Fox News anchored in stupidity on 14th Amendment

Article author: 
Ann Coulter
Article publisher: 
World Net Daily
Article date: 
19 August 2015
Article category: 
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body: 

...how could anyone – even a not-very-bright person – imagine that granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens is actually in our Constitution?

...Judge Andrew Napolitano, Fox’s senior judicial analyst... at least got the century right. He mentioned the Civil War – and then went on to inform Bream that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to – I quote – “make certain that the former slaves and the native Americans would be recognized as American citizens no matter what kind of prejudice there might be against them.”

Huh. In 1884, 16 years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, John Elk, who – as you may have surmised by his name – was an Indian, had to go to the Supreme Court to argue that he was an American citizen because he was born in the United States.
 
He lost. In Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not grant Indians citizenship.
 
The “main object of the opening sentence of the 14th Amendment,” the court explained – and not for the first or last time – “was to settle the question, upon which there had been a difference of opinion throughout the country and in this court, as to the citizenship of free negroes and to put it beyond doubt that all persons, white or black … should be citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.”
 
American Indians were not made citizens until 1924...
 
Of course it’s easy for legal experts to miss the welter of rulings on Indian citizenship inasmuch as they obtained citizenship in a law perplexingly titled: “THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924.”...
 
As the Supreme Court said in Elk: “[N]o one can become a citizen of a nation without its consent.”
 
The anchor baby scam was invented 30 years ago by a liberal zealot, Justice William Brennan, who slipped a footnote into a 1982 Supreme Court opinion announcing that the kids born to illegals on U.S. soil are citizens. Fox News is treating Brennan’s crayon scratchings on the Constitution as part of our precious national inheritance.
 
Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals is America’s most-cited federal judge – and, by the way, no friend to conservatives. In 2003, he wrote a concurrence simply to demand that Congress pass a law to stop “awarding citizenship to everyone born in the United States.”
 
The purpose of the 14th Amendment, he said, was “to grant citizenship to the recently freed slaves,” adding that “Congress would not be flouting the Constitution” if it passed a law “to put an end to the nonsense.”
 

 

CAIRCO Research