RIGHT SPEAK: Mid-Air Birth Flies Home How Stupid Birthright Citizenship Is: The Extreme Manipulation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause Must End Now if the Republic is to Survive

Mid-Air Birth Flies Home How Stupid Birthright Citizenship Is:

The extreme manipulation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause must end now if the republic is to survive

To borrow from comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s famous redneck schtick, if you were born on a flight over U.S. air space, you might be a U.S. citizen.
The latest birthplace debate underscores just how insanely stupid sweeping birthright citizenship has become in the modern age. And it’s another example of why the U.S. Supreme Court needs to fix a flawed 130-year-old interpretation of the Constitution.

‘A Child Born on a Plane’

Multiple corporate outlets had some fun reporting on the “stork” story of a passenger who gave birth over the weekend during a flight from Jamaica to New York City. The Caribbean Airlines flight “landed at New York’s John F. Kennedy international airport with one more person than it took off with,” the liberal Guardian guffawed.

As the cheeky piece explained, the citizenship status of the newborn remained up in the air because officials had yet to make clear the citizenship status of the parents — “and where the plane was at the exact moment the baby was born.” The child would, of course, automatically be a U.S. citizen if either parent is a U.S. citizen. If not, it depends on precisely where the birth occurred. If the answer is within 12 nautical miles of the U.S. coastline, the newborn just won the U.S. citizenship lottery.

“… [A] child born on a plane in the United States or flying over its territory would acquire United States citizenship at birth,” the State Department’s rule states.

All of this drives home the point that the expansive view of birthright citizenship is a bastardization of the law — and it needs to end. This Supreme Court has a chance to bring sanity to more than a century of manipulation of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, twisted to appease myriad monied interests.

‘Wherein They Reside’

Last week, the court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a challenge to President Donald Trump’s first-day-in-office executive order denying automatic citizenship to children born to illegal aliens or to “birth tourists” and others that have long gamed the system.

As Hans Mahncke wrote this week in The Federalist, the question before the court is whether the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause extends to “every child born on American soil, no matter who the parents are or why they are in the United States.” And American waters and airways, as the ridiculous expanded interpretation goes.
While it seems inconceivable that the three liberals on the court would stand with Trump on doing away with the birthright citizenship, members of the conservative majority seemed skeptical of the government’s arguments. Perhaps that’s because, for reasons not entirely clear, Solicitor General D. John Sauer failed to press the jurisdictional language of the amendment. But the justices seemed to be missing the key point of a post-Civil War constitutional amendment meant to extend U.S. citizenship to former slaves, not to grant it to millions of children of noncitizens by virtue of being born within the boundaries of America.
The Amendment declares:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” --->READ MORE HERE