When the Trump administration asks the Supreme Court on Thursday to allow it to deny birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and visa holders, its legal theory will rest on a reinterpretation of a critical phrase of the Constitution. But when you plug their preferred meaning back into the historical context in which the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause was enacted, the results are nonsensical. In other words, the crux of the government’s argument simply makes no sense.

The first sentence of the 14th Amendment, passed by Congress a year after the Civil War, is the Citizenship Clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” When President Donald Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his administration that would deny birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and visa holders, he premised it on the idea that undocumented immigrants and visa holders are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. This is the phrase the government is asking the courts to reinterpret into a fictional absurdity.