As time goes by it becomes more and more apparent that a mountain of chaos, distress, and pain has been inflicted upon "us" by the un-elected, life-tenured, out-of-touch lawyers who inhabit the Federal bench.
The subject of my immediate ire is the large and growing army of "Anchor Babies," who are figuratively the illegitimate progeny ("bastards") of the late, not-at-all lamented Supreme Court Justice, William Brennan.
The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted specifically to prevent southern States from denying the rights of citizenship to freed slaves. That's it. Nothing more.
The operative description of the said emancipated persons is, "...born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof..." One might suppose that it never entered the minds of the senators drafting the Amendment that it might be applied one day to the children of aliens or others not legally in the country, but surprisingly, Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan was quoted at the time as saying, "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." It is not a stretch to suppose that Senator Howard would have been even more emphatic on the question of children of those ILLEGALLY in the United States. OF COURSE, they would not be granted citizenship under this new 14th Amendment, just because they happened to be born on U.S. soil!
Enter the aforementioned Justice Brennan. In a FOOTNOTE to a 1982 decision (Plyler v. Doe), Brennan remarked, "no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful."
This statement is so manifestly and patently stupid and unsupportable that it is shocking that anyone would even write it, let alone take it seriously. "No plausible distinction"? Are you shitting me? People legally here vs people here illegally? No distinction? The mind reels.
And yet this ridiculous, unsupported, patently false assertion is the ENTIRE BASIS of the "anchor baby" phenomenon that has lured literally MILLIONS of unhappy foreigners to break our laws and jump our borders. Arguably, it has also been one of the bases by which courts have decreed that the states and federal government are effectively PROHIBITED from denying things like welfare, housing subsidies, MEDICAID, and so forth to ILLEGAL ALIENS (if that expression offends you, I invite you to engage in an impossible auto-sexual act).
Although this footnote has been enshrined in American "Constitutional" law as though carved on Mount Fucking Rushmore, it is not clear whether a Constitutional amendment would even be required to overturn it. It is not actually binding as precedent because it was not the basis of the holding in Plyler v. Doe, but there can be no doubt that if Congress passed a law bringing sanity to the issue, open-borders proponents would find a Federal Judge to declare the law "unconstitutional." So an Amendment is probably the only solution.
And dare I say, footnotally, that it is stuff like this that makes Mr. Trump so attractive to "normal" people? Our politicians are so afraid of being branded "racist," that they refuse to even introduce legislation to overturn this "anchor baby" phenomenon - in spite of the fact that 90% of the American population finds it both unconstitutional and repugnant to our national sovereignty.
We are apparently fucked, and loving it. No other country in the world has anything like this "anchor baby" thing.
The subject of my immediate ire is the large and growing army of "Anchor Babies," who are figuratively the illegitimate progeny ("bastards") of the late, not-at-all lamented Supreme Court Justice, William Brennan.
The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted specifically to prevent southern States from denying the rights of citizenship to freed slaves. That's it. Nothing more.
The operative description of the said emancipated persons is, "...born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof..." One might suppose that it never entered the minds of the senators drafting the Amendment that it might be applied one day to the children of aliens or others not legally in the country, but surprisingly, Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan was quoted at the time as saying, "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." It is not a stretch to suppose that Senator Howard would have been even more emphatic on the question of children of those ILLEGALLY in the United States. OF COURSE, they would not be granted citizenship under this new 14th Amendment, just because they happened to be born on U.S. soil!
Enter the aforementioned Justice Brennan. In a FOOTNOTE to a 1982 decision (Plyler v. Doe), Brennan remarked, "no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful."
This statement is so manifestly and patently stupid and unsupportable that it is shocking that anyone would even write it, let alone take it seriously. "No plausible distinction"? Are you shitting me? People legally here vs people here illegally? No distinction? The mind reels.
And yet this ridiculous, unsupported, patently false assertion is the ENTIRE BASIS of the "anchor baby" phenomenon that has lured literally MILLIONS of unhappy foreigners to break our laws and jump our borders. Arguably, it has also been one of the bases by which courts have decreed that the states and federal government are effectively PROHIBITED from denying things like welfare, housing subsidies, MEDICAID, and so forth to ILLEGAL ALIENS (if that expression offends you, I invite you to engage in an impossible auto-sexual act).
Although this footnote has been enshrined in American "Constitutional" law as though carved on Mount Fucking Rushmore, it is not clear whether a Constitutional amendment would even be required to overturn it. It is not actually binding as precedent because it was not the basis of the holding in Plyler v. Doe, but there can be no doubt that if Congress passed a law bringing sanity to the issue, open-borders proponents would find a Federal Judge to declare the law "unconstitutional." So an Amendment is probably the only solution.
And dare I say, footnotally, that it is stuff like this that makes Mr. Trump so attractive to "normal" people? Our politicians are so afraid of being branded "racist," that they refuse to even introduce legislation to overturn this "anchor baby" phenomenon - in spite of the fact that 90% of the American population finds it both unconstitutional and repugnant to our national sovereignty.
We are apparently fucked, and loving it. No other country in the world has anything like this "anchor baby" thing.
