Trump Vows to Terminate US Birthright Citizenship – Reports
DETAILS FOLLOW:
‘ll leave it to the legal scholars to debate the fine points, but it’s no accident that one week before the midterms, President Trump says he wants to revoke birthright citizenship.
Sure, he did it in an interview with Jim VandeHei and Jonathan Swan of Axios for the premiere of the website’s string of HBO specials. And yes, Trump expressed surprise that the journalists, who had been digging into the issue, knew about his secret plan to move against the practice.
For Trump to speak of eliminating the practice where illegal immigrants can arrange to have babies in this country, and they automatically become American citizens, is very much part of his eleventh-hour push on immigration. At a time when he has been pounding away at the Central American caravan — at least until that narrative was interrupted by terror attacks — birthright citizenship is shrewdly targeted to his base.
When pressed, he said that “you can definitely do it with an Act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order … It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”
The president made this argument: “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years, with all of those benefits.”
That is wrong. As the New York Times points out, “dozens of other countries, including Canada, Mexico and many others in the Western Hemisphere, grant automatic birthright citizenship, according to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that supports restricting immigration and whose work Mr. Trump’s advisers often cite.”
There is also the not insignificant matter of the 14th Amendment: “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.”
Some conservatives have argued that the 14th Amendment was intended to apply only to citizens and permanent legal residents.
What’s interesting to me is that the right fiercely objected when Barack Obama used his executive power to stop the deportation of the dreamers, saying this was a horrible abuse of presidential authority. They did have a point that Obama was trying to accomplish with a pen what he could not get passed into law, which is why the issue remains unresolved and Trump can threaten to expel younger immigrants unless Congress acts.
HOW MANY TIMES HAVE WE HIGHLIGHTED THE FIASCO OF THE 14TH AMENDMENT. NOW THAT KAVANAUGH IS ON THE COURT WE CAN ADJUDICATE THE FIASCO THAT HAS BEEN UNTOUCHED FOR 15O YEARS.
PREVIOUS INFO ON THE 14TH AMENDMENT:
Two years after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, where new state governments, based on universal manhood suffrage, were to be established. Thus began the period known as Radical Reconstruction, which saw the 14th Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1866, ratified in July 1868. The amendment resolved pre-Civil War questions of African American citizenship by stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.” The amendment then reaffirmed the privileges and rights of all citizens, and granted all these citizens the “equal protection of the laws.”
AN UN-GOING CRIME IS BEING COMMITTED – THE SUPREME COURT MUST ONCE AGAIN MUST STEP IN AND ADJUDICATE
Overwhelming evidence against the interpretation of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” or “not subject to any foreign power” as reaffirming the common law doctrine of citizenship by birth to aliens can be found following the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1867 George Helm Yeaman, United States Minister to Denmark, in his well received treatise on allegiance and citizenship, which was presented to Secretary of State William H. Seward, said: “But the idea of a double allegiance and citizenship united in the same person, and having reference to two separate, independent, and sovereign nations or governments, is simply an impossibility.”
In the year 1873 the United States Attorney General ruled the word “jurisdiction” under the Fourteenth Amendment to mean, which Justice Gray would recognize in Elk v.Wilkins years later:
The word “jurisdiction” must be understood to mean absolute and complete jurisdiction, such as the United States had over its citizens before the adoption of this amendment… Aliens, among whom are persons born here and naturalized abroad, dwelling or being in this country, are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States only to a limited extent. Political and military rights and duties do not pertain to them. (14 Op. Atty-Gen. 300.)
House Report No. 784, dated June 22, 1874, stated, “The United States have not recognized a double allegiance. By our law a citizen is bound to be ‘true and faithful’ alone to our government.” There is no way in the world anyone can claim “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” affirms the feudal common law doctrine of birth citizenship to aliens because such doctrine by operation creates a “double allegiance” between separate nations.
If there is one inescapable truth to the text and debates, it is this: When Congress decided to require potential citizens to first be subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States they by default excluded all citizens of other nations temporarily residing in the U.S. who had no intention of becoming citizens themselves or, disqualified of doing so under naturalization laws. This was no oversight because it was too simple to declare the common law rule of jus soli if indeed that was truly the desired goal by these very competent lawyers (both Howard and Trumbull were lawyers).
Aaron Sargent, a Representative from California during the Naturalization Act of 1870 debates said the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause was not a de-facto right for aliens to obtain citizenship. No one came forward to dispute this conclusion.
Perhaps because he was absolutely correct.
