The Trump administration is citing a racist confederate lawyer who argued for “separate but equal” segregation and Jim Crow law in its attempt to end birthright citizenship.On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the Justice Department’s attempt to argue that being born in the United States doesn’t make you a citizen, contrary to what the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment states. A friend-of-the-court brief from the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance, or CALDA, highlighted that the DOJ is, in its own briefs, “recycling the losing arguments” of Alexander Porter Morse, who unsuccessfully argued before the Supreme Court in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark that U.S. children born to Chinese immigrant parents had no right to citizenship.According to The Washington Post, Justice Department lawyers specifically referenced Morse’s argument that the Constitution “exclude[s] the children of foreigners transiently within the United States” from qualifying for citizenship.Morse believed that Chinese people were “uncivilized,” didn’t want Black people to have the right to vote, and opposed Reconstruction. It’s deeply troubling yet unsurprising that the Trump administration is using his views to support its case.“In Wong Kim Ark, Wharton, Morse, and Collins lost. And that loss was deserved. Their arguments were built on a racist foundation, attempting to use anti-Chinese sentiment to relitigate, rather than interpret, the Citizenship Clause,” CALDA wrote. “A Supreme Court made up of people who themselves harbored anti-Chinese racist beliefs nevertheless stood up to that moment and defended the Constitution.”CALDA compared the historic ruling to one far more shameful decades later, upholding Japanese internment. “In Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court allowed fear and bigotry to subjugate the Constitution, a mistake that this Court would later say was ‘wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—has no place in law under the Constitution.’“This is another moment for the Court,” CALDA continued in its brief. “Will it follow the path this Court blazed in Wong Kim Ark? Or will it issue another Korematsu?”