The Modern Constitutional

I spent most of the final week of 2005 thinking about the implications of changes to the 14th Amendment.

Thanks so much to everyone for that mind storm but hopefully I didn’t run through too many stoplights while driving around town with my head spinning over all this. (I haven’t read about any mysterious hit and runs in the local papers the last few days so I may be safe.)

As a side, I still feel it’s wonderful to be able to find a wealth of information regarding such curious things right here at my fingertips. We are living in a wonderful age.

The more I read, followed the crooked trail of clues and pondered this whole mess, the more often I came upon the name F. James Sensenbrenner and folks like Tancredo as mere toadies of the same. These are the same guys that are using Homeland Security and emergency hurricane funding bills as riders to pay for enhancements to the national bureaucracy, tattoo removal programs and federal screwworm studies. (The blind bums in my state decided to spend their national pork on attacking the evil Goth culture that is so prevalent among the kiddies today ... gee whiz.)

These guys are the money men. They got their mind on their money and their money on their mind. If nothing else, I come away with the sense that guys like this man F. James, grandson of the man who invented Kotex, have far too much influence in the halls of power.

Upon review, it seems all these toadies do have a few traits in common. They are mostly white, rich, well connected, and earned every deferment known to man in order to stay out of any dangerous or credible military service to their country during Vietnam. They all have the likeness of John Fogarty’s Fortunate Son. They are also mostly Republican, which means they are members of the majority, they feel they own the federal government, they share the unenviable burden of leading our nation’s peasants by the nose into a better future, and they feel they have carte blanche to do whatever they want with our laws while expecting little outright retribution from the general public.

Oh, yeah, the theme seems to be if you argue or debate their agenda, you will be labeled an opportunist, dishonest or reprehensible, or simply unpatriotic, and the meeting will be gaveled abruptly to an end.

Holding on to this Sensenbrenner guy for just a moment, according to what I read he is not really the big meanie that I make him to be. He is not in essence a bad man. But the way he goes about things is not to my liking. Mostly, I think, that’s just because he’s a fat cat politician and I’m not. (I also wonder about all our constitutional liberties that his toadies seem intent on trampling or altering, in the name of national security, the same liberties which their very own ancestors surely took great advantage of.)

But I did find it interesting to learn that the third highest financial contributor to The Honorable man from Wisconsin was his old pal Bud Selig in his post as the Commissioner of MLB.

Now, this fact is significant to all of us fans of baseball. I can understand now why, when asked about steroids in MLB, the Judiciary Chairman regularly pooh-poohs his response with sayings like, “Well, it’s a problem everywhere, with football, soccer, badminton and ping pong, etc, etc.” And considering the charge to protect MLB’s legal standing, I can see why it might be important for the Commish to have a few friends in Washington just like this slimy dude. But, man, I thought, how and where does the Commish get the money to contribute to politicians like Sensenbrenner?

Then I remembered, oh, yeah, idiots like me give it to him.

Now, back to the 14th.

My first concern is that it really is open to some interpretation. Reading the history of the 14th, it seems to me it was written some 150 years ago for a very good reason. Primarily, I read that it was to refute Dred Scott, thus eliminate any legal argument that Negroes or Redskins could not be American citizens. As amendments typically go, the words in it were somewhat of a compromise among the different factions of the day. The historical references indicate that at first it may have been as simple as a declaration of fact, “If you are born on American soil, then you are an American.” But, along the way, it seems things like the problem with foreign ambassadors popped up and the words “under the jurisdiction of” were included.

You know, my first reaction is the same as yours: shut this door quickly. Play your games with Iraq and Afghanistan, toy with No Child Left Behind, we’ll clean up the mess later, but keep your damn fingers out of the Constitution. No, seriously, keep your damn fingers out of the Constitution!

Clearly, though, I believe one could argue that the culture and environment of immigration during the 1860’s under which this amendment was framed was significantly different and far more simple than the modern issues we enjoy with millions of illegal aliens, porous borders, need for security while considering complex international cooperation, etc.

I don’t believe history versus modernity should in itself set some grand precedent for changing the Constitution. If it does, we’d all be in trouble. I am no legal scholar but even I’d be unwilling to thrust that argument before the big wigs. Still, based on a completely different scenario of 2006 versus 1866, I can see how a precarious legal argument could transpire for a modern modification to the 14th. (Not the vague one the Tancredo Toads have chosen, however.)

In the meantime, I’ve tried to consider the question of why even bother with this amendment? Setting aside what is apparently the main point of Sensenbrenner’s Toadies, that being the danger of terrorist infiltration along the Mexican border, which makes no sense whatsoever regarding the bureaucracy of birth certificates, what possible motivation do they have or real (ie, money) problem could they fix by altering the constitutional definition of a citizen’s birthright?

(BTW, I am stuck with the idea here that anyone who truly thinks that changes to the Constitution or issuance of computer chip encoded id cards will prevent future terrorist attacks just doesn’t get the whole idea behind sleeper cells.)

According to what I’ve read, hidden in the language of bills like HR 698, the change they’re looking for would be to say that at least one of the newborn’s parents must be a US citizen for automatic citizenship to be granted…on the face of it, not an unusual demand, I don’t think, and certainly not unprecedented around the world. In fact, after conducting a very casual survey among my fellow Turkey Hunters at the Town Tavern, I found no objections to this idea at all.

(Admittedly, one has to be very cautious when presenting matters of Constitutional concern before the august patrons of the Town Tavern. In fact, I left out the whole part about what the 14th Amendment really says when I loosely remarked about this problem at the bar. Further, I was offered some very interesting alternative suggestions as standard criteria for determining citizenship…I’ll offer that up in a separate message some day. But the bottom line is, I didn’t hear anyone arguing for immigrant rights when the subject was broached. Something tells me that perhaps my Turkey Hunter pals are not as PC as our representatives in the Beltway.)

Bowing to that PC concern, perhaps, I don’t think Sensenbrenner, Tancredo or the other toadies have spelled out “the agenda” very clearly at all. You have to tie it in with their arguments on “Guest Worker” rules, RealID national id cards, etc, a wide far-reaching web of limitations, restrictions and corrections to the old rules that they want enacted.

I think the overall goal is not to stop illegals or even prevent infiltration but to stem the financial giveaways.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has openly advanced the idea that immigrant workers are important to the future of our economy. What is being bandied about on both sides of the aisle is how to make them more manageable and taxable. The in-crowd knows they can’t stop people from coming across the border and they don’t really want to. (Well, they can stop it, but they won’t as long as US businesses depend on it. Now, I’m not saying it’s just the PC crowd keeping this at bay. There are plenty of PR firms in the Beltway that could conjure up ways to sell border control to the public. Instead of just building a wall along outer edge of Arizona, they could construct a “National Protection Barrier” or call it a “Freedom Fence” and probably get away with it.)

Anyway, if they can’t really make us safe then they’ve go to do the next best thing and get a handle on the hidden cost of 99 cent eggplants. That means they have to make it harder for illegals to ride the backs of their kids while sucking healthcare and education dollars paid by legal citizens. It means they have to get back some of that lost tax revenue that illegals aren’t paying. Why? Because it costs lots and lots of money to take care of Mexican kids and it really pisses off average citizens who can’t afford to have their own teeth fixed. So, the answer is to remove that complaint by establishing a different process to “naturalize” immigrant workers. And the first step on that winding road is to more clearly define who is a citizen and who ain’t.

So, after a week of deep consideration, I agree with you. Although I think it’s quite possible we could see a change or even a brilliant argument in favor of it, altering the 14th won’t stop illegal immigration or “people smuggling” as it is most recently termed by the Toadies. Such change won’t protect the price of strawberries or even make life easier or better or safer for the average bum out there. But it probably will eventually create a few extra tax dollars for more important things like international war, improved federal tattoo removal programs and more modern screwworm studies.

On with 2006.