You old folks may remember a time when it was actually controversial, back in 2010, when Iowa congressmelon Steve King wanted to trash the 14th Amendment and its guarantee of birthright citizenship, so Our Nation wouldn’t sink to the sea floor under the weight of all those “anchor babies” the illegals were having. Since then, though, a whole bunch of other Republicans have become quite open to throwing the 14th Amendment right out the Overton Window. You see, while some amendments are holy and can never be restricted — like the Second, which preserves all the others at the mere cost of 30,000 dead Americans annually — others have unintended consequences that simply can’t be tolerated, like how the 14th lets Messicans from all over Latin America come here and pop out a bunch of new citizens who have to be treated as if they had rights or something.
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Trashing birthright citizenship is suddenly the Hot New Thing, thanks to Donald Trump’s brilliant new immigration plan, which even he acknowledges is less a policy blueprint than something to shut up reporters who keep asking him what his plan is. Heck, Trump doesn’t merely want to end birthright citizenship, he wants to deport all 11 million illegals in the country AND to send their citizen children along too, because when we deport the illegals, “we have to keep the families together. But they have to go.” (Vox’s Dara Lind generously acknowledges, “Maybe Trump simply doesn’t understand that this is the inevitable conclusion of his plan,” because the man says lots of things that he doesn’t really think about, after all.)
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Besides Trump, a whole bunch of the other passengers in the 2016 GOP Clownmobile are big on ending birthright citizenship, with varying degrees of acknowledgment that this would require amending the stupid old Constitution that gets in the way of a lot of other good ideas. Scott Walker thinks it’s a terrific idea because Harry Reid was for it one time, which we suppose was an attempt to be “bipartisan.”
Ohio Gov. John Kasich has been all over on the topic, saying recently that maybe we could keep the 14th Amendment as is, but also pushing for an end to birthright citizenship during his 2010 campaign for governor. No one knows who he is anyway. Rick Santorum described birthright citizenship as an “enticement to illegal immigration” in a column he wrote for Dead Breitbart’s Refuge for Angry Nativists. And Joisey Gov. Chris Christie would also like to take a look at dropping the 14th Amendment, too, perhaps in favor of a requirement that anyone who wants to be a citizen must endorse his campaign.
When he ran for the Senate in 2010, Constitutional Scholar Rand Paul didn’t merely want to build an underground electric fence on the border; he also mused that perhaps the 14th Amendment was never “meant to apply to illegal aliens.” That’s some pretty good constitutional literalism there, Rand.
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As HuffPo notes:
Even South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a longtime supporter of immigration reform, has called for a consideration of a change in the Constitution because he believes immigrants will simply “drop and leave” their kids in this country.
To be fair, this may say more about Lindsey Graham’s peculiar ideas about how human families actually work than about immigration. Apparently he believes that a lot of people spawn and swim off like salmon or something, as they do on his homeworld.
And here’s our favorite, Bobby “Not Bobby Brady, but 100% American” Jindal tweeted Monday night that he wants to get rid of the very part of the Constitution that made him a citizen at birth:
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That’ll learn those pesky brown people! Needless to say, there’s not the least shred of hypocrisy here, because when Bobby was born, his parents were here legally on student visas, and if we repealed the 14th Amendment just enough to make sure that only children of illegal immigrants were deprived of citizenship, there’s no chance at all that some kid might be born to people who enter on a student visa, make a citizen babby, and then overstay their visas, right? It would be pretty simple to strip the kid of citizenship, we guess. Maybe it could even be restored if the kid’s parents renewed their visas? And then when that kid grows up and runs for president … Yep, this will work out dandy.
Read more at http://wonkette.com/593029/gop-candidates-take-knife-to-messican-loving-parts-of-constitution#Su6xX33eK8c0fpPs.99
