Constitution, shmonstitution….
The 14th Amendment is quite clear: Anybody born in the United States is a citizen. You can argue about its wisdom or unintended consequences, but you cannot seriously argue about its language:
““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.”
There is no equivocation, no qualification. Under that provision, even children born in this country to illegal immigrants become U.S. citizens, period. If that bothers you, if you want to change that reality, you have to change the Constitution, which contains provisions by which it can be amended.
However, U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal proposes to alter the Constitution with a simple law, in effect pretending the Constitution doesn’t exist. As the Associated Press puts it:
“Under Deal’s proposal, babies born in the U.S. would automatically have citizenship only if at least one of their parents is a U.S. citizen or national, a legal permanent resident of the U.S., or actively serving in the U.S. military.”
The fact that Deal’s solution would clearly be unconstitutional doesn’t faze him. To the contrary, he suggests that the main obstacle to his proposal is political:
“I think the current makeup of the Congress is such that this will never get a hearing and will never be an issue that we get a chance to vote on. But I think it’s important to keep the issues that are part of the immigration problem alive.”
Translation from politispeak: “I’m running for governor in a crowded Republican field, and to draw attention to myself and appeal to conservative voters, I’m more than willing to propose legislation that violates the U.S. Constitution.”
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117 comments Add your comment
N.J,
May 26th, 2009
3:28 pm
Wrong. The founders spoke quite largely on rights and wealth only belonging to the living. By their definitions of their time, this excluded the unborn as well as the dead:
Jefferson, for instance:
Certainly several of the “founding fathers” thought a great deal about the problem of inherited wealth, and about how taxation might be used to reduce social inequality. In a letter to James Madison in 1785, for instance, Thomas Jefferson suggested that taxes could be used to reduce “the enormous inequality” between rich and poor. He wrote that one way of “silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.”
Thomas Jefferson also famously wondered whether all hereditary privileges should be abolished since “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living.”
A tax on estate receipts was instituted by Congress in 1797, during the presidency of John Adams, to pay for a build-up of the US navy.
That said, the founders strongly supported property rights, and preferred the idea of dispersing inherited wealth through the abolition of the laws of primogeniture (a system of inheritance where all the property is handed down to the first born male) rather than through taxation.
As Jefferson also said, “To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association–the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.
The position above being that the dead do not have the right to pass on their wealth, and the unborn do not have any rights so to speak to inherit it.
With regard to ideas like abortion, the founders left all such determinations to an individuals personal morality, not to the state:
Thomas Jefferson once said, “All men are created equal and independent. From that equal creation they derive rights inherent and inalienable.” (Landis 130) Americans’ rights were formed because of the relationship between church and state, but an individual’s morals decide what is considered right or wrong.
https://www.msu.edu/~barzleah/WRA135/WorksCited1.html
Prior to the BUSH legislation with regard to the Partial Birth Abortion Ban (a procedure which was invented by political activists, and not by the medical profession) The entire national law and Constitution left it to a persons own moral determination to beleive whether a fetus was a human being or not. That is, even if a person claims to not be religious, their personal belief in this matter has no factual basis, but is in one way or another, a doctrine f faith or personal belief and cannot be subtantively proven one way or the other.
The founders considered that rights as a citizen, started at birth, ended at death, and no ideology based on individual faith or belief should be allowed to intrude on another persons individual faith or belief. We absolutely know their opinion on this issue, as abortion was VERY common in their time and they chose not to address the issue at all.
In fact while one thinks of the “midwife” as someone who only delivers a child, the fact was that midwives wer also people who performed abortions, particularly in cases when the health of the mother was threatened.
And the pro life whackos still avoid this single point. What of the unborn child who does harm to his mother or kills her while in the womb.
As usual, the right to lifers are using a misleading name for themselves. The mothers life isnt worth a damn by their interpretations.
They are not pro life,merely anti abortion. If the mothers life is not part of the equation, they are not pro life.
N.J,
May 26th, 2009
3:37 pm
The one thing we know about the founders. First they wanted all religious considerations to be kept out of the law. You beleive the unborn has a right to life, I dont. Unless there is absolute proof that before quickening, this is so, you do not get to assert, what is basically a belief based on some form of faith and not fact, your belief does not get to trump mine, nor even deny me the right to that belief legally.
The evidence of their lack of belief in any of the known religions is in their own words:
Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. . . . Each of those churches accuse the other of disbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”
John Adams, our second president, saw among the clergy the “pretended sanctity of some absolute dunces” and wrote Thomas Jefferson in a letter dated April 17, 1817, “This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.”
Thomas Jefferson, third president and author of the Declaration of Independence, said in a letter written Jan. 17, 1825: “I trust that there is not a young man now living in the United States who will not die a Unitarian.” Furthermore, he referred to the Revelation of St. John as “the ravings of a maniac.”
James Madison, fourth president and father of the Constitution, wrote in a letter dated April 1, 1774, “Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise.”
That is, they were rationalists and without a rational reason for suggesting that the unborn are entitled to a right to life, but their mother can be deprived of it by those who oppose abortion, your argument would not hold up.
N.J,
May 26th, 2009
3:40 pm
Arguably, the founders also strongly opposed invasions of personal privacy and amendments to the constitution strenthened that. They crates an implied right to privacy in the 1st, 3rd and 4th Amendments and the 14th amendment later asserted that the government could in no way, shape or form violate privacy in any area of life.
N.J,
May 26th, 2009
3:49 pm
Among the early founding fathers, Witherspoon most clearly defines the natural rights human are BORN with. That is the rights are gained at birth, not before:
Witherspoon’s list of man’s perfect rights in the civil state after the natural state is left behind, which are guaranteed full protection under the social contract, is as follows:
1) a right to life;
a right to character. 3
2) a right to employ his faculties and industry for his own use;
3) a right to things common and necessary, as air, water, earth;
4) a right to personal liberty;
5) a power over his own life;
6) a right to private judgment in matters of opinion;
7) a right to associate with any person or persons;
Witherspoon lists the natural rights which are both essential and universal to each person and must be protected by the social contract under the constitution and laws of the new society. They are listed as such:
a) to act for his own protection
b) to defend himself
c) and not be dominated by another.
Not this alone. John Witherspoon was the teacher of many of the founders. Of the 25 college graduates at the Continental Congress, 25 went to the college he served as president at, and six had his signature on their diplomas.
At the time that Witherspoon was teaching and president at Princeton, he noted, though he didnt much like, the principal which existed in his day, that a parent had the RIGHT to take the life of their own child.
Again the one term that the founders never defined was “what is a person”
However from their own writings, we know for a fact, they asserted that the dead didnt have the rights of the living, and that rights were obtained when one was born, and not before.
N.J,
May 26th, 2009
4:13 pm
Along with this, those who heard the case for Roe v Wade hunted high and low, throughout history for ANY legal event in which ‘pre quickening” abortion was made illegal. They addressed “common law” as far back as they could as well as “cannon law” or church law and the result was:
3. The common law. It is undisputed that at common law, abortion performed before “quickening” — the first recognizable movement of the fetus in utero, appearing usually from the 16th to the 18th week of pregnancy 20 — was not an indictable offense.
21 The absence of a common-law crime for pre-quickening abortion appears to have developed from a confluence of earlier philosophical, theological, and civil and canon law concepts of when life begins. These disciplines variously approached the question in terms of the point at which the embryo or fetus became “formed” or recognizably human, or in terms of when a “person” came into being, that is, infused with a “soul” or “animated.” A loose consensus evolved in early English law that these events occurred at some point between conception and live birth. 22 This was “mediate animation.”
Although Christian theology and the canon law came to fix the point of animation at 40 days for a male and 80 days for a female, a view that persisted until the 19th century, there was otherwise little agreement about the precise time of formation or animation.
There was agreement, however, that prior to this point the fetus was to be regarded as part of the mother, and its destruction, therefore, was not homicide. Due to continued uncertainty about the precise time when animation occurred, to the lack of any empirical basis for the 40-80-day view, and perhaps to Aquinas’ definition of movement as one of the two first principles of life, Bracton focused upon quickening as the critical point. The significance of quickening was echoed by later common-law scholars and found its way into the received common law in this country.
http://www.topix.com/forum/colleges/baylor-college-of-medicine/TQLKLST17KFJ0QELV/p15
From which point the courts decided to make abortion in the first 3 months 100 percent legal, as common law allowed for going back until the earliest times in European history.
next for each succeeding trimester, the conditions changed, but asserting that the mothers rights to self defense, something which has also been asserted as a basic right of common law, that is the right to protect ones own health and well being, is a basic human right which the courts cannot infringe upon.
N.J,
May 26th, 2009
4:16 pm
The rest of the history of law with regard to abortion either held the abortion of a quickened fetus as at worse, a misdeameanor and in most cases no crime at all:
Whether abortion of a quick fetus was a felony at common law, or even a lesser crime, is still disputed. Bracton, writing early in the 13th century, thought it homicide. 23 But the later and predominant view, following the great common-law scholars, has been that it was, at most, a lesser offense. In a frequently cited passage, Coke took the position that abortion of a woman “quick with child” is “a great misprision, and no murder.” 24 Blackstone followed, saying that while abortion after quickening had once been considered manslaughter (though not murder), “modern law” took a less severe view. 25 A recent review of the common-law precedents argues, however, that those precedents contradict Coke and that even post-quickening abortion was never established as a common-law crime. 26 This is of some importance because while most American courts ruled, in holding or dictum, that abortion of an unquickened fetus was not criminal under their received common law, 27 others followed Coke in stating that abortion of a quick fetus was a “misprision,” a term they translated to mean “misdemeanor.” 28 That their reliance on Coke on this aspect of the law was uncritical and, apparently in all the reported cases, dictum (due probably to the paucity of common-law prosecutions for post-quickening abortion), makes it now appear doubtful that abortion was ever firmly established as a common-law crime even with respect to the destruction of a quick fetus.
N.J,
May 26th, 2009
4:17 pm
To put it simply, back to the 13th century, and during the time of the founders, abortion was never considered a criminal act. Many of the founders were in fact, lawyers familiar with the common law of their own day.
catlady
May 26th, 2009
5:19 pm
I am pretty far to the left, BUT..we have laws against theft. Little is more precious than American citizenship. People who commit a crime (illegal entry) cannot profit by their crime. Getting American citizenship is certainly a benefit, as well as any other perqs illegal immigrants get.
N.J,
May 26th, 2009
6:06 pm
People commit crimes, and profit from them all the time. There are simply crimes that are classed as legitimate crimes, and those that are classed as illegitimate crimes. Most of the things that have caused the current economic crisis, were legitimate crimes before Reagan decriminalized them when he changed the tax codes and a number of other business regulations.
For example when Reagan fired air traffic controllers, he was violating the legal rights of labor to organize.
Techincally there is actually no such thing as an ILLEGAL immigrant. We dont actually have laws that deny people coming into this country. What we have is a quota system depending on the country of origin. Our immigration laws developed rather late in our nations history and they do not precisely make people who come in around the quota system “illegal” but rather, “unrecognized”. In fact our immigration laws have nothing to do with them being here, but in fact only assure that the person entering the country is not bringing a communicable disease, or has not been adjudicated of a crime in another country which would invalidate them entering the United States. Techically the term ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT is a misnomer. There is no such thing as an illegal immigrant. An immigrant is someone who enters the United States by following the set policies of the United States. The person who is here without following those policies is not an immigrant. However, they are violating policies and procedures, not laws.
Since the 1980’s however the law actually quite different:
The Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 was signed into law by President Reagan and included amnesty for aliens who could establish residence in the United States since January 1, 1982, employer sanctions aimed at removing the lure of employment, and a special exemption for aliens employed in agricultural work.
The Triennial Comprehensive Report on Immigration (USINS, 1999) showed that 2.7 million person gained lawful permanent residence as a direct result of IRCA.
Although the Immigration Act of 1990 (IMMACT90) that took effect in 1992, more than doubled the number of visas available to persons who qualified for employment-based immigration, it also attempted to begin removing aliens with aggravated felony convictions. This focus on removing criminal aliens continued with the addition of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) that attempted to apply retroactivity to aggravated alien felons in the United States. In addition to adding Border Patrol agents (5000) and interior enforcement agents (300) over several years, the IIRIRA also expedited removals of certain excludable aliens applying for admission into the United States. Needless to say, the various amendments are under continuous judicial review and this tends to neutralize the intent of the laws. Interior Enforcement.
Techically once you are here, you are here. You are no longer actually illegal.This is another Republican invented term. Technically you can only deport, by law, felons.
If someone gets into the country without these inspections, they are not actually illegal. If they are caught they are released and given a date to go before an immigration judge to determine if they are felons or not. If they are not, they are allowed to stay, because the quota systems of the 1950’s and 1960’s were completely repealed later on.
Lee
May 26th, 2009
8:11 pm
Interesting how Jay Bookman can quote the Constitution when it serves his politically correct purpose, but thinks it is okay to pass laws to interfere with our Constitutional rights at other times.
Second Amendment anyone?
N.J.
May 26th, 2009
9:34 pm
No, the second amendment at best guarantees the right to own and bear arms, but does not state that the government cannot regulate this in some way, such as licensure, if said ownership creates some condition which violates the body of the constitution such as a failure to “promote the general welfare” the Amendments are just that, amendments to the consitution, that can either alter those additions if they have been found harmful or unnecessary, as in prohibition, The right to bear arms, was added to the constitution two years after the constitution was signed and ratified. The 2nd amendment, can be overridden by another amendment, just as the 19th Amendment was voided by the ratification of the 21st Amendment. If the terms of the second amendment cause enough social and national problems to the point that it is harmful to the general welfare, the government can completely remove that right, as it is not a right granted within the body of the constitution itself OR it can be redefined by legislation. The constitution guarantees the right to vote, and various rights to citizenship, but as the nation changed, legislation to redefine what the definition of the “United States” was.
For example it would be perfectly legal for Congress to prohibit the IMPORT of firearms under its power to regulate commerce, if it was determined that the importation or exportation of guns to and from the United States were not in the best interest of the general welfare. This does not abrogate the terms of the second amendment in any way, it simply changes the conditions of ownership to suit the times.
If all that is required is licensure and registration of the gun, this in no way prohibits the right to own and bear arms.
Copyleft
May 27th, 2009
8:46 am
Dave R gets spanked and runs away… N.J. presents an array of facts and logic to support the correct, liberal view… and a random wingnut posts an irrelevant lie about an unrelated topic (in this case, guns).
Another day on Bookman’s Blog!
King of All
May 27th, 2009
9:28 am
I wonder what he would propose for John McKain who was born outside the United States? Hhmmm!
N.J,
May 27th, 2009
5:22 pm
This is the typical conservative method, Copyleft. When they are confronted with fact, they simply run to another article or thread in a blog and start posting more of their schizphrenic ideation.
Some of my favorites. Hillary Clinton is a lesbian who had a heterosexual affair with Vince Foster. Bill Clinton was a totally incompetent president who was the liberal Darth Vader. Ronald Reagan passes massive tax cuts and massively increases government deficit spending and the Democrats are responible for not stopping him.
Republicans are capable of holding two diametrically opposed sets of beliefs in their heads simulataneously and assert both are correct. The classical definition of mental illness.
N.J,
May 27th, 2009
5:27 pm
Oh yes, Nancy Pelosi is now responsible for the Bush torture policies.
N.J,
May 27th, 2009
5:32 pm
And this is the most wonderful thing about conservatism and conservative parties. They always die and have to be replaced with a party that starts out to be more moderate and populist and rather quickly becomes a conservative dinosaur. A party incapable of evolving and changing with the times.
The conservatives of the 1820’s were replaced by the more radically populist, anti – slavery wing of their party, which became the Republican Party. Within 45 years of Lincoln, the anti corporation populist, becoming President the Republican party becomes the party of Wall Street and big business. for a brief time during the Depression, the Republicans revert to an isolationist, populism again, but within ten years are the party of big business and rampant militarism again. With each switch and reversion, they become deafer and deafer to the popular will. Which is why they are stone deaf to it now, and their party will die off to be replaced with another, less conservative and more populist party.
NannyGoat
May 28th, 2009
11:04 am
Jay strikes again. So, Jay…what are your thoughts about the 1970’s women lib movement attempting to change/amend the constitution or the repeal of the 18th amendment.
Jay is so offbase. He should be paying the AJC to have a place to spout his nonsensical babblings.