Republicans Attack Birthright Citizenship-RM Raskin Fires Back

The cupboard is now officially empty and the game is up. Having picked an illegal forever war with Iran and driven our national debt over 40 trillion dollars, one quarter of which comes from this president alone, the republicans are now officially barren of any new proposals or ideas to bring down the price of gasoline or diesel or groceries or housing or health care or to control the spiraling corruption and lawlessness of the administration. As a result, our friends on the Judiciary Committee are like hamsters on a wheel spinning in place with utterly spent and discredited ideas. The summer is over but every day we are treated now to 24-7 summer reruns. Yesterday we held a sixth hearing on the GOP's defund the police sanctuary jurisdiction bill, a bill that already passed out of committee six months ago but is so toxic, futile and counterproductive that even Speaker Johnson can't be convinced to bring it to the floor. But through the awesome power, I suppose, of magical thinking, our colleagues simply held another hearing as if they had not already passed the bill that the hearing was about. Today our colleagues wish away the Supreme Court's recent five to four decision in Trump versus Barbara and so here in Never Neverland we are once again debating the 14th Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship which even the Roberts Court could not disappear with its magic maggot wand. In our Sisyphean effort to drag our friends back towards reality, let me recite the first sentence of the 14th Amendment. You know some parts of the Constitution may be difficult and ambiguous like due process or establishment of religion, but this sentence is perfectly clear. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and in the state wherein they reside. The sentence overturned the Dred Scott decision and reflects our commitment to a republic in which the rights of privileges of citizenship are shared by everyone born or naturalized here, not just the people who fall within an officially sanctified racial or ethnic group. In 1898, 30 years after passage, the Supreme Court closed the door on the argument being advanced yet again by our colleagues in this outburst of constitutional amnesia and political nativism. In 1898, the court held in one key mark that the citizenship clause guaranteed the rights of all people born in the United States including, yes, even the children of the reviled non-citizen Chinese immigrants. Despite the question of birthright citizenship being settled law for more than a century now, this lawless president tried to nullify that right by way of an imperious and totally unconstitutional executive order. In the aftermath, judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have repeatedly ruled that the order was unconstitutional and void. One of those judges, District Judge John Kuenauer of the Western District of Washington State, a Ronald Reagan appointed judge, did not mince words. He said citizenship by birth is an unequivocal constitutional right. It is one of the precious principles that makes the United States the great nation that it is. The president cannot change, limit, or qualify this constitutional right by executive order. I can't remember a case that presented a question as clear as this. Despite the court's 6-3 ruling on Trump's first unlawful executive order, the incorrigible nativist in the White House simply cannot take no for an answer. On August 6th, he issued two new executive orders in another attempt to refuse citizenship to people deemed unworthy. One order restricts birthright citizenship for specific categories of people including children born to adults with connections to foreign organizations or embassies as well as anyone considered an alien enemy. It also restricts birthright citizenship to anyone whose parents are engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship. Stripping people of citizenship is a hallmark of authoritarianism. The Reich Citizenship Law, one of the Nazi's Nuremberg laws, stripped German Jews of their citizenship and robbed them of full political and civil rights in 1935. Following Hitler's moves, Mussolini revoked the citizenship of tens of thousands of Italian Jews and ordered them to leave the country within six months. Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet famously claimed to have revoked the citizenship of Ambassador Orlando Letelier before ordering his assassination in Washington, D.C. Letelier responded, I was born a Chilean, I am a Chilean, and I will die a Chilean. They were born traitors, they live as traitors, and they will be known forever as fascist traitors. To this day, authoritarian countries purport to deprive people of citizenship to punish them for their speech or dissent. Stripping rightful Americans of birthright citizenship is not this administration's first descent into authoritarianism. Alas, the president and his extremists have built a masked paramilitary force in ICE and unleashed it along with CBP agents to harass, attack, arrest, and even kill American citizens simply for exercising their First Amendment rights to record and protest government actions. Without any legal justification, Trump's ICE soldiers shot down and killed in cold blood. Two American citizens, Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and poet and Alex Preddy, a VA ICU nurse, who are peacefully observing and protesting the actions of immigration officers. Many others have died or been wounded in the administration's reign of terror against American communities. A young man protesting in California is now permanently blind in one eye thanks to federal officers hurling a projectile at him. An emergency room nurse in Oregon, peacefully protesting government violence, was hit in the face with a tear gas canister. Homeland security agents have repeatedly entered people's homes forcibly without judicial warrants and without consent to conduct arrests. In one episode, masked agents forced open a door and entered the home of a terrified U.S. citizen, Scott Tao, in St. Paul. Agents refused to produce a warrant or look at the identification he scrambled to show them to prove that he was a citizen. They manhandled him, held him in his home at gunpoint, then hauled him from the house into sub-freezing cold weather, wrapped in a blanket, wearing nothing but sandals and underwear. After realizing that they had entered the wrong home and that Mr. Tao was a U.S. citizen with no criminal record, agents brought him back, checked his ID, and left without apologizing for their humiliating and unconstitutional conduct. Mr. Chairman, immigrants and their American-born children are not poisoning the blood of our nation. They are a vital part of our nation's political bloodstream. All of us in America today are the descendants of immigrants, lawful or unlawful or somewhere in between, except for Native Americans whose roots long predate the Republican, the descendants of Americans who were brought here involuntarily as part of the slave trade. We should not punish American children by stripping them of their citizenship, what Chief Justice Roberts called in his opinion in Barbara, the right to have rights simply because of who their parents are. That is a desecration of our constitutional heritage. Remember always, said FDR, speaking to the daughters of the American Revolution, that all of us are descended from immigrants and revolutionists. In 1798, at a time of anti-immigrant hysteria surrounding the Alien Sedition Acts, Jefferson wrote a letter to his despondent friend, John Taylor, in which he counseled patience to survive a moment not unlike the one we see today. A little patience and the reign of witches shall pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight restore their government to its true principles. Thankfully, rereading the 14th Amendment itself, we constitutional textualists will continue to exercise a little patience until we can dissolve this spell and extinguish this nightmarish fantasy offered by the President, just as the Supreme Court emphasized only nine weeks ago. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I yield back.