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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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The viable plan to ending birthright citizenship is to reexamine the legal definition of natural born citizen in light of earlier British jurisprudence which, in some cases, mentiins that the father must also be a natural born citizen. This is the kind of originalist legal argumentation that we find among Heritage Foundation guys and their SC picks.

We can do that, and then we can just restrict how many people can come in. Do a pregnancy test on women who come in. Lots of simple stuff. This issue is a failure of political will, not political thought.

The viable plan to ending birthright citizenship is to reexamine the legal definition of natural born citizen in light of earlier British jurisprudence which

There's no need to have motivated semantic arguments about what is a "natural birth" and what isn't (what about those born via Cesarean section??) because it's totally irrelevant to the constitutional language. The fourteenth amendment is extremely clear and unambiguous:

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.

How many members of the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court do you believe would vote categorically against birthright citizenship?

If they can be persuaded that what the founders intended precluded the children of non citizen fathers, then maybe all of them, why not?

The whole point of the 14th amendment was to grant citizenship to the freedmen, who had no legitimate descent from any US citizen. (Slaves not being citizens, as an obvious statement of fact). If a citizen parent was a requirement to benefit from the 14th, then it wouldn't have done what it was supposed to do.

birthrate citizenship

Is that like, whoever raises the birthrate the most gets to become a citizen? That’s certainly one plan for dealing with the problem.

Yeah I’m just mildly dyslexic, sadly. I edit a lot of ‘writes’.