14th Amendment

Constitutional Amendments are a frequent and relevant subject of political discourse. The Fourteenth, granting automatic citizenship to all people born in the United States, is now front and center. In response to those clamoring for more restriction on immigration, leading Republicans are threatening to revoke it.

While I disagree with their conclusion, I concede their point. On one hand it’s hard to impugn the motive of an expectant Mexican mother going to great length to make her child an American citizen. But it’s at least plausible, if not probable, that this was not the intent of the people who wrote this amendment. As an aside I suspect that the “Founding Fathers,” commonly spoken of as being of one mind, didn’t see eye to eye on everything they signed. The conflicting interests of thirteen colonies had to be reconciled so the results had to have reflected compromise, an element once present in Congress by both parties.

There’s no questioning the wording of the 14^th Amendment on this subject and I’ve yet to hear a threat of judicial appeal. To repeal or even modify a Constitutional Amendment, another must be enacted. The Twenty first Amendment repealing prohibition was necessary to nullify the Eighteenth that established it. So we’re talking about revising the Constitution, a process considerably more cumbersome than an Act of Congress. In the late 1970s the E.R.A Amendment passed both Houses, but failed to win ratification by the required number of state legislatures.  

Because of its inherent difficulties, passing a Constitutional Amendment requires a fairly broad consensus. We’ve only had twenty seven, the most recent being in 1992. In effect it deferred any pay raise Congress might vote itself until the next Congress convened. The law that required this change was hardly a high point in the legacy of those who wrote it.  Even the Founding Fathers were human. To their credit, attempts at correcting this oversight began in 1789 and came to fruition two hundred and three years later. As I said, this is a cumbersome process. The next to last Amendment in 1972 lowered the voting age to eighteen. With draftees of this age dying in Vietnam, passage was both easy and sensible.

Many of the current crop of enthusiasts want to make repeal retroactive by stripping citizenship from those who have come by it in this manner, further evidence of the  emptiness of these threats. The noise being made by GOP bigwigs is purely a symbolic attempt to strengthen a base less in need of enthusiasm than reason. As an indicator of things to come, I’d put it on a level with those three cornered hats.