A reader writes concerning my critique of Michael Anton’s opinion column on birthright citizenship:
I think your argument about “jurisdiction” may be incorrect. The “plain meanings” of words change over decades, for one. But it appears from what you’ve written, that the author of those words contemporaneously clarified exactly what he meant, even though it slightly differs with a current legal definition. And it’s logical: at the time, it would have been easy to consider someone who claimed allegiance too and citizenship in another country to NOT be subject to U.S. jurisdiction. That idea continues somewhat today, in the mechanism of extradition.
I absolutely shiver at the thought of the meanings of legal words, the underpinnings of our entire legal system, actually drifting. It’d be rather like gluon and meson trading definitions, which doesn’t matter until someone tried to do a physics experiment using the old words and the new meanings.
Ka-boom!
The reader is right that, in Anton’s piece, that Senator Turnbull had apparently defined the meaning, as I noted in my initial post. But today, also in WaPo, Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center[1], rebuts Anton’s article. To the particular point of my reader:
Those who attack birthright citizenship, as did former Trump official Michael Anton in a recent Post op-ed, often go out of their way not only to misrepresent the plain meaning of the words of the 14th Amendment and those who drafted and ratified it, but also to ignore the racist and bloody history that required it in the first place. Sen. Lyman Trumbull, for example, a leading advocate in Congress for the citizenship clause, was quoted by Anton as somehow supporting his twisted reading of the clause.
Except it was Trumbull who answered the racists of his own time who worried about “naturalizing the children of the Chinese and Gypsies born in this country.” Trumbull said the citizenship clause “undoubtedly” would do that, and that a child of such immigrants “is just as much a citizen as the child of a European.” In other remarks, Trumbull made it even clearer, saying, “Birth entitles a person to citizenship, that every freeborn person in this land, is, by virtue of being born here, a citizen of the United States.”
Those who, like Anton, deny the plain meaning of the citizenship clause and its powerful history love to focus on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction,” as if somehow they can make the clause say the opposite of what it actually says. They have even added to Trumbull’s statements — it’s amazing what slipping in an extra “[or]” will do — in ham-handed attempts to distort their meaning (which have been criticized across the ideological spectrum).
Either Anton, like myself, is ignorant of parts of the 14th Amendment debate, or deliberately conceals the full information (much like Fox News), or Wydra is engaged in similar deceit. In the absence of the time to research the subject more fully, I must reluctantly turn to circumstancial evidence. In this case, Wydra’s defense leaves the meaning of jurisdiction untouched, which I find more reasonable and preferable than the implications of Anton’s position. Without more first-hand evidence and analysis, I am inclined to stand by my analysis.
Any historians in the crowd?
1I give her position simply as a courtesy, not to suggest she has dispositive authority. I am not familiar with her institution, it could be the equivalent of a mail-order church for all I know.
