The fundamental question in the birthright citizenship case is if foreign nationals who came here “under no authority of our law” count the same as the rest of us, Theo Wold, former assistant attorney general and former White House Deputy Assistant for Domestic Policy under President Trump, explained during an appearance on Breitbart News Daily.
Wold, who penned the original executive order on birthright citizenship, discussed the Supreme Court hearing the case on the matter this week. While this should be a no-brainer to most Americans, Wold suggested, he walked through some of the arguments made by those who believe illegal immigrants’ children should have legitimate citizenship by birth.
He explained that the left-leaning thinkers tend to believe the meaning of the 14th Amendment is settled.
“It’s like frozen in amber, so you can’t change that. And why? Because, well, it was addressing a particular problem, which was the status of black slaves, and the framers of the amendment said no subsequent Congress could sort of change the contours of this original meeting,” he said, playing the devil’s advocate.
“Ok, fine. What the administration does instead is we will analogize by looking at the exceptions they created. And they created an exception that said the 14th Amendment does not cover the children of ambassadors. It doesn’t cover the children of Native Americans. It doesn’t cover foreign invading armies,” he explained, noting that Chief Justice John Roberts said something picked up by the left-leaning justices later on.
“He says, ‘Yeah, well, those exceptions are kind of small, like foreign invading army. We don’t have a lot of those. We don’t have a lot of foreign ambassadors having kids everywhere. So how do you get from these tiny little exceptions to this big class of the children of illegal aliens. I don’t think you can do that. I think you’re stuck with those small exceptions.’ And so what they essentially did was, the meaning is fixed,” he said.
“And then if you want to analogize logically from the exception, that’s foreclosed to you, too. So you’re stuck, sorry, Trump administration. I think even most ordinary lawyers would look at that and say, ‘What? We do this all the time,’” he concluded, offering a rebuttal to that line of logic by pointing to Justice Samuel Alito.
“I think the rebuttal was sort of offered by Justice Alito, which is, you know, look, a microwave didn’t exist at the time of the original meaning of some of the constitutional clauses. But we can extrapolate, sort of, technology, or our understanding of certain conventional practices today, and we liken it to these things,” he explained, deeming this a “great case” made by Alito.
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“It was about — violation of Fourth Amendment search and seizure. And it was, you know, the placing of, like, essentially the homing beacon on the back of a car. And Alito likens that to some of the things that you know, British troops would have done in the early, late 18th century to American patriots who were working the revolution of following their behavior. So you draw the metaphor. The analogy. It’s a simple legal exercise we do all the time,” he said, explaining that Roberts’ logic is flawed as it is not about the group size in this case but the fundamental principle of the matter.
“It’s the principle at stake, which is, do foreign nationals who come here under no authority of our law — who were not allowed to enter, none of us agreed, ‘Hey, yeah, come on in with your family’ — if they are here and they have children, do they count the same as the rest of us?” Wold asked.
“And I think again, it’s pretty obvious to anyone at home thinking through this — well, this simply can’t be. How would we ever function?” he asked.
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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