Yeah, The Follow The Constitution Stuff? Not So Much Now.
The 14th amendment to the Constitution of the United Damn States of America grants citizenship to any person born on American soil. Unless, of course, our Attorney General Ken “Mr. Felony” Paxton decides he doesn’t like them personally.
In the last year, the state has refused to issue birth certificates to children who were born in Texas to undocumented parents. In May, four women filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Texas Department of State Health Services alleging constitutional discrimination and interference in the federal government’s authority over immigration.
Our attorney general has decided that Texas is not going to issue birth certificates to natural born citizens as required under the 14th Amendment.
He took an oath of office.
I, Ken Paxton, do solemnly swear, that I will faithfully execute the duties of the office of Attorney General of the State of Texas, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of this State, so help me God.
I think they figure that anything after the Second Amendment is just wasted paper.
Thanks to Elizabeth for the heads up.
They read our Constitution like they read their Buybull; buffet idiots selecting tidbits to support their st00pid. As taxpayers we need a law to force idiots to pay for their own lawyers, when they decide to pull their unconstitutional stunts. Maybe if we stopped paying for cops who make doing anything while black a killing offense and the other miscreants pay for their own defenses, they’d start thinking. Not likely, but at least we wouldn’t be paying for their craven crap.
1The Secretary of Paranoia (Ron Paul) has been running (endlessly) ooga-booga commercials on my local tv stations. Since I refuse to investigate (don’t want to so much as add to his visitor count) does any brave soul know what evil this puke is up to now?
As to this AG puke, I’m fairly confident that even at my advanced age, if he and I were locked in a room together, I would be the only one to walk out. I hate Republicanites.
2Paxton and his “anti-birthright babies” crowd are just begging for it. The Supremes will end up telling them that if this is what they want, they have to go through a constitutional amendment process but that would require all sorts of work and sweat and years. Well, to heck with that! Just go rogue, thank you very much. This bunch is so cheap, so tawdry and they take that as a compliment!
3They are following the Constitution. They just re-wrote it first.
Much as they have rewritten the Bible, American history, and anything else that doesn’t suit them.
They’ve given us a Constitution that recognizes only rich white men as people, a Bible with a Jesus filled with hate, and an American history that ignores slavery.
4Impeach him, lock him up, hang him! He’s not doing his job. Texas deserves better than this slimeball!
5How can you tell Paxton is lying? Are his lips moving?
6Punish the children, that’s the ticket!
7Well, come on now, the good book does say “Suffer the little children…” and this is just Paxton’s peculiar twist on scripture.
8Well first of all, a birth certificate records the place of birth and parentage. That’s it. The U.S. Constitution establishes citizenship. Doesn’t this butthead know that?
9Do you think someone born in Texas before it secedes would be eligible to run for POTUS after secession? Maybe Mr. Felony thinks he can stop these newborn citizens from running for president in 2052 if they don’t have a US birth certificate, just in case Texas fails to become an independent nation by then.
10Karen in NM. Yes, in the same way that a child born in New York before July 4, 1776 was deemed a British subject when his loyalist parents took him to England. It’s fascinating–a guy on Twitter posted a link to a Supreme Court case from 1898 where the discussion goes into why that’s so (and why a child born here to foreign parents is an automatic native-born US citizen, unless a parent is an ambassador or other agent of a foreign state)…it comes out of English common law.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/169/649
I knew about the 14th Amendment definition of “natural-born citizen” and that children of US citizens are citizens wherever they’re born (that bridges two definitions that have been used, one or the other, in various places at various times in history: place of birth, and bloodline.) I know a woman, the daughter of a American mother married to a Finnish father, born in this country, who has dual citizenship as a result.
But I had no idea how deep the roots of nationality were, the different ways in which it had been interpreted, esp. with regard to children born while parents are not in their own nation.
11Every official in the chain of command approving those “department rules” who took an oath of office (Commissioner pro tem of the Department of Health Services, for one, and probably the other Commissioners, and of course the Attorney General) has breached his/her oath by not upholding, protecting, and preserving the Constitution, including the specific phrasing of the Constitution with regard to “natural-born citizens.”
It is astonishing to me that ardent Republicans, so eager to “save” babies in utero, would not recognize the reasons pregnant women come here when they are in imminent danger of death or injury severe enough to cause death to their unborn children, and would argue that these women should have stayed in Central America or Mexico and died (pregnant, which means one of those precious little innocent angels they’re so hot to “protect”) rather than come across the Border to birth in relative peace, as much as peace as they get, hounded as they are by Republicans.
Those babies are U.S. citizens. Period. They deserve proper birth certificates because they were born on U.S. soil. Period. It is not their fault their mothers don’t have the exact documentation the bureaucracy wants. I’ll bet not one the people who made this decision has ancestors who arrived with perfect documentation. Most of the people who immigrated here were common folk and certainly did not have a photo ID. I have ancestors scattered across several centuries of immigration. The most recent, my father’s mother’s people, arrived in the 1890s from The Netherlands; the earliest may have crossed the land bridge with no documentation at all except traces in DNA and artifacts found by archaeologists…but that slender branch may have been African instead. (Things got mixed up in the Carolinas and Tennessee.) Beyond that, there are little twigs quite early (pre-Revolution) in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, and another twig (not the most interesting) in Tennessee.
Even the “real” Native Americans aren’t truly native–indigenous. They immigrated from Asia, and ultimately everyone is descended from those who emigrated from Africa and spread across Europe and Asia and everywhere else in time.
12I have yet to know when we the people crowned our so called leaders in Austin as monarchs of Texas, its own country. I see so much danger here in Texas regarding the power of the hate machine–if you do not like a certain part of the Constitution just creatively make administrative rules that someone might not notice– same thing goes for Texas ID requirements–they would not accept their own Texas Driver’s license as proof of residency in Texas when I took my 92 year old dad to get a Texas id–unfortunately–we the taxpayers pay the price as these legitimate lawsuits make their way through the courts and deem the practices unconstitutional–it seems as if their mantra “Secede” has already happened and no one told us that Texas is now its own country.
13Regrettably, this practice is neither new nor unusual.
There are a *lot* of natural born U.S. citizens, particularly in Texas, who the USA will not issue passports to. If they leave the country, too bad. Unfortunately, the courts have been looking the other way for many years.
The issue is that anyone birthed by a midwife in Texas from the 1940s on is presumed to be unreliable, as some parents purportedly got midwives to lie and attest that they had attended the births of the parents’ foreign born children here in the U.S.. While it’s likely true that this happened in some cases, IIRC about half-a-million U.S.-born babies can’t get any proof of U.S. birth or citizenship, leaving them in a very grey area w/ regard to the law.
Naturally, this isn’t a problem for folks who are rich or white.
14So the Texas taxpayers will now have to foot the astronomical legal bills for re-litigating what has already been decide by the Constitution. God Awmighty, these Repukians have more ways to waste time and money.
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