The 14th Amendment: A History Lesson
(Aug. 11) -- With illegal immigration an increasingly potent issue, some Republican senators are proposing changes to the 14th Amendment, starting with the first sentence -- the one that guarantees citizenship to anyone and everyone born on U.S. soil, including the children of parents here unlawfully. Nearly 150 years ago, however, it was the GOP that had to fight to get the amendment in place.
When the amendment was ratified in 1868, its citizenship clause was a necessity that dealt with assigning legal status to the millions of slaves who had just been freed during the Civil War. (It also happened at a time when the House, the Senate and the presidency were all in Republican hands.) But the current proponents of revising the 14th Amendment, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., argue that that's all the citizenship clause was ever meant to do, and that extending birthright citizenship to today's illegal immigrants is a perversion of the document's original intent.
A closer look at the amendment itself, however, suggests that the authors may have had more on their minds than the exigencies of the era. Before the 14th Amendment passed, the federal government had no single, clear definition of who a citizen was, or what it meant to be one. And while the first line did cover freed slaves, David Blight, an American history professor at Yale University and one of the country's most prominent Civil War scholars, feels the way the amendment was written suggests a purpose even grander than emancipation....
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When the amendment was ratified in 1868, its citizenship clause was a necessity that dealt with assigning legal status to the millions of slaves who had just been freed during the Civil War. (It also happened at a time when the House, the Senate and the presidency were all in Republican hands.) But the current proponents of revising the 14th Amendment, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., argue that that's all the citizenship clause was ever meant to do, and that extending birthright citizenship to today's illegal immigrants is a perversion of the document's original intent.
A closer look at the amendment itself, however, suggests that the authors may have had more on their minds than the exigencies of the era. Before the 14th Amendment passed, the federal government had no single, clear definition of who a citizen was, or what it meant to be one. And while the first line did cover freed slaves, David Blight, an American history professor at Yale University and one of the country's most prominent Civil War scholars, feels the way the amendment was written suggests a purpose even grander than emancipation....