Excellent info, thanks.
I was interested in the 14th Amendment issue - whether non-citizen parents could produce a natural born citizen merely by giving birth on USA soil - which is why I worded my question so narrowly.
Curious about your own views on “14.”
The historical annotation is pretty clear this Amendment was focused on former American slaves, not foreign citizens.
The all-inclusive interpretation found in Ankeny is, as I recall, just a modern footnote by one Supreme Court judge on a somewhat unrelated issue.
“The historical annotation is pretty clear this Amendment was focused on former American slaves, not foreign citizens.”
The intent of the interstate commerce clause was to smooth over trade barriers between states, not for the federal government to legislate on every conceivable aspect of human life that somehow indirectly brushes against commerce. Some of those laws, like the health insurance mandate, are obviously a misinterpretation. But most of IC laws, even conservatives agree, are reasonably justified by the language of the Constitution. One man’s “regulation” is another man’s administer, command, rule, dominate, etc.
Point is, plain language is ultimately more important than the motivation behind and the hoped for result of various laws.