Back to Basics

As often as I can, I watch Fox News’s 6 p.m program, and my favorite part of that program is the contributions of Charles Krauthammer.

Charles normally dissects an issue with precision and accuracy.  But not today, on August 5.  He posed the issue whether a congressman was right to say we need to amend the 14th Amendment to deal with the problem of anchor babies.  Krauthammer made the mistake of not reading the Amendment before discussing it.  So did all the other participants in the discussion.

Krauthammer correctly stated that “we should not amend the Constitution to deal with such a small problem.”  He missed the opportunity to point out that the congressman, like much of the American press and punditry, are asking the wrong question and therefore getting the wrong answer.

Let’s read the document, and see where that leads.  The first sentence of the 14th Amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States….”  Who gets to say who are “subject to the jurisdiction”?

Skip to the last sentence of the Amendment.  It is a clause that appears in many of the Amendments.  “The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

There you have it, in the plain language of the Constitution itself.  Congress can define by statute who is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.  It has long since done so with regard to children born to diplomatic personnel.  A child born of Japanese diplomatic personal who is born in a D.C. hospital is Japanese at birth, not American.  Why is that so?  Because Congress wrote a law that says so.

Congress can solve the anchor baby problem immediately by a statute.  It simply has to say that a child born of a Mexican citizen who has paid a ”coyote” to get smuggled into the U.S., and risked death in the deserts of the Southwest to get to an Arizona hospital is not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S.  It can further resolve the problem by ending all preferences for all known relatives of a prior anchor baby to come into the U.S.

Families don’t need to be “united” in the U.S.  They will be just as united back in Mexico, or any other nation from which pregnant women engage in “citizenship tourism.”

Those who favor open borders, where anyone who can sneak into the U.S. is entitled to all privileges of Americans, favor the anchor baby route to make this so.  After all, it’s for the children.  And they add, we shouldn’t mess with the Constitution.

But the Constitution is in no danger, and both mothers and babies will be in less danger, if Congress simply writes a law to deal with the problem.  And the 14th Amendment gives Congress that very power.

At most times and in some circumstances presidential speeches carry weight far beyond the actual words spoken or written. A president’s verbal gaff can start a war, rather than prevent one. A slight mistake by a president can cause American markets–or even international markets–to collapse, rather than stabilize.

There is a second point of great importance. Even if a president uses the best words and concepts to address any issue or crisis, those who hear those words–Americans or foreigners, friends or foe–must take his statements seriously. To be effective, a president must be believable, at least to most of the people whom he seeks to influence with his comments.

With those points in mind, we turn to President Obama’s speech Tuesday night from the Oval Office on the subject of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The main purpose of President Obama in this speech was to demonstrate he is “in charge” of the situation. He spoke on June 16. The Deepwater Horizon exploded, burned, and sank two months before. Between then and now, more oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico than from the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989.

Obama said in his speech that “just after the rig sank, [he assembled] a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge.” Competent searchers on the Internet can easily find out that Obama did NOT assemble the best minds until much later, and when he did, he falsified their recommendations and shut down other rigs in the Gulf for six months on his own initiative.

Obama continues: “as a result of these efforts, we’ve directed BP to mobilize….” The administration did no such thing. It left BP to act on its own trying to cap or stop the oil flow. The administration did act to prevent up to a thousand oil skimmers, some from overseas, from coming to the Gulf. Obama only marginally recognizes that there are two different and independent crises demanding attention. One is plugging the leaks from the well. The other is stopping the leaked oil from destroying the fishing and tourism industries of four American states, which are also suppliers of both sea food and petroleum products to all of America.

Obama said: “We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes.” Since it is a simple matter to find out that the administration actually hampered state and industry efforts to deal with the spreading oil, this comment backfires. The logical conclusion is that Obama did not act originally and lied about it, so in the future he will offer more of the same.

He refers to thousands of workers, thousands of troops, millions of feet of booms. If the effort were that massive and consistent, there would not have been a Coast Guard shutdown, early this week, of six oil skimmers outfitted and put into service by Governor Jindal of Louisiana.

If your house is burning down, and the Fire Department is there with hoses running, whose fault is it if the Water Department shows up and shuts them down to inspect their hoses and test the water?

Here’s John with his Ben Franklin hair extensions!

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every opportunity to talk about the Constitution while dressed and speaking as Benjamin Franklin.  Then, President Obama decided to make a vacation visit to the Grove Park Inn, in Asheville, N.C.  That’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from my home.

So I planned a one-man demonstration, dressed as Franklin, as close as I could get on public property, to the main entrance of the Grove Park Inn.  My wife protested that I really should “leave the guy alone when he’s on vacation with his family.”  I thought about it, reluctantly agreed.  So, this here is my version of “Standing on a Corner, Watching All the Presidents Walk By.”

My main subject is respect for the Constitution.  Obama has no such respect.  The latest example came just today, Friday.  Obama made a public statement that the new, stiff immigration law just signed into effect by the Governor of Arizona, involved “violations of civil rights.”

It involves no such thing.  The Supreme Court has long since ruled on a case concerning police stops for ID purposes.  The Court ruled that a brief stop asking any citizen to identify himself is constitutional.  Someone who was a ”Professor of Constitutional Law,” as entirely too many reporters have misidentified Obama, would have known that.  (Obama was the lowest order of faculty, a lecturer in law, and that only because some trustees of the University of Chicago insisted that the law school find a spot for Obama, somewhere.)

The main point is that Obama does not give a tinker’s dam about the Constitution. He is only concerned whether the preferred parties in any case are more likely to win than the politically disliked parties.  Arizona has every right to pass a law that applies only to its territory, and for the benefit of its own citizens, concerning the legality of anyone who is in the state.

The Arizona law makes no new definition of who is an illegal alien, but accepts word for word the federal definition.  Therefore, its new law will be ruled constitutional.  I predict a 5-4 vote in favor of Arizona, because only four justices on the court believe that the Constitution is not a real barrier to whatever the current administration wants to do.

This anti-constitutional position of Obama is not an isolated event, but commonplace. Look at Professor Liu, whom he nominated for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.  Liu consistently wrote as a professor of law at the University of California, that judges have a right to change the meaning of the Constitution.  Before the committee, he assured them that he would “obey the Constitution” if confirmed.

People who respect and care for the Constitution do not want a second justice to join the court by lying about his or her prior career and writings.  Anyone who has to lie about his or her own background to get on a court, doesn’t belong on the Supreme Court or any other court.  But these are exactly the kind of judges that Obama prefers.