One of the most tiresome idiocies of the deranged left is the reflexive resort to the Argumentum ad Hitlerum. ‘Oh, you like flags? Well, Hitler liked flags, too!’ ‘Donald Trump drives in a motorcade in an open car? Hitler did that, too!’ It’s the stupidest argument imaginable – and one that the right aren’t entirely immune too: ‘Oh, you’re a vegetarian? Well, Hitler was a vegetarian, too!’
Maybe liberals have been doing this forever and I only recently noticed, but there’s been a rash of supposedly serious news outlets trying to discredit conservative arguments by attributing the argument to the most embarrassing right-winger they can find.
A particularly stupid current example is the left-media trying to discredit the notion that the 14th Amendment is about freed slaves, not illegal aliens.
For those of you unfamiliar, the 14th Amendment is the origin of the United States’ peculiar – and almost singular – policy of conferring citizenship on anybody born within its borders. They’re one of the few countries to confer birthright citizenship. Almost everywhere else, simply being born there isn’t enough: almost everywhere requires that one or both parents be citizens, or at least permanent residents. Simply swanning in eight months’ pregnant and dropping an anchor baby while on holiday, or illegally in the country, won’t cut it.
So, how did America wind up in that situation?
The 14th Amendment was necessitated by the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War. Suddenly the US had a substantial population of people born and raised in the country, often for generations, who had never been recognised as citizens (not least thanks to the Supreme Court and its Dred Scott decision). Some Native Americans weren’t recognised as citizens at the time, either.
To fix this obviously deplorable situation, along came the 14th:
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.
As it happens, the above text, the ‘Citizenship Clause’, was added late in the debate over the 14th Amendment. 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…
Pretty open and shut, you would think. Ah, but you’re not a mainstream media journalist. So, your immediate response isn’t to seek out the most fringe loony you can find who just happens to have the same view, and attribute it to them.
Today’s Weakest Link trick comes from the Times’ Abbie VanSickle, who claims John Eastman is the originator of the idea […] In case you’re not sure what to think of Eastman, VanSickle quickly identifies him as “an obscure California law professor … [who provided] Mr Trump with legal arguments he used to try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election” […]
Upon publication of VanSickle’s article, every journalist on TV became an expert on the issue, regurgitating her preposterous claim that Eastman is the brains behind the idea.
Except that, Eastman’s delusions of grandeur – and the MSM’s tiresome habit of ad hominem-by-proxy – aside, this isn’t true.
– “Mr Eastman said that the president did not directly consult him about the birthright citizenship order but that several of his friends … ‘knew that my scholarship was kind of at the forefront of this.’”
— “Mr Eastman said Mr Trump was ‘likely’ referring to him [when he cited many lawyers who agreed with him on anchor babies].”
None of this matters to the MSM, though. The gambit is as obvious as it is stupid: find someone who’s easy to attack, then solely attribute the argument you want to demolish to them. For the MSM, the attraction of this blatant fallacy is that they get to dismiss an inconvenient argument without ever having to actually address it.
But, even if you’re going to disregard the actual author of the Citizenship Clause, there’s plenty of people who’ve made the same argument long before a self-aggrandising Mr Eastman.
In 1985, Yale professors Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith – no slouches – published a book, “Citizenship Without Consent: Illegal Aliens in the American Policy,” making this inarguable point:
“The parents of [illegals] are, by definition, individuals whose presence within the jurisdiction of the United States is prohibited by law and to whom the society has explicitly and self-consciously decided to deny membership. And if the society has refused to consent to their membership, it can hardly be said to have consented to that of their children who happen to be born while their parents are here in violation of American law.”
Schuck and Smith simply take it for granted that anchor babies are not mandated by the 14th Amendment. They write that the debates “establish that the framers of the Citizenship Clause had no intention of establishing a universal rule of birthright citizenship.”
Not to be outdone, a decade later, the Stanford Law & Policy Review published a piece by Dan Stein and John Bauer, also arguing that there’s nothing to justify anchor babies in the Constitution.
Then, in 2003, the late Richard Posner, 7th Circuit Appellate judge, wrote a concurring opinion in Oforji v. Ashcroft for the express purpose of demanding that Congress stop “awarding citizenship to everyone born in the United States.” He said he doubted that this was the meaning of the 14th Amendment and pleaded with Congress to pass a law and “put an end to the nonsense.”
Just for the record, Posner is the most-cited federal judge, and one of just 100 judges listed in Great American Judges: An Encyclopedia. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia called him a ‘genius’, as did many of his legal peers.
But, hey, some disbarred nobody in California who’s clearly desperate for attention said it too, so it must be a bad idea.
Why think, when you’ve got the MSM to tell you what to?
