Sen. Bernie Moreno plans to drop a piece of legislation on the Senate floor next month that Democrats will find difficult to dismiss, because one of their own icons wrote it. The Ohio Republican announced he will introduce a bill to end birthright citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants on U.S. soil, and he intends to copy it almost word-for-word from former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's 1993 Immigration Stabilization Act.
The move follows a Supreme Court ruling that halted the Republican push to end birthright citizenship through executive action, with the Court voting 6-3 against the Trump administration's approach. But Justice Brett Kavanaugh left a door open. Moreno seized on it.
Appearing on Fox News's "The Ingraham Angle," Moreno laid out the plan and the political logic behind it. He said he will file the bill when the Senate returns from recess on July 13. And he made clear the bill is designed to do more than change immigration law, it is designed to force a vote that exposes how far today's Democratic Party has drifted from its own recent history.
Harry Reid, the late Nevada Democrat who led his party in the Senate for years, introduced the Immigration Stabilization Act in 1993. Section 1001 of that bill was titled "Basis of Citizenship Clarified." A press release from Reid's own office at the time stated that the legislation "clarifies that a person born in the United States to an alien mother who is not a lawful resident is not a U.S. citizen."
The bill never advanced out of committee. But the language survived in the public record, and now Moreno wants to revive it, virtually unchanged.
As Fox News Digital reported, Moreno described his forthcoming legislation as a "carbon copy" of Reid's original proposal. The senator framed the effort as both a policy solution and a political challenge:
"What it's going to do is highlight two things, the Democrats of today are nothing like the Democrats of 1993 and, if they choose to reject a bill sponsored by their majority leader that they named an airport in Las Vegas after, then I think my Republican colleagues have no choice. We have to recognize that these Democrats want to systematically destroy this country."
That last line will draw fire from the left. But the underlying question is harder to dodge: Why would today's Democrats refuse to support a bill their own party leader once championed?
It is a question with a long paper trail. Reid and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein both advocated positions on birthright citizenship that their party now labels extreme. The shift did not happen because the facts changed. It happened because the politics did.
The Supreme Court's ruling against the executive approach was a setback for the White House. But Moreno pointed to language from Justice Kavanaugh that he says provides a clear path forward through Congress.
Moreno told viewers that Kavanaugh "said that what we have to do is clarify what citizenship means. We can do that through an act of Congress." It is worth noting that this characterization comes from Moreno himself; the source does not independently quote Kavanaugh's opinion. Still, the senator's reading aligns with the broader legal consensus that Congress retains authority to legislate on citizenship criteria, even after the Court blocked the executive route.
That distinction matters. Republicans have already begun demanding congressional action in the wake of the ruling, and Moreno's bill gives that demand a specific vehicle, one with a Democratic pedigree.
The bill Moreno plans to introduce goes beyond the citizenship question. Breitbart reported that the Immigration Stabilization Act of 2026 would also cap annual refugee admissions at 50,000, set employment-based immigrant visas to zero, make non-citizen voting a federal crime, and increase border security funding. All of these provisions mirror the original Reid bill.
Moreno framed the broader package in blunt terms in a statement reported by Breitbart:
"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."
The senator added: "I will reintroduce this exact bill when I return to DC. Let's see how today's DC Democrats will vote when offered the ideas of the Democrat party that used to love this country and the American people!"
That framing, pitting today's Democrats against their own party's record, is the core of Moreno's strategy. And it is not without precedent. Democrats authored much of the anti-birthright-citizenship playbook in the 1990s, when border enforcement and immigration limits enjoyed bipartisan support. What changed was not the policy's merits but the party's coalition.
Moreno did not stop at introducing the bill. He urged Senate Republicans to "eliminate the filibuster" to pass it, a step that would require significant internal consensus within the GOP conference and would carry lasting procedural consequences.
Whether Republican leadership has the appetite for that fight remains unclear. The filibuster has long been a tool both parties have alternately defended and attacked depending on who holds the majority. The rule's defenders tend to shift with the political winds, and Moreno's call to scrap it on immigration will test whether his colleagues see the issue as urgent enough to justify the institutional cost.
Several open questions remain. Moreno has not identified which Republican senators would back filibuster elimination for this bill. He has not released formal bill text. And the precise language of Kavanaugh's opinion, which Moreno is treating as a green light for legislation, has not been independently quoted in the available reporting.
None of that diminishes the political potency of the move. If the bill reaches the floor, every Democratic senator will face a binary choice: vote for a bill written by their own former leader, or vote against it and own the distance between today's party and the one Reid led.
Reid's 1993 proposal was not some fringe effort. He was the sitting senator from Nevada, a member of his party's leadership class, and he put his name on legislation that said children born to illegal immigrants should not automatically receive citizenship. His office issued a press release explaining exactly what the bill did. There is no ambiguity to spin away.
The bill died in committee more than three decades ago. Moreno wants to make sure the vote happens this time.
If Democrats block it, they will not be rejecting a Republican idea. They will be rejecting Harry Reid's.
