Judge rejects Eastman bid to retain law practice while fighting disbarment
A judge in California turned down an urgent plea Wednesday from John Eastman — an architect of Donald Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election — to allow him to keep practicing law while he fights an effort to permanently revoke his license.
Judge Yvette Roland recommended Eastman’s disbarment in March after finding he repeatedly breached legal ethics in service of Trump’s scheme to stay in power. Though her ruling is not the final word — and Eastman plans to appeal — it triggered an automatic suspension of Eastman’s license.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/01/judge-rejects-eastman-bid-practice-00155641
Yeah, him. Well, he has also weighed in on another matter near and dear to Baby Donald's heart.
Inside The Plot To Write Birthright Citizenship Out Of The Constitution
Now, after years in the wilderness, the fight to thwart a bedrock Constitutional provision that grants citizenship to nearly everyone born on American soil has been thrust onto center stage. Trump has said he is likely to issue an executive order curtailing birthright citizenship on his first day in office, potentially directing government agencies to stop issuing passports and social security numbers to the children of undocumented immigrants. The full scope of any potential order is still unclear, but it would be almost guaranteed to prompt a legal battle as the federal government seeks to flout more than a century of legal precedent holding that the 14th Amendment — passed in part to ensure that freed slaves would receive citizenship after the Dred Scott decision and the Civil War — applies to nearly everyone born on American soil.
Several of those who, before Trump took office, pushed fringe interpretations of that history in an effort to end birthright citizenship also worked on the legal elements of his 2020 coup attempt. John Eastman, the attorney who pushed to have Mike Pence reject electoral votes in January 2021, has been a proponent of the move for decades. Ken Chesebro, seen as the architect of the fake electors scheme, co-wrote a Supreme Court brief with Eastman in May 2016 that dismissed birthright citizenship as a “vestige of feudalism.”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/...irthright-citizenship-out-of-the-constitution
History tells us what originally motivated language granting birthright citizenship in the 14th A. It was in part to undo the racism behind the Dred Scott decision.
Debunking Modern Arguments Against Birthright Citizenship By Elizabeth B. Wydra*
Since its ratification in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed that “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.”
Just a decade before this language was added to our Constitution, the Supreme Court held in Dred Scott that persons of African descent could not be U.S. citizens under the Constitution. Our nation fought a war at least in part to repudiate the terrible error of Dred Scott and to secure, in the Constitution, citizenship for all persons born on U.S. soil, regardless of race, color, or ancestry.
Against the backdrop of prejudice against newly freed slaves and various immigrant communities such as the Chinese and Gypsies, the Reconstruction framers recognized that the promise of equality and liberty in the original Constitution needed to be established permanently for people of all colors; accordingly, they chose to constitutionalize the conditions sufficient for automatic U.S. citizenship. Fixing the conditions of birthright citizenship in the Constitution—rather than leaving them up to constant revision or debate—befits the inherent dignity of citizenship, which should not be granted according to the politics or prejudices of the day. Despite the clear intent of the Reconstruction framers to grant U.S. citizenship based on the objective measure of U.S. birth rather than subjective political or public opinion, for over a decade bills have been introduced in Congress to end automatic citizenship for persons born on U.S. soil to parents who are in the country illegally.1 This effort has gained momentum from outside Congress: in recent years, a small handful of academics has joined the debate and called into question birthright citizenship, 2 and in the 2008 presidential campaign, several Republican candidates expressed their skepticism that the Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship. 3
https://www.americanimmigrationcoun...es/research/Birthright Citizenship 091509.pdf
I don't find it coincidental that birthright citizenship was added to the Constitution as a repudiation of racism, and racism motivates the movement to repeal it.
