There's not much to say that I haven't already said about proposals like Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce's attempt to deny citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants, but his statement here is inadvertently revealing:
“This is an orchestrated effort by them to come here and have children to gain access to the great welfare state we've created,” Pearce said of Hispanic immigrants.
Pearce contended that the bill would not violate the 14th Amendment, saying only that “we would write it right.”
The intent of the 14th Amendment was to end the practice of granting American citizenship based on race. Pearce wants to "rewrite" the amendment so that it in fact operates as a de-facto denial of citizenship on the basis of race. The funny thing about Pearce's statement is that he's freely admitting how unconstitutional his proposal is -- if you have to "rewrite" an amendment to make your proposal constitutional, then it's not constitutional. The only way to repeal the 14th Amendment is to pass another amendment, which conservatives will never be able to do. * Until then, this movement continues to make a mockery of the conservative judicial philosophy of originalism, revealing it to be nothing more than an conservative intellectual framework for results-oriented judicial activism.
There will come a time when Republicans and Democrats who supported these kinds of laws will be ashamed to have done so. That time is coming sooner than they think.
*My mistake, he's talking about writing the law "right." There's no way to do that in a way that isn't unconstitutional without a new amendment.
-- A. Serwer
