Monday - July 12, 2010

Cut The Anchor Chain

An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their Vindication.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens, of every race and color, without regard to any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States, to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding.

Note the “and not subject to any foreign power” part. This one paragraph grants full equal rights to all, regardless of color or gender.

This Act was vetoed by President Andrew Johnson (D-TN), but the veto was overridden by the Radical Republicans in Congress. This Act is still alive today, as 42 U.S.C. § 1981. Because the actions of this Act were not specifically empowered by the Constitution as it then existed, the ideas of the Act were quickly duplicated by the 14th Amendment. That’s a bit of a chicken-egg thing, but it worked.

Amendment XIV
Section 1. 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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

While the 14th is most famous for overturning Dred Scott it also overturned Barron v. Baltimore, an 1833 decision wherein the Supremes ruled that the Bill of Rights did not apply to the States. [ Barron was also the Kelo of it’s day, and that decision was just as wrong as Kelo regarding property rights. ]

So it is blatantly obvious that the later Slaughterhouses decision was wrong because it was over-focused. Slaughterhouses specifically only “incorporated” those rights that the federal government had granted, not those rights that it “merely” recognized. And this started the nation down the long slow road of incorporation. At this point in time, Amendments 1 through 9 have been incorporated, although the 3rd Amendment (quartering soldiers in your home) has only risen to the 2nd and 10th Circuits; it has never come before SCOTUS. The 10th Amendment deals with the States themselves, and thus it’s incorporation would be redundant. So in effect Slaughterhouses has been mostly nullified even if it hasn’t yet been explicitly overturned. I’m waiting ...

But back to that “and not subject to any power” bit from the Act. That’s the same meaning as the “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” language in the 14th. It takes an act of willful blindness to not see the real meaning, and that meaning is this: foreign nationals who are in our country and who give birth do not magically bear American citizens. They are “subject to any foreign power” because they are citizens of that other nation; they are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”.  This means that the “anchor babies” thing is bass-ackwards, dead wrong, and always has been.

Hey, that’s not just my opinion. The smallest bit of research shows that this was the original intent. Here are the words of the author of that part of the 14th Amendment, Senator Jacob M. Howard (R-MI):

The first amendment is to section one, declaring that “all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United State and the States wherein they reside.” I do not propose to say anything on the subject except that the question of citizenship has been so fully discussed in this body as to not need any further elucidation, in my opinion. This amendment of which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard is the law of land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are, or are not, citizens of the United States. This has long been a great desideration in the jurisprudence and legislation of this country.

Talk about your “original intent” - it’s all in the congressional record, the whole debate, right here. Senator Doolittle (R-NY, Chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs) then tries to put in words that exclude the Indians, and Howard argues against that. The debate rages on for 7 long-winded pages before the bit about the indians is voted down. And eventually, the amendment was voted on, and passed, using Howard’s language for that section; after intense amounts of debate and bloviation about Chinese in California and Digger Indians and so forth, the words of that section - and their meaning as explained in excruciating detail - were accepted.

So why do we have these anchor babies? Willful blindness and judicial activism. And so, 142 years later, Virgil Goode was moved to essay in today’s Front Page Magazine

In his address to the country on immigration last week, President Obama said that “being an American is not a matter of blood or birth.” Our current government policy of giving automatic US citizenship to the children illegal aliens who are born on American soil makes being American solely a matter of birth.

Americans are quickly waking up to the disaster that is the arbitrary government policy of guaranteed automatic citizenship to the children of illegal aliens.  A Rasmussen Poll found that 58% of Americans opposed granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, while only 33% supported it.

Birthright citizenship creates a massive fiscal burden on the American taxpayer.

This is why I have used the term “anchor baby” to describe them.  The critics of this term are the same people who are trying to make the anchor drop even deeper.  During his speech last week, President Obama stated we cannot deport illegal aliens because “it would tear at the very fabric of this nation—because immigrants who are here illegally are now intricately woven into that fabric. Many have children who are American citizens.”

The costly policy of granting birthright citizenship is based upon a misinterpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment.  It states, “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.”

This was clearly designed to guarantee for the purpose of ensuring that the children of freed slaves could not be denied citizenship.  Granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens is a completely arbitrary interpretation that has never been ruled on by the Courts or passed by statute.

I think it’s long past high time that our children’s Social Studies education be geared far more to actual civics and the study of our founding laws than to feeewings and how evil white men oppressed the world. And I cast the first stone also at the Supreme Court for being lazy and not actively taking up this misinterpretation and ruling on it, instead waiting through generations for some lower court case to work it’s way upward. I do not think that SCOTUS is legally precluded from proactively clarifying an obvious wrong, but if we are to have any valid and useful immigration reform in this nation then without question it must begin there. It’s all there in black and white and completely unequivocal: the 14th Amendment does not allow anchor babies. Citizenship once given can not be taken away however, so let’s just admit our mistake, and stop making it. Then we can move forward.

Oh, and Obama “the constitutional scholar” surely merits a big fat flaming F for missing this one. Whether it’s through willful blindness, or via the misguided beneficence of social justice types like Deady Kennedy, the giving of birthright citizenship is not constitutionally based.  And thus it can not be a valid law. It is not now, nor has ever been, a right. It is merely a policy, an act of generosity that we can no longer afford to make.

Posted by Drew458     on 07/12/2010 at 10:43 AM   
Filed Under: • Illegal-Aliens and Immigration •  
• Comments (7) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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