When the Trump administration asks the Supreme Court on Thursday to allow it to deny birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and visa holders, its legal theory will rest on a reinterpretation of a critical phrase of the Constitution. But when you plug their preferred meaning back into the historical context in which the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause was enacted, the results are nonsensical. In other words, the crux of the government’s argument simply makes no sense.
The first sentence of the 14th Amendment, passed by Congress a year after the Civil War, is the Citizenship Clause: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” When President Donald Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his administration that would deny birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and visa holders, he premised it on the idea that undocumented immigrants and visa holders are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. This is the phrase the government is asking the courts to reinterpret into a fictional absurdity.
As a non American, but with friends and family there, I think you need civil war 2.0. I don’t say this lightly as I grew up in a country ravaged by a civil war and subsequent wars. However, the left is trying to play by the rules while the Trump and his handlers are ripping up the rule book and seem to be unstopable. Maybe when the dust settles your constitution needs fixing, to keep lobbyists, billionaires and corporations out of politics.
Once caveat, lobbying is actually a good thing. Lobbying is just educating elected officials about a goal you’re trying to accomplish.
For example, my SO lobbied our state government about a bill to keep non-violent offenders with children out of jail.
What’s bad is bribery masquerading as lobbying.
You are of course correct, I meant corporate / political lobbies (looking at you AIPAC and big pharma, tobacco et al). I think the biggest issue of course is that major lobbyies are, as you stated, nothing but bribery. I remember in the early 90’s when John Major was elected PM of England, he’d previously failed a bus conductors exam and worked as a bank teller, in the US, if you’re not ultra rich it’s practically impossible to make any headway in politics.