The rhetorical positioning is the important part of the birthright-citizenship debate.

One sees people take positions of similar structure to Ken Block’s, here, on many issues, from immigration to finance to healthcare to science:

KenBlockRI: Far too many people from both sides of the partisan divide do not understand the powers granted to the different branches of the US government by our Constitution.

One of humanity’s great advantages is that we can divide the labor of understanding.  One person figures something out, and others can build on his or her conclusions without necessarily repeating all the difficult cognitive work the discoverer has done.  The problem is that people sometimes overstate the confidence and reach of their conclusions, especially when it comes to the law.

Going to court is expensive, time consuming, and risky, so wherever possible, people try to interpret past findings to understand make educated guesses about future ones.  In this case, the precedent left a gray area between “children born of alien enemies during a hostile occupation” and children born to legal immigrants who haven’t yet become citizens.  Many of us would tend to think mothers who knowingly enter our country in contravention if its laws are demonstrating that they do not consider themselves subject to its jurisdiction (which is the tricky phrase in the Constitution).

An administrative agency (to wit, the President) could therefore do as Donald Trump has done and put down a marker, and somebody with standing to sue can bring it to the courts if he or she disagrees.  Unfortunately, our government has become such that this would end in the Supreme Court’s deciding the true meaning of the words and potentially thereby making new laws by amending what the drafters of the law intended.  It would be healthier if the court found that the language did not provide sufficient grounds to decree a resolution definitively from the bench and left it to executive interpretation until such time as Congress and the People of the United States clarified the underlying law.

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Warrington Faust
Warrington Faust
7 days ago

Everyone who knows anything of history knows that the 14th Amendment was passed to insure the citizenship of freed slaves, and thus preventing them from being denied the tight to vote. How have we strayed so far from there>

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