Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno is done waiting on the courts to fix what he and millions of Americans see as a glaring loophole in immigration law. Following the Supreme Court’s decision blocking President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, Moreno announced he will introduce legislation when the Senate returns from recess on July 13 that would end automatic citizenship for children born on U.S. soil to mothers who are neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents.
What makes Moreno’s move especially sharp is where the bill actually came from. He is not writing new legislation from scratch. He is reviving, almost word for word, a bill first introduced in 1993 by then Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada. The Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993 explicitly stated that children born in the United States to an alien mother who is not a lawful resident should not automatically become citizens.
Moreno wants Congress on the record. His plan is simple and, frankly, brilliant politics. Reintroduce Reid’s exact language and force today’s Democrat Party to either support the very policy their own former leader championed or expose how far left the party has drifted since the 1990s.
“Before far-left radicals took over the Democrat Party, their leader Harry Reid introduced a great bill to end birthright citizenship, ensure no illegals could vote, and crack down on employers who abuse illegal labor,” Moreno said in a statement announcing the reintroduction.
The senator did not mince words about what he expects the vote to reveal. He wants to find out, once and for all, whether Harry Reid would still have a home in the modern Democrat Party. Given how the party has shifted on immigration enforcement over the past three decades, most observers expect the answer to be a resounding no.
This all comes on the heels of a bruising defeat for the Trump administration at the Supreme Court. In a closely watched ruling handed down on June 30, the Court sided against the president’s executive order attempting to redefine the scope of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, argued that citizenship under the 14th Amendment extends to all children born on U.S. soil regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
Not every justice agreed, and the dissent was not quiet about it. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, filed a blistering dissent grounding his reasoning in the actual history of the 14th Amendment. Thomas argued the Citizenship Clause was written for freed slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War, not as a blanket guarantee for children of people who entered the country illegally.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh took a more nuanced position, concurring in part and dissenting in part, but his opinion contained a critical detail that Moreno and other Republicans immediately seized on. Kavanaugh made clear that while the Court was ruling on the limits of executive power, Congress retains the ability to clarify citizenship law through ordinary legislation.
That is precisely the door Moreno intends to walk through. Rather than pursue the long and difficult road of a constitutional amendment, which requires two thirds majorities in both chambers of Congress plus ratification by three quarters of the states, Moreno is betting that a straightforward act of Congress can accomplish much of what conservatives have wanted for years.
President Trump himself has argued that no constitutional amendment is necessary at all, insisting that Congress already has the authority to define citizenship through statute. Legal scholars on the left dispute that reading, with groups like the ACLU arguing that no ordinary law can override a constitutional provision. Conservatives counter that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was never intended to apply to people who are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States in the full legal sense, a phrase they argue excludes illegal aliens and their children.
Moreno’s bill is not limited to birthright citizenship. It carries the full weight of Reid’s original 1993 framework, now updated and reintroduced as the Immigration Stabilization Act of 2026. The legislation would cap annual refugee admissions at 50,000 and require the president to prioritize those slots for applicants with the greatest humanitarian need, a far cry from the open-ended refugee policies pushed by the Biden administration.
The bill also takes direct aim at voter fraud concerns that have plagued elections in recent cycles. It would make it a federal crime for noncitizens to vote in any federal, state, or local election, and it would nullify any such votes that are cast. For a party that has spent years accused of turning a blind eye to noncitizen voting, this provision alone puts Democrats in an uncomfortable spot.
Criminal enforcement is another major pillar. The bill expands the list of crimes classified as aggravated felonies for immigration purposes, stiffens penalties for illegal reentry to a range of ten to twenty years, and requires local law enforcement agencies to notify federal immigration authorities within 72 hours of a felony arrest involving an illegal alien.
It would also allow for faster deportation proceedings to begin while a criminal sentence is still being served, closing a loophole that has allowed some criminal aliens to remain in the country for years after they should have been removed.
Border security funding is addressed as well, with the bill calling for an increase in the number of Border Patrol agents and the introduction of user fees on border crossings to help finance enforcement operations, an idea that shifts some of the cost burden away from taxpayers.
Moreno made his intentions known publicly before the ink on the Supreme Court’s ruling was even dry. Responding to a social media post from Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin highlighting Reid’s original 1993 proposal, Moreno wrote that he would reintroduce “this exact bill” upon returning to Washington and challenged his colleagues to see how today’s Democrats would vote when offered the same ideas their party once championed.
He did not stop there. Moreno also called on his fellow Republicans to consider eliminating the filibuster in order to get the legislation across the finish line, a suggestion that reflects growing frustration among conservatives who feel Senate rules have repeatedly allowed a minority of Democrats to block popular, common sense immigration reforms.
The politics here are worth dwelling on. Harry Reid was no moderate by the standards of his era, but even he understood in 1993 that unchecked birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants created perverse incentives and strained public resources. Three decades later, the same policy position that once had bipartisan credibility is now treated by much of the Democrat Party as an unthinkable extremist position, a shift that tells you everything about how far the party has moved.
Republicans are already framing the upcoming vote as a referendum on just how radical the modern Democrat Party has become. If Senate Democrats vote against a bill built entirely from their own former leader’s playbook, it will be difficult for them to claim they still represent mainstream American values on immigration.
