Big plans
Trump adds another item on the white supremacist agenda: getting rid of citizenship by birth aka the Fourteenth Amendment.
President Trump is planning to sign an executive order that would seek to end the right to U.S. citizenship for children of noncitizens born on U.S. soil, he said in a television interview taped on Monday.
A president can’t ditch a constitutional amendment just by signing an order.
The move would be certain to spark a constitutional debate about the meaning of the 14th Amendment. It reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
In other words, the people formerly known as slaves and non-citizens are citizens and have the rights of citizens. John Wagner at the The Atlantic gives some background:
To the members of the 39th Congress who framed the Fourteenth Amendment, the cause of the Civil War was clear. It was something called “the Slave Power”—a term which referred to the concessions made by the Philadelphia Framers to the slave states in 1787. Those were (1) the “three-fifths” clause, allowing extra seats in Congress to states with large slave populations; (2) the “electoral college,” which gave slave states undeserved power over the selection of the president; and (3) the principle of equal representation in the Senate, which had come over time to allow the South a veto over the more populous and dynamic North. As a result of this rigged system, the South had since 1790 dominated the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court. And in the years after the 1857 Dred Scott decision, “the slavocracy” had begun making a legal argument that even “free states” must now be required to permit and protect slavery within their borders. The pro-Southern Supreme Court seemed quite likely to back such a radical new rule. “We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their state free,” Abraham Lincoln warned in 1858, “and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.”
We have a history. The Fourteenth Amendment is a corrective to some of that history (far from all of it).
And yet, the neoconfederates manage perfect amnesia about their aggressive imposition of THEIR preferred laws on the rest of the country. ‘States Rights’ is a post-hoc sham. They’ve been peddling that lie for over a century, and its been poisoning American politics ever since.
Well, previous presidents haven’t tried, have they?
They can if Congress and/or the courts don’t stop them.
Yes, the 14th amendment is a corrective to some bad history, but it’s also the creator of it, as it is what allows felony disenfranchisement.
In a way arguing the history makes the case for keeping birthright citizenship weaker. If the intent was to pull former slaves in as citizens, that goal has been accomplished (or, if not, is now impossible to accomplish).
Along those lines, iknklast says if the Courts don’t stop Trump, he could get away with it. Maybe they could argue original intent was only to redress slavery issues?
Getting back to the original point, Trump surely has bad motives, but in isolation I don’t find his position to be ridiculous. If you accept that a nation has a right to decide who can be a citizen, then I think it’s reasonable to question if birth within the physical borders is enough. It does seem rather arbitrary.
Borders are arbitrary.
And not always physical.
Oh yes, quite, “in isolation” Trump is just a harmless bag of skin with a brass top, BUT WE’RE NOT LIVING IN THAT ISOLATION.
Jesus fuck.
There is just one case in which I would agree that an ‘anchor baby’ should not have citizenship.
Trump.
Andy Borowitz had similar thoughts:
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-strips-citizenship-from-children-of-immigrants-thus-disqualifying-himself-from-presidency
He’d need a different court… But he could get it if he gets an opportunity to appoint more Kavanaugh.
Future comments from Skeletor:
“Maybe this particular person had bad intentions, but offering to share with a stranger some of the wealth accumulated by your dead husband when he was King of Nigeria is really a kind thing.”
“It gets cold at night here. No doubt these people had bad intentions, but in isolation it’s a kind thing to welcome new people to the neighborhood by placing two pieces of wood on their lawn and setting them on fire.”
“No doubt the Nazis had bad intentions, but providing transportation, housing, and showers for Jews is a good thing in isolation.”
LOL