Trump is bloviating. He can’t just cancel the 14th amendment.

A dubious legend has it that President Lincoln, encountering Harriet Beecher Stowe one day, exclaimed: “So you’re the little lady who started this big war.” He alluded to Stowe’s novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which is thought to have had an outsized anti-slavery impact.

If Mr. Lincoln said it, he assuredly knew better — and, in fact, might have pictured himself as “the tall man who started the big war.” It was his call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress “rebellion” in the lower South that tipped the reluctant Virginia and North Carolina into secession and turned an angry argument into a war.

More pertinently, he might have mentioned the provocative words of a Supreme Court opinion of 1857 that electrified him and many others: This was Chief Justice Taney’s “dictum,” properly so-called since it had no legal force, that the framers of the Constitution had conferred “no rights which a white man is bound to respect” on black people, bond or free.

Taney was attempting to justify his court’s refusal to entertain a slave’s case for freedom. A slave could not be a citizen and therefore had no standing. QED! Those were perhaps the most infamous words ever uttered by a chief justice — and Taney was relying on the view of a partisan historian that happened to be quite wrong.

All this is prologue to a chapter of history of which Mr. Lincoln’s ignorant successor obviously knows little or nothing. Otherwise, he could not have boasted that he intends to cancel, by executive order, Section 1 of the 14th Amendment. That clause provides unambiguously that “All persons born or naturalized in the U. S. and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the U. S. and of the state wherein they reside.”

Trump’s point apparently being that an all-powerful president like himself can terminate the anomaly that children of aliens, even in temporary residence, are automatically birthright citizens — an anomaly which he customarily pictures as licensing pregnant women to jet from all over the globe into the U. S. to deliver babies that automatically become US citizens — and future welfare-abusing deadbeats.

Maybe this was the misunderstanding that prompted him to portray Barack Obama as a usurper.

But what happened in the Supreme Court chamber that far-off day in 1857 prompted a priority clarification assuring that no such travesty as befell Dred Scott will ever be repeated.

Meanwhile, Trump’s bloviation about canceling a civil right isn’t taken seriously by anyone acquainted with the relevant history and the rules of constitutional government. It is another fiction calculated to agitate his too easily fooled followers. Undocumented aliens may indeed be spawning menacing infants determined from the cradle to cheat honest taxpayers. But this is bigoted bluster, and on the evidence unlikely. The recent immigrants who so disturb Trump usually grow up to be hardworking, citizens — to be valued, not scorned.

Meanwhile, it can be said without fear of contradiction that the day Trump successfully cancels a Bill of Rights provision by “executive order” will be Day One of the Trump dictatorship and doomsday for the Constitution he swore to defend.

This story was originally published November 5, 2018 at 3:00 AM.