Governors Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal have at least a rudimentary grasp of Amendment XIV, Section 1. Donald Trump doesn't but he's pretending to. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) doesn't have a flipping clue, and would ignore it if he did:
Marco Rubio dismissed Donald Trump’s immigration plan today as not feasible, and said he disagreed with the billionaire about ending birthright citizenship.
“I’m open to doing things that prevent people who deliberately come to the U.S. for the purposes of taking advantage of the Fourteenth Amendment, but I’m not in favor of repealing it,” Rubio told reporters at the Iowa State Fair Tuesday morning. “I haven’t read his plans, I’ve only read press accounts on some of them. But obviously there’s some ideas that have merit, but the majority of it is really not a workable plan that could ever pass Congress.”… [emphasis added]
That's undoubtedly true.
“We have twelve or thirteen million human beings [way more than that, actually] that have been here for a long time. And there is really no, there’s not really a realistic way of rounding up and deporting twelve or thirteen million people and our nation wouldn’t want to do that anyway,” Rubio said.
Where there's a will, Senator, there's a way. And actually, two-thirds of the country want to do precisely that, so you would appear to be on the wrong side of that particular issue.
Bush III is, as you doubtless anticipated, even more stubbornly obtuse on Amendment XIV, Section 1:
Revoking birthright citizenship would require a change to the Constitution, he noted. That’s a lengthy process, so in the meantime, “There needs to be real efforts to deal with the abuse of these factories where people come in and have children to gain the citizenship for the children. But this is in the Constitution. The argument that it’s not I don’t think is the right view.”… [emphasis added]
Rubio and Bush have the Fourteenth Amendment all backwards. In point of fact, birthright citizenship is NOT in the Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment or anywhere else.
Here is what Section 1 says:
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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. [emphasis added]
"Subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is the relevant and operative clause in that Section. It modifies the clause that precedes it and provides its context. Without it, Rubio and Bush would be correct that anybody who happens to be born on American soil would automatically be a "born" U.S. citizen. So we have to establish what "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means, since that is by definition a subset of the total sample population.
And, to save time, let us go right and straight to the authoritative source:
To understand the term jurisdiction, one may go to the debates on the congressional record of the Fourteenth Amendment. In those debates, and in articles of that time period written to explain the intent of the language of the amendment, one finds that “full jurisdiction” was meant to mean “full allegiance to America.”
The intention was to protect the nation against persons with divided loyalties.
The writers of the Fourteenth Amendment wished to follow the importance of "full loyalty" as portrayed by the Founding Fathers. As far as the founders were concerned, there could be no divided allegiances. They expected citizens to be fully American....
The definition of "persons within the jurisdiction of the United States" in that act was all persons at the time of its passage, born in the United States, including all slaves and their offspring, but not having any allegiances to any foreign government.
Michigan Senator Jacob Howard, one of two principal authors of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment (Citizenship Clause), noted that its provision, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," excluded American Indians who had tribal nationalities, and "persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers."
Senator Howard’s responses to questions regarding the language he used in the Citizenship Clause were recorded in the Congressional Globe, which are the recorded transcripts of the debates over the Fourteenth Amendment by the Thirty-Ninth Congress:
Mr. HOWARD: “I now move to take up House joint resolution #127.”
The motion was agreed to; and the Senate, as in Committee of the Whole, resumed the consideration of the joint resolution (H.R. #127) proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
“The First Amendment is to section one, declaring that all persons born in the United States and Subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside. I do not propose to say anything on that subject except that the question of citizenship has been fully discussed in this body as not to need any further elucidation, in my opinion. This amendment which I have offered is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons. It settles the great question of citizenship and removes all doubt as to what persons are or are not citizens of the United States. This has long been a great desideratum in the jurisprudence and legislation of this country.”
Senator Howard even went out of his way to indicate that children born on American soil of foreign citizens are not included.
Clearly, the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had no intention of freely giving away American citizenship to just anyone simply because they may have been born on American soil.
The second author of the Citizenship Clause, Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull, added that "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States" meant "not owing allegiance to anybody else."
The full quote by Senator Trumbull:
"The provision is, that 'all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.' That means 'subject to the complete jurisdiction thereof.' What do we mean by 'complete jurisdiction thereof?' Not owing allegiance to anybody else. That is what it means."
Trumbull continues, "Can you sue a Navajo Indian in court? Are they in any sense subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States? By no means. We make treaties with them, and therefore they are not subject to our jurisdiction. If they were, we wouldn't make treaties with them...It is only those persons who come completely within our jurisdiction, who are subject to our laws, that we think of making citizens; and there can be no objection to the proposition that such persons should be citizens."
Senator Howard concurred with what Mr. Trumbull had to say:
"I concur entirely with the honorable Senator from Illinois [Trumbull], in holding that the word 'jurisdiction,' as here employed, ought to be construed so as to imply a full and complete jurisdiction on the part of the United States, whether exercised by Congress, by the executive, or by the judicial department; that is to say, the same jurisdiction in extent and quality as applies to every citizen of the United States now."
Based on these explanations by the writers of the clause, then, it is understood that the intention was for those who are not born to American citizens to have no birthright to citizenship just because they simply were born inside the borders of this country. [emphases added]
Put another way, the Constitution would need to be amended to ADD birthright citizenship by removing "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" FROM the Fourteenth Amendment.
And as a practical matter, can even Jeb and rightwing Dezi not see why Senators Howard and Trumbull added that clarifying language to their Amendment? An enemy nation wouldn't have to invade the United States militarily, whether with horses and muskets or later with tanks and APCs and fighters and bombers, and all with infantry; all they would have to do is send their nationals pouring passively across the border with orders to breed like cats, every subsequent offspring automatically a "U.S. citizen," regardless of loyalty. The Palestinians call it "the right of return," and Israel has never allowed it, because they know what would happen: the Jewish population would be overrun and displaced. This would be the right of return strategy writ large, an invading enemy population growing in our midst like a cancer, and our self-destructive misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment binding and gagging us and making us accessories to our own national erosion and destruction.
Now is the willfully displaced Mexican and Central American influx an "enemy" population? Not necessarily. But neither are the children they have here automatically "Americans," either. It's no different that how the Birthers got it all wrong obsessing over Barack Obama's birth certificate when what actually disqualifies The One from constitutional eligibility for the presidency is the fact that his father was Kenyan, and at the time therefore a British subject, not an American. The reverse was also true in that John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, but he was still a "born American" because both of his parents were U.S. citizens.
Words, as Rush Limbaugh likes to say, mean things. And where the Constitution is concerned, they do not mean what lawyer and judges say they mean, they mean what the founders and writers of every Amendment since the Bill of Rights originally meant them to mean.
Pity hardly anybody is concerned with the Constitution anymore, aside from us.
And, it would seem, Governors Walker and Jindal.
UPDATE (8/19): Aaaaaaand Senator Cruz.
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