Why Arizona Republicans Want to Destroy the Constitution

In today's Washington Post, Harold Meyerson's column explains why crazy un-American Republicans - to his credit, so far Rep. Jeff Flake has resisted this - want to destroy their party's most valuable contribution to the U.S. Constitution, the document that the creepy Tea Partiers claim to revere despite their inability to read or follow it. And it's not because they're all neo-Nazi sympathizers like the moronic thug Russell Pearce:

The Republican war on the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause is indeed directed at a mortal threat -- but not to the American nation. It is the threat that Latino voting poses to the Republican Party.

By proposing to revoke the citizenship of the estimated 4 million U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants -- and, presumably, the children's children and so on down the line -- Republicans are calling for more than the creation of a permanent noncitizen caste. They are endeavoring to solve what is probably their most crippling long-term political dilemma: the racial diversification of the electorate. Not to put too fine a point on it, they are trying to preserve their political prospects as a white folks' party in an increasingly multicolored land.

Absent a constitutional change -- to a lesser degree, even with it -- those prospects look mighty bleak. The demographic base of the Republican Party, as Ruy Teixeira demonstrates in a paper released by the Center for American Progress this summer, is shrinking as a share of the nation and the electorate. As the nation grows more racially and religiously diverse, Teixeira shows, its percentage of white Christians will decline to just 35 percent of the population by 2040.

The group that's growing fastest, of course, is Latinos. "Their numbers will triple to 133 million by 2050 from 47 million today," Teixeira writes, "while the number of non-Hispanic whites will remain essentially flat." Moreover, Latinos increasingly trend Democratic -- in a Gallup poll this year, 53 percent self-identified as Democrats; just 21 percent called themselves Republican. [This is even more true in Arizona, where the state GOP has declared war on Latinos.]

To be sure, the wretched state of the economy could drive some otherwise Democratic-inclined Latino voters to the GOP this November. But Republicans are doing their damnedest to keep this from happening. Their embrace of Arizona's Suspicious-Looking-Latinos law and their enthusiasm for stripping Latino children of their citizenship will only hasten Latinos' flight.

Sentient Republican strategists such as Karl Rove have long understood that unless their party could win more Latino votes, it would eventually go the way of the Whigs. That's the main reason George W. Bush tried to persuade congressional Republicans to support immigration reform. But most lawmakers, reflecting the nativism of the Republican base, would have none of it.

By pushing for repeal of the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause, the GOP appears to have concluded: If you can't win them over -- indeed, if you're doing everything in your power to make their lives miserable -- revoke their citizenship.

Ghetto-Fabulous Russell Pearce vs. the U.S. Constitution, Round Two

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.