Language of the 14th Amendment: it couldn't be any clearer

Mary Potter


Language of the 14th Amendment: it couldn't be any clearer | politics, Donald Trump, Constitution,

14th Amendment:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States,

and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,

are citizens of the United States."

The President's most recent alarming statement that he can cancel citizenship of children born in the US to illegals was news this week. His click bait, wishful thinking pronouncement is what a bull leaves behind ias he traverses the pasture.

Few amendments to the US constitution are as clearly written as the Fourteenth. Passed in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War, the amendment addressed and overturned a US Supreme Court decision that represented a low point in the Court's history. The Dred Scott decision found that children of slaves would always be slaves and never citizens.

What the President proposes is similar to Scott -once an illegal, always an illegal to the nth generation. If a child born on US soil is not a citizen, then their children will never be.

That's not what the 14th Amendment says.

The panic on the left is that conservative judges now dominate the federal courts. The Senate moved quickly to fill lower courts with conservatives. That does not mean that when (not if) the executive order comes before a court that judges appointed for life will twist the 14th Amendment to satisfy the President. Judges, conservative and progressive, once appointed, are pretty much free of influence from those who appointed them. They can't be removed except by their own decision or cause. Finding cause to remove a federal judge is equivalent to the biblical camel getting through the eye of a needle. It's possible but highly improbable.

Justice Scalia, the patron saint of the Federalist Society, will haunt the halls of the courts if this very bad idea gets much past the front door. Judges who purport to be conservative in their judicial outlook follow precedent. Conservative does not mean twisting 150 years of law to satisfy Donald Trump.

The greater danger to the 14th Amendment is the growing move for a new constitutional convention. Historians remind us that the convention to fix the Articles of Confederation morphed into a constitutional convention creating the government we now have.

The bottom line to the latest idea floated out of the White House is this trial balloon of an executive order overturning the Fourteenth Amendment should crash and burn.