Another 14th Amendment Mess, The birthright citizenship CON!
Trump is right
By. executive order, Donald Trump has declared that the Fourteenth Amendment is not to be interpreted as mandating birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants — a position shared by Ron and Rand Paul, incidentally — and of course the result has been the usual hysteria.
But there is a very strong case to be made that Trump has the better of the constitutional argument.
The Fourteenth Amendment begins, “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.”
The key phrase to consider there when considering who is a “natural-born citizen” is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The argument of Trump’s legal supporters is that illegal immigrants are subject to a foreign sovereignty, are therefore not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and thus the citizenship clause above does not apply.
The “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause, ignored by birthright citizenship advocates, has to have some meaning or it wouldn’t have been included, and the number of children of foreign diplomats being vanishingly small, we can assume it extended beyond that extremely rare case (so rare as hardly to be worth mentioning).
What was meant by the clause was that you had to be subject to no other sovereign.
Senator Jacob Howard drafted the citizenship clause of…