More attacks on the Constitution

The 14th Amendment decrees that if one is born on US soil and not in the governmental employ of a foreign nation, then you're a citizen. There is a move as part of immigration reform to strip this Constitutional right from the children of immigrants.

James C. Ho, an appellate and constitutional litigator and former law clerk to Clarence Thomas, writes in the LA Times that just such and effort to essentially redefine or overturn the 14th Amendment is underway.

The 14th Amendment states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." That states it pretty clearly in my mind.

But that's not stopping those who wish to deprive children of citizenship. Ho concludes:

The U.S. Supreme Court long has taken the same view. In 1898, the court held in United States vs. Wong Kim Ark that the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants was constitutionally entitled to citizenship, noting that the "14th Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory . . . including all children here born of resident
aliens."

The court has reiterated this view in subsequent decisions. In Plyler vs. Doe (1982), the majority concluded, and the dissent agreed, that birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment extends to anyone "who is subject to the laws of a state," including the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens. And in INS vs. Rios-Pineda (1985), a unanimous court agreed that a child born to an undocumented immigrant was in fact a citizen of the United States.

Although the Constitution seems clear, Democrats in Congress might nevertheless be persuaded to repeal birthright citizenship as a bipartisan compromise to secure passage of a comprehensive immigration reform bill — in the hope that the provision would simply be struck down in court. Perhaps that explains why Senate Democrats quizzed Samuel A. Alito Jr. about the issue during his confirmation hearings. Stay tuned: Dred Scott II could be coming soon to a federal court near you.