Less than two weeks into this second Trump presidency, the fearmongering has already reached fever pitch. “He can’t do it!” the critics have invariably howled in decrying President Donald Trump’s landmark day-one executive order upending the status quo on birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens.

When it comes to birthright citizenship, the virtue signaling and armchair excoriation is not just silly – it’s dead wrong on the law. Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order on birthright citizenship is legally sound and fundamentally just.

The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, reads: “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.” The clause’s purpose was to overturn the infamous 1857 Supreme Court case, Dred Scott v. Sandford, and thereby ensure that Blacks were, and would forever be, full-fledged citizens.

But Blacks were here from America’s beginning. The ruinous slavery debate aside, in 1868 Blacks were thus universally viewed – unlike, for example, American Indians – as “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Our debate today thus depends on whether, in 1868, aliens – legal or illegal – were considered “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.

They weren’t.

In the post-Civil War Republican-dominated Congress, the 14th Amendment was intended to constitutionalize the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which had passed two years prior. Rep. James Wilson (R-Iowa), then House Judiciary Committee chairman and a leading 14th Amendment drafter, emphasized that the amendment was “establishing no new right, declaring no new principle.”

In other words, the 14th Amendment formalized the Civil Rights Act of 1866. And the citizenship clause of that law reads: “All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” In other words, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” necessarily excludes those “subject to any foreign power.” As then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Lyman Trumbull (R-Ill.) said during the 14th Amendment ratification debate, “subject to the jurisdiction” means subject to the United States’ “complete” jurisdiction – that is, “not owing allegiance to anybody else.”

The 14th Amendment thus constitutionally requires that neither legal nor illegal aliens be afforded birthright citizenship.

This understanding was unchallenged for decades. In the 1873 Slaughter-House Cases, Justice Samuel Miller interpreted the citizenship clause as “intended to exclude from its operation children of … citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.” And in the 1884 case of Elk v. Wilkins, Justice Horace Gray held that “subject to the jurisdiction” means “not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance.”

It’s true that Gray inexplicably reversed course in an oft-cited 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Over a powerful and compelling dissenting opinion joined by Justice John Marshall Harlan, the sole dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson, Gray held that there is some level of birthright citizenship for the children of aliens. But even in that wrongfully decided case, the court emphasized that its holding was limited to children of “resident aliens” who were under “the allegiance” of the United States. The court repeatedly emphasized that its holding only applied to those legitimately “domiciled” here.

Fourteenth Amendment-mandated birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens is, at best, a live and unsettled legal debate. But the original meaning is quite clear: The amendment’s draftsmen would have been aghast at the notion that people who broke our laws and entered our soil illegally could then be afforded birthright citizenship for their children. The drafters likely foresaw, as so many today do not, the tremendous perverse incentives induced by such an ill-conceived policy.

The so-called legal eagles are wrong. And Trump, yet again, is right.