result has been a long time coming. Eleven years ago, I wrote about then-presidential candidate Donald Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship under the headline, “Trump vs. the Constitution.” “If the courts follow the Constitution,” I argued, Trump’s efforts to undermine the 14th Amendment “will surely fail.”
Trump v. Barbara makes the failure official. “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,'” the Court held in Barbara. “We keep that promise today.”
Writing in dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that the 14th Amendment should be read narrowly to guarantee birthright citizenship only to those newborns whose parents are “subject to the jurisdiction of the government of his domicile.” But that is not what the text requires. The text of the 14th Amendment says: “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.”
To be “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” means to be subject to the laws and authority of the United States. This meaning was well settled at the time of the 14th Amendment’s drafting and ratification. For instance, the 1865 edition of Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Languagedefinedjurisdiction, in the context of a government, as meaning the “power of governing or legislating,” “the right of making or enforcing laws,” and “the power or right of exercising authority.”
Both illegal immigrants and lawful temporary visitors are “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” under this original meaning because the U.S. government has “the right of making or enforcing laws” that apply against such persons when they are present on U.S. soil. Such persons may be arrested and prosecuted under our laws when they are here. That makes their U.S.-born children birthright citizens under the original meaning of the constitutional text. The majority in Trump v. Barbara was therefore right to reject the nontextualist and unhistorical reading promoted by Thomas and others.
The Supreme Court does not always get it right in cases of such magnitude. This time it did.
