Birthright for me but not for thee

Valerie Sobel

Latest indignation to hit the liberal psyche like a pound of bricks is the suggestion by President Trump that American born children of illegals should not receive citizenship.

Unhinged at the prospect of losing more liberal votes if this “racist” platform becomes law, they cannot process the simple idea that rewarding illegal behavior with the greatest prize in the world is wrong and brazenly corrupt.

Moreover, the impudent left cares none for thousands in queue for legal immigration to the US, those who respect American laws and spent time and money on due process. Law and order doesn’t resonate at the best of times, let alone when votes are at stake. But this is beside the point.

First, what the heck is the 14th Amendment of the constitution, which was written back in 1866 to protect African American slaves? And what was actually meant?  We have to go no further than to the words of the author of that Amendment, Senator Jacob Howard, predictably a Republican in the ranks of Republican President Abe Lincoln who abolished slavery:

“The first amendment to section one, declaring that ‘all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.”

Any questions? Or, ambiguity?

Let’s proceed to the next step: why, then, has the constitution been subverted to grant citizenship to those who break American law?

Only since the 1960’s, and not in accordance to any legal stature or court ruling, the decisions by various federal bureaucratic departments and agencies granted citizenship to children of illegals by virtue of taxation. Succinctly put, the desire for government revenue, together with governmental incompetence in dealing with illegal migration to the country, circumvented the purpose and meaning of the 14th Amendment. The result of executive branch’s lax enforcement of immigration law became birthright citizenship, when in fact, it was nothing more than a bureaucratic invention.

In the words of Constitution expert Mark Levin:

” So to be clear, the president would not be altering the constitution, on the contrary, the president would be taking charge of the executive branch and upholding the 14th Amendment.”

No doubt all of this will be duked out as part of another attempt by the liberal judges to prevent Trump from the law and order redux. Luckily, there is a 130 year trail of case law, stipulating that if you come here without federal legal consent, you and your children fall outside of all protective measures of the American constitution.  But let’s not get hung up on details.

The democrats, in all their bountiful wisdom, have put forth plenty of bright ideas with respect to birthright citizenry. Not the least of which are their crystal clear visions for Israeli citizens living on their ancestral legal land of Samaria and Judea. People, otherwise known to them not as indigenous Jews, but “occupying settlers” of the arbitrarily-named West Bank, in order to erase their birthright status right out of the page. A politically expedient characterization piece that tidily fits in their overall anti-Israel puzzle.

In other words, righteous champions of the birthright argument (today’s American left),  fail to extend the same ardent compassion towards thousands of children born to Jewish families living in the West Bank. The enlightened leaders of the Democratic Party go as far as to even suggest that it is these indigenous-to-land “settlers”, peaceful productive people who have not known any other home, are the very obstacle to peace.

What exactly happens to their stance for “birthright” compassion here? Dare I suggest that all that empathy and TLC are ethnically, racially and politically determined?  According to their logic, an American-born Honduran child of illegals has every right to be a citizen and continue living in the US, but a Jewish child born in the West Bank, in his indisputably ancestral land, is an illegal settler who needs to pack his bags, get out of Dodge, and make room for descendants of Jordanian expulsions.

Ditto for Gaza. Who can erase the imagery of forced removals of peaceful Jewish families and their children from their homes back in 2005? Over 9000 people were forced from the only homes they knew, homes of their parents and grandparents.  And for what? To appease international liberals hell bent on Israel’s human and land concessions in order to achieve peace. Well, we all know how that lucid idea worked out.  Gaza, for centuries ruled by every empire known to man, never once belonging to anything or anyone “Palestinian”, but firmly under the rule of King David in 11BCE, was deemed unacceptable for any Jew born and raised there, by liberals et al. Ergo, in accordance with mainstream liberal agenda, it has been ethnically cleansed of all things Jewish.

Similarly, just under 900,000 Jewish men, women and children were forcibly, and under the threat of death, kicked out from 22 Muslim countries in the Middle East, as recently as the 20th Century. Any cries for rite of return from the liberal left for these birthright-worthy individuals?

Today, there are about 470,000 Jews living in Judea and Samaria.  By virtue of a 4000 year old birthright and legal land deed! And not by misuse of the 14th Amendment. But if it were up to the American Democrat and his vocal edicts w.r.t. everything Israel, like in Gaza, every single one would be forcibly removed from his/her home.

Notably, American democrats can’t even support the most Jewish place on earth, Jerusalem, as capital of the Jewish State, let alone recognize Jewish birthright!

“Birthright” was and always will be a political stance used to ramp up votes for the American Democratic Party. It has about 1/1024th to do with empathy and even less than that with law and order. But everything to do with a tiny detail:  there are approximately 22 million illegals in the US today. It is a statistical factoid that children of those illegals vote predominately democrat.

Valerie Sobel is the Special Contributor of Blitz.