Constitutional Matters You Might Not be Thinking About

Just when you became complacent, thinking the only talk of changes to the US Constitution you would ever hear about would involve gay marriage and abortion, a shining intellectual beacon from the right steps in and shakes things up.

Current US Representative and Georgia GOP gubernatorial hopeful Nathan Deal has put forth a proposal that would change the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Ratified in 1868, the amendment grants US citizenship to any person born in the United States. This means that if your parents are undocumented, but you are born in the United States, you are a citizen. Period, end of story.

Apparently the suffocating anti-immigrant climate that we currently live in is a bit too tolerable and lenient for Rep. Deal. He doesn’t believe that the intent of the 14th Amendment was to allow for individuals to enter the country without documented status and have a baby who would then be granted citizenship as a birthright. And apparently this practice has become commonplace, even problematic, though there is absolutely no evidence that points to this.

I’m always fascinated by those who claim to have insight into the mindset of the intent of others’ actions. I find it particularly interesting when we get into debates about the intent of laws passed and/or court decisions made. I would agree with Rep. Deal that it probably wasn’t the intent of those living in 1868 and just coming out of a civil war to amend the Constitution to give citizenship rights to those whose parents do not possess proper legal documentation to be in the United States. The amendment was intended to grant citizenship to freed slaves who were born in the US. But the original intent of the amendment is not what is important. What is important is the spirit of the amendment.

I wonder if Rep. Deal remembers that we are a nation founded on the principle of White supremacy. The Spanish, French, British, and other Western European colonial settlers believed that the indigenous peoples occupying North America were savages who needed to be saved.

Our country exists because of the systematic and legal murder and rape of the indigenous peoples living here for centuries before the arrival of Europeans. They then pillaged and plundered their lands, stripping all the resources for personal use - my how times have changed. The remaining indigenous folks were then forced to specified parcels of land called reservations.

While these events were occurring the economy was being built on the backs of slaves kidnapped from their homelands across an ocean, forced to be build a better country for others to inhabit. And this was all done legally, with clear intent.

So it with all this in mind that I ponder, or rather dismiss offhand, the proposal of the Rep. from Georgia. You see, Rep. Deal, most of us don’t want to live in a country whose policies reflect the intent and ideas of those from the past because if we still operated on the intents of laws passed 20 years ago, let alone 100 or 200 years ago, most of us wouldn’t be allowed to be here.