As the saying goes, it’s a bold strategy: let’s see how it works out for them. The American Civil Liberties Union has launched a legal challenge to assert the civil rights of unborn children. This, from an organisation that has for decades steadfastly rejected any idea that unborn children have legal rights.
For instance, in 2017, the ACLU strenuously opposed a “‘fetal personhood’ bill that would have established a fetus as a separate and distinct person from the woman who carries it”.
Yet, now they’re arguing the direct opposite.
Friday’s lawsuit accuses the administration of violating the Constitution by denying citizenship to children born on US soil if their mothers are either unlawfully present or temporarily in the country and their fathers are not US citizens or lawful permanent residents.
The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of New Hampshire, ACLU of Maine, ACLU of Massachusetts, Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus and Democracy Defenders Fund. It seeks to represent a proposed class of children born under the terms of the executive order and their parents.
In other words, the unborn child has separate rights to the woman who carries it.
Doublethink: to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them… to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again – George Orwell, ‘1984’.
At issue is the American policy of ‘birthright citizenship’: the idea that simply being born in a place, regardless of whether the mother was there legally or not, automatically confers citizenship. So, any eight-months pregnant woman can simply waltz into the US, drop an anchor baby and never leave.
The ACLU lawsuit calls birthright citizenship “America’s most fundamental promise” and claims the executive order threatens to create “a permanent, multigenerational subclass” of children denied legal recognition.
No, they’re legally recognised as citizens of the nation their mother is a citizen of.
“The Supreme Court’s decision did not remotely suggest otherwise, and we are fighting to make sure President Trump cannot trample on the citizenship rights of a single child,” said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead attorney in the case.
Hmm, does that include the citizenship right to not ‘be deprived of life’ without due process of law, as guaranteed by the US constitution?
It was presumably with a straight face that they said this:
“This executive order directly opposes our Constitution, values, and history,” added Devon Chaffee, executive director of the ACLU of New Hampshire.
About that ‘history’: the ‘citizenship clause’, was added late in the debate over the 14th Amendment, which was necessary to granting citizenship rights to newly freed slaves. The draft sentence which became adopted as the above clause was introduced on May 30, 1866 by Michigan Senator Jacob Howard, a leading Republican in the Reconstruction Congress. Howard also played a leading role in drafting the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery.
Howard was absolutely clear that his proposal did not automatically confer birthright citizenship on foreigners:
This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens – Jacob Howard.
If only Jacob Howard were alive today to dick punch the Democrats to the middle of next week for flooding the union with people who had no right to be there.
