Leading Republicans call for partial repeal of 14th Amendment [View All]

[Hannah Bell]

A constituency within the political establishment has been consolidating in recent months for a repeal of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which provides that every person born in the US is guaranteed citizenship. This reactionary proposal, ostensibly to combat “illegal” immigration, has broad and far-reaching consequences for democratic rights in the US...

Over the past week, leading Republican senators have publicly given consideration to introducing a constitutional amendment that would repeal the citizenship clause...Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, indicated that he supported holding hearings on whether the 14th Amendment citizenship right should be abolished. The campaign to abolish the citizenship clause has been accompanied by an accelerating xenophobic campaign against immigrants and their children...

In every country, hatred of immigrants has long been promoted to divide the working class along national and ethnic lines and to provide a base for right-wing policies. In the US, it is the cornerstone of a growing quasi-fascistic element in the political establishment that has the increasing support of major sections of the media.

The assault on the 14th Amendment, however, is not only an attack on undocumented workers and their children, it is an attack on the right of citizenship itself, with broad implications for the democratic rights of the entire population...The 14th Amendment, drafted in 1866, contains many of the most significant of the US constitutional protections...The right to citizenship is a right on which many other rights depend...If citizenship can be revoked and a non-citizen can be denied constitutional protections, then the entire system of democratic rights can be bypassed and a class of persons with no rights can be created. This is what is behind Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman’s proposal in May of this year for a “citizenship-stripping” law. This proposed law would empower the State Department to revoke a person’s citizenship if the person were found to have engaged in “terrorist activities” or other acts of “disloyalty.” A number of prominent Democrats have signaled support for such a law, including Charles Schumer of New York...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/amen-a09.shtml