Posted on 10/28/2007 9:32:18 AM PDT by bocopar
Back in 2002, I wrote this....
"Personally, Id love to see our government abolish the 14th Amendment. One of the original intents of the Amendment was to make the children of slaves U.S. citizens in an effort to better assimilate them into American society. That good intention has been taken advantage of by people coming across the border eight-and-a-half months pregnant. The United States may just be the only country that allows foreign nationals automatic citizenship for their offspring and the fact that it is obviously now being abused is an understatement."It's comforting to know that Fred Thompson has publicly joined the program....
(Excerpt) Read more at outsidethewire.mensnewsdaily.com ...
Good on Fred and Good on Bob Parks
WTG, Fred!
CAMPAIGN 2008
Thompson angers state Hispanics
The White House hopeful's comments on citizenship may alienate GOP voters.
Jim Stratton, Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer September 29, 2007
When Fred Thompson said it might be time to review the practice of granting citizenship to every child born on American soil, he didn't acknowledge the seismic shift such an idea represents.
Citizenship by birth has been prescribed by the Constitution since 1868 and upheld for 109 years by the Supreme Court but the Republican presidential candidate made it sound anachronistic.
"I think that law was created at another time and place for valid reasons," the former U.S. senator from Tennessee said earlier this month. "It probably needs to be revisited."
It was a little confusing (to me) without it. Thanks!
Unfortunately for Thompson the historian and legal scholar, the XIVth Amend is the basis of the modern American economy. The anchor baby decision can and should be sunset unless some 150 year olds are still having babies, but the rest has to stay like it or not.
I had to scroll to the bottom...
Thanks for the heads-up. They must have changed the link since posted.
It’s been corrected.
bp
FINALLY and about time someone said this.
Another opinion stated as fact.
The talk must stop. We must secure our borders now. A nation without secure borders is no nation at all. It makes no sense to fight terrorists abroad when our own front door is left unlocked. This is my six point plan:
This amendment has been greatly abused from what it was originally intended for and needs to be done away with. As long as we’re doing that make it 10 years retroactive.
Citizenship should be a relatively minor issue with regards to illegal aliens.
Citizenship confers certain responsibilities upon an individual. Voting, for one. Serving on a jury, if asked. Obeying the law...now that's the key one.
The real problem is that citizenship has been contorted to confer the right to entitlements--and that's why so many foreign nationals try so hard for their children to be born on American soil.
The law does need stricter enforcement and perhaps a re-clarification of what "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means, exactly. Automatic U.S. citizenship should be restricted to the children of U.S. citizens, irrespective of location of birth, and of legal immigrants (permanent residents) born domestically. In the latter case, the children can be assumed U.S. citizens until an age of majority (either eighteen or twenty-one years of age) and then given a choice.
(This is the part where I politely disagree with former Sen. Thompson: the Fourteenth Amendment need not be repealed but rather adjusted and enforced.
Employees of Mexicorruption freely and openly advocate for their citizens living here ILLEGALLY; Mexicorruption employees closely monitor our local, state, and national government agencies; the Mexicorruption government provides their citizens "beyond borders" ID's; they encourage their citizens to go to America by the millions; Mexicorruption sends school textbooks to American public and private schools to be used to educate Mexicorruption children; Mexicorruption also IMO taxes their citizens living here by the process of individual and group remittances.
Of course it ain't just Mexicorruption -- there are those disgusting diasporas of people advocating and lobbying our Congress for benefits for their home countries -- often to the detriment of the United States of America. Screw 'em all!
And idiots are saying he lacks passion? Are they not reading these headlines? Oh I forgot the MSM is burying these news stories on FRed. He is the best man for the job, and Rudy would just as well like to annex Mexico since he loved illegals going back to the mid 90’s.
I'm sure Congress thought about this for a long time, to find a way to stop the abuse and violence against them by those Citizens who would always consider the slaves as property, and not quite a full person as defined in the Constitution. So even though the Civil War freed the slaves, there was no exit strategy or laws to protect them after the war ended. They had no citizenship anywhere. They were a people without a country.
Congress could not, with a sweep of the pen, write a law that granted the freed slaves citizenship, protecting them with all of the safeguards non-slaves were protected by, for the word, "Citizen" was already clearly defined in the Constitution and it could not be changed by a law, for Congress can write no law that is not in pursuance to the Constitution.
Note that the word, 'Citizen' is ALWAYS spelled with a capital 'C' in the Constitution, in every instance until the 14th Amendment was written. From that point on, citizen was spelled with a lower-case 'c', identifying those who were members of the 'color of law' Federal United States and 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'
Citizens (free men) of the states of the union were NOT subject to the jurisdiction of the Federal government (or the federal United States) before or after the Amendment was ratified. The government could not and did not force the states to grant citizenship to the freed slaves. Instead, Congress created a make-believe United States, a corporation, on paper only, and proceeded to populate it with the freed slaves, granting them a form of citizenship which was on par and equal to the rights of Citizens. Knowing that government cannot grant 'rights,' (as God alone is recognized as the giver of righs) it granted its citizens 'priviledges and immunities.'
So, again, I ask what would you have done if you were a congressman at the time? It seems to me that the 14th Amendment would have been something you would have supported, at least at the time. Except for the mis-use of the Amendment in relation to anchor babies, the Amendment does much to promulgate the doctrine of equal protection under the law.
(As an aside, the Mass. Supreme court could have resolved this with a stroke of the pen, legislating from the bench by re-defining the word, 'marriage' to include the union of any two people. This was clearly illegal and unconstitutional and violated not only the law, their oaths of office, the Constitution and separation of powers, but common sense.
Given the task of devising an exit strategy for the freed slaves, I'm sure it would have re-defined the word, 'Citizen' to include freed slaves, regardless of skin tone, against the constitutional prohibitions for doing so, and that would have been the end of the matter. It can be said that at least the congress back then was more in tune with the law than the Mass. supreme court is today.)
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