We see that the neo-Nazi-hugging, undereducated state legislator Russell Pearce is up to his old unconstitutional tricks again and thought we would reprint this blog post from December 5, 2007, when we also were running for Congress in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District (we withdrew after others entered the Democratic primary):
The provocative insider Republican blog Seeing Red AZ reports that term-limited State Rep. Russell Pearce (R-National Alliance) has abandoned his exploration of a candidacy in the primary against U.S. Rep. Jeff Flake in Arizona's Sixth Congressional District. This anti-government activist, of course, will be running for a different public office rather than moving to honest work in the private sector that right-wingers adore.
So right now nothing stands between Jeff Flake and yet another term of do-nothing showboating on behalf of his extreme laissez-faire anti-middle-class philosophy but me.
Scary, huh?
But there are rumors that things might change soon. Stay tuned.
Although I revere the United States Constitution, I am far from being an expert on it. I managed to get only a B+ in Prof. Fletcher Baldwin's Constitutional Law I class in the spring of 1992 at the University of Florida College of Law although I did somehow get an A in both Prof. Charles Collier's Constitutional Law II class that summer and in Prof. Baldwin's Civil & Political Liberties class that fall.
I did just a little work involving constitutional issues as a staff attorney in social policy at UF's Center for Governmental Responsibility and spent only one year as a visiting professor in legal studies at Nova Southeastern University, where I taught just two undergraduate sections each of Constitutional History I, Constitutional History II and Political & Civil Rights.
And while I did supervise teaching assistants in Constitutional Law for three years at Nova Southeastern's Shepard Broad Law Center, I admit that my knowledge of the Constitutional might not match that of the ghetto-fabulous Russell Pearce, who is, after all, a member of the Arizona House of Representatives and presumed candidate for the same seat in the U.S. House of Representatives for which I am running.
But I would respectfully suggest to Russell Pearce that he take a look at the first sentence of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment: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.
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 had declared that all persons born in the United States were citizens, but the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified a couple of years later, enshrined that in our Constitution.
In U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), the Supreme Court held that under the Fourteenth Amendment, a child born in the United States of parents of foreign descent who are not employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under a foreign power, and are not members of foreign forces in hostile occupation of United States territory, becomes a citizen of the United States at the time of birth.
According to the Wong Kim Ark decision, the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment had to be interpreted in light of English common law tradition that had excluded from citizenship at birth only two classes of people: children born to foreign diplomats and children born to enemy forces engaged in hostile occupation of the country's territory. Since Mr. Wong, who was born in the U.S. to parents who were not citizens -- and who never could become U.S. citizens due to the racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 -- didn't fit in these two categories, he was a U.S. citizen.
U.S. citizenship law since Wong Kim Ark has acknowledged both jus soli (citizenship through place of birth) and jus sanguinis (citizenship inherited from parents). While the Supreme Court has never explicitly ruled on whether children born in the United States to undocumented (so-called "illegal") immigrant parents are entitled to birthright citizenship via the Fourteenth Amendment, it has generally been assumed that they are.
In some cases the Court has implicitly assumed, or suggested in dicta, that such children are entitled to birthright citizenship.
In Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982), the court stated in dicta that illegal immigrants are "within the jurisdiction" of the states in which they reside, and added in a footnote that "no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment 'jurisdiction' can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful."
And in INS v. Rios-Pineda 471 U.S. 444 (1985), the Court referred to a child born to deportable aliens as "a citizen of this country."
This leads me to respectfully suggest to Arizona Rep. Russell Pearce (R-National Alliance) that his bill to take away citizenship from children born in this country, like the proposed Arizona referendum to accomplish the same thing, is patently unconstitional.
I further respectfully suggest that when Russell Pearce claims that the Fourteenth Amendment "has nothing to do with aliens," he is full of shit.
Well, Mr. Pearce is still pretty scary, even if he backed away from what have would been a humiliating defeat by Jeff Flake in the 2008 Republican primary for Congress. In most civilized parts of the country, a Russell Pearce would be widely considered an embarrassing laughingstock. Too bad Arizona is so backward that Pearce and his slimy ilk actually are in charge of the legislature and that the poorly-educated moronic majority of voters of the Cactus State seem to want to keep their own kind in power.
