White House Press Secretary (i.e. Paid Bullshitter) Karoline Leavitt held her first press briefing on Tuesday, and based on some of the things she said in response to questions from the news media, it’s safe to assume her only qualifications for the job are that she’s got blonde hair and Perv-in-Chief Donald Trump finds her attractive.
At one point, Leavitt told reporters, “This administration believes that birthright citizenship is unconstitutional.”
So the 14th Amendment to the Constitution violates the Constitution? Wow! The sound you hear right now is Thomas Jefferson spinning in his grave at 10,000 revolutions a second.
Here’s what the 14th Amendment says:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
That could not possibly be any clearer. If you’re born in the United States, you’re a citizen. That also applies if you aren’t born here but later naturalized and become a citizen. That’s inviolable. It might just as well be written in stone like the Ten Commandments right-wingers are so fond of forcing down children’s throats even though the same Constitution calls for a separation of church and state.
According to Time, the issue of birthright citizenship has been challenged before.
“The most recent attempt to litigate the issue occurred in 2004, when then-law professor John Eastman co-authored an amicus brief in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, a case concerning the due process rights of an accused “enemy combatant” and U.S. citizen whom the United States military had captured in Afghanistan. Eastman’s brief urged the court to rule that Hamdi was not a U.S. citizen because Hamdi’s parents were foreign nationals who were in the United States on temporary visas at the time of his birth. The argument failed: the first line of the court’s decision described the case as being about “the legality of the Government’s detention of a United States citizen on United States soil as an ‘enemy combatant.’” Eastman, who has served in the past as a legal advisor to Trump, is currently fighting disbarment and facing criminal charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty, relating to his role in seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.”
But despite that and other rulings from various federal courts on the issue of birthright citizenship, the Trump administration seems eager to try yet another challenge to the 14th Amendment. Still, even with a 6-3 right-wing majority on the current Supreme Court, it seems unlikely they’ll succeed.
Leavitt’s bizarre Orwellian declaration drew lots of commentary online.
