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Silly season

Candidates’ continued talk of ending birthright citizenship is ridiculous

There are times in any presidential election when candidates are tacitly allowed to say stupid things. Vacation season 15 months before the election is one example. And the media tend to go along with that.

So, for example, we have otherwise serious news outlets seemingly accepting the idea that a 73-year-old self-proclaimed socialist is a viable candidate for the Democratic nomination or that Rick Perry’s glasses have some bearing on the Republican race. (Or that Perry himself does, for that matter.)

But, far and away, the worst case is the continued talk from GOP presidential candidates about ending birthright citizenship – the idea that, with few and narrowly drawn exceptions, anyone born in this country is a citizen of the United States. The objection, of course, is to illegal immigrants and so-called “anchor babies,” children born in the U.S. to parents who came here illegally.

That came up again last weekend when Donald Trump released a position paper that included his proposal to end birthright citizenship. Several other Republican candidates have made similar noises, including Kentucky’s Sen. Rand Paul, who co-sponsored a 2011 bill to extend citizenship to children born in the United States only if at least one parent was a citizen. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has said he thinks birthright citizenship was a “mistake.”

The problem is that “mistake” has a proper name – the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. One of three pivotal amendments passed in the aftermath of the Civil War, the 14th begins: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

There have been arguments as to what “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means exactly, but those have been resolved. Children born to foreign diplomats are not U.S. citizens, and for a while Native Americans were not included because sovereign Indian nations were thought not to be under U.S. jurisdiction.

That last was changed by law, however, when Congress passed the Nationality Act of 1940. Any other quibbles were effectively dismissed in 1898 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the American-born son of Chinese immigrants, here legally but at that time prohibited from becoming citizens under the Chinese Exclusion Act, was a U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment.

Of course, birthright citizenship is not the entirety of the 14th Amendment addresses. It also assures Americans of due process and equal protection of the law, protects the right to vote and guarantees that the nation will respect its debts.

Who thinks the voters really want to monkey with that? More to the point, do Trump, Rand, Graham and the others think Republican primary voters would repeal or amend one of the cornerstones of our constitutional rights out of anger over immigration? That is not a pretty picture they are painting of their own supporters.

In any case, amending the Constitution requires the approval of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states. (There is a provision for another route via a constitutional convention, but that has never been done.)

It is a cumbersome and deliberately difficult task that, absent some crisis such as the Civil War, rarely succeeds and typically takes years. The 27th Amendment – the last one, so far – was proposed in 1789. It took effect when Michigan ratified it in 1992.

Amending the Constitution is serious business, all the more when the point is to deny someone a right. Americans are not about to do so out of spite. Recognizing that, for candidates to keep talking about it suggests they have nothing else to say.



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