Today in “trends that the RNC is supporting for no discernible reason”:

Removing the 14th Amendment from the Constitution.

It began with an irrational panic, fueled — as most irrational panics seem to be these days — by ill-informed lawmakers who don’t even know the tenets of the Constitution they’ve sworn to uphold, much less any of the rest of the laws of this country.  They referred to the imaginary phenomenon in shorthand as “anchor babies,” and while the concept has been around for a while it’s recently reaching new heights in the national discourse — specifically, as the latest of many justifications for why Arizona’s new SB 1070 needs to exist.

The concept is basically this.  Pregnant Mexican women, seeking to exploit our country’s 14th Amendment (which states that any person born on U.S. soil is an American citizen), cross the border illegally and give birth to their children.  The mothers then have the right to live in this country indefinitely, because the 14th Amendment also extends right of citizenship to any relative whatsoever of any American citizen living or dead.

(That was a joke.)

In fact, leaving “anchor babies” is completely impossible according to 8 USC 1204 (INA 2224), the specific section of our country’s federal policy regarding the non-citizen parents of citizen children.  There is simply no provision for parents to be automatically granted citizenship, amnesty, green cards, or what-have-you by virtue of having a citizen child in the United States.  Amnesty and citizenship rest, as they have always rested, with the U.S. Attorney General’s office on an individual case-by-case basis.  Now, may the Attorney General extend amnesty as he sees fit?  Sure.  Might he be persuaded to do so for the benefit of “family unity”?  Of course.

But for many Republicans, including Sen. Lindsay Graham, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce, co-sponsor of SB 1070, that’s not good enough.

Earlier this week, Sen. McConnell suggested that Congress “ought to take a look at” the 14th Amendment.  In addition, legislation suggesting that the 14th Amendment be repealed or otherwise rendered ineffective has been slowly building up steam in the Senate, with new legislation being sponsored by 93 different public officials.  According to this new piece of legislation, being born in the U.S. will no longer automatically qualify any individual for U.S. citizenship.

Of course, no one is actually suggesting any new standards, because what would our government be if not deliberately vague and fearmongering?  But the irony of this particular measure is that it would, if enacted, disqualify most members of the current U.S. government from continuing to serve in public office.

See, the 14th Amendment doesn’t exclusively deal with citizenship.  It is also our current basis for determining most of the basic functions of our government.  As Orly Taitz will never let this country forget, one of the primary qualifications for holding U.S. public office (particularly the Presidency) is a very specific type of U.S. citizenship — that is, the President must have been born on U.S. soil.  Requirements for Senate and House are less stringent, but still require Senators and Representatives to be U.S. citizens for a minimum period.  The majority of U.S. public officials — of U.S. citizens, period — have obtained U.S. citizenship under the provision of the 14th Amendment.  There is no further rigmarole your parents had to go through, at the hospital where you were born, than simply proving that you were born on U.S.-owned soil — a fairly easy task all things considered.  So if the section of the 14th Amendment which automatically grants citizenship to all babies born on U.S. soil is repealed or rendered ineffective via statute, then nearly the entire population of the U.S. — including the very U.S. Senators who want to sign this bill into law — will be disenfranchised.  Illegal immigrants on the very soil they are trying to (cough) “protect.”

I’ll leave aside for a moment the fact that, according to U.S. Border Patrol statistics, the Mexico-America border is less porous than it’s been since 1975.

I’m going to leave aside for a moment the fact that racial issues keep on intruding into this whole debate, despite the fact that none of the sponsors of these bills believe themselves to be racist.  (The 14th Amendment, for those who don’t know — and I am looking straight at you, Sen. McConnell — was signed into law during Reconstruction, as part of the program to extend citizenship to non-whites.)

I’m just going to say that this bill is, quite possibly, the dumbest bill ever to gain any sort of following whatsoever in the history of the U.S. Senate.  Whatever the safety of our country and security of our borders may be worth, it certainly isn’t worth disenfranchising everyone in the country except the naturalized immigrants.

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