Trump / Musk (other than DOGE)

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rodoheel said:
Just to be clear, I personally think that it is worse than a "weak argument," it is completely laughable. There is no real argument that illegal immigrants aren't subject to US jurisdiction - otherwise we couldn't prosecute them for crimes! I've read the legal theories as to why "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" implicitly requires that the US government have consented to someone's presence here and I'm not convinced. It also would be a practical nightmare to administer and would result in a constant flood of legal proceedings about citizenship.

Of course, none of this means the current activist court won't adopt this insane argument. The hope is that Roberts and ACB, at least, aren't willing to go that far.
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At this point, I'd put more hope in Kav on this issue than Roberts.

The entire point of the 14th Am was to grant citizenship to people whose presence was not consented -- e.g. slaves. So you're right. It's not a serious legal theory. But the court embraced all sorts of non-serious theories last term, including of course the immunity one.
 
Enigma94 said:
Would it be retroactive? Could every citizen who is the child of an immigrant have their citizenship revoked? I mean we are all ultimately children of immigrants (except NA), but I'm wondering if this policy would be going forward only or would existing birthright citizens of immigrant parents be at risk as well?
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Well, that's the big question. It's not knowable. I can't answer this question in terms of law, because the premise (i.e. that birthright citizenship is not granted by the 14th) assumes that we've departed from law. One would hope that even if the Court were to adopt this crackpot theory, the reactionaries would appreciate how wrong it would be to apply that principle retroactively. They might be able to find some sort of weird hook on which to base the citizenship ruling, but applying it retroactively challenges fundamental tenets of the rule of law, which they might or might not care about.

It should be said that Supreme Court precedent has said that citizenship-stripping is an unconstitutional form of punishment, because it is fundamentally untenable and wrong to render someone without a country, without a home. That's an old precedent, and it hasn't been tested recently.

This would be different: it wouldn't be citizenship-stripping so much as a declaration that the citizenship was never valid. Still, a person born in the U.S. to immigrant parents who became naturalized US citizens would not necessarily be a citizen of the "home country" and if denied citizenship in the US, the person would not have any citizenship at all.
 
superrific said:
Dude, "rooting out inefficiency in government" has been a GOP thing for decades. Every GOP administration sets up some sort of task force to cut the fat. Sometimes Congress too. Do you remember Simpson Bowles?

And the reason you don't hear about it is that there just isn't much waste at all (outside of the DoD, which I can't comment on). When the GOP talks about waste, they are only talking about things they don't like (as always) and it's usually ignorant. These things have a purpose. If you don't like the purpose, fine, but it's not just waste or inefficiency.

You'll see. This DOGE thing will come up with basically nothing and probably you will never hear of it again after the inauguration. If you do, it will be some symbolic bullshit or talking about cutting valuable programs that Musk etc. just don't like (which is not the same thing at all).
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You forgot the 3rd option besides cutting waste and outright cutting programs - doing things more efficiently. For example, SpaceX, rather than letting the booster engines fall to earth, rendering them unusable for future launches, figured out a way to catch them and reuse them. That's something that the federal government, because it doesn't have any true concern about a budget, would never think to do.

 
ZenMode said:
You forgot the 3rd option besides cutting waste and outright cutting programs - doing things more efficiently. For example, SpaceX, rather than letting the booster engines fall to earth, rendering them unusable for future launches, figured out a way to catch them and reuse them. That's something that the federal government, because it doesn't have any true concern about a budget, would never think to do.
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Yeah, NASA never ever thought about re-useability. That's why we never invented a spaceship that could land on a runway like an airplane and then be reused. What's that, we've had something like that for a long time?

Did you know that NASA experimented extensively with reusable rockets in the 1960s and 1970s. It couldn't be done with that tech at the time.

And you've gotten the causality 100% incorrect. The reason that NASA couldn't have developed that technology was that Congress DID give it a budget, and within that budget, there was not enough $$ to invest in speculative technology. It's an open question whether private companies are necessarily more innovative than governments, but that's not your point. Your point is that the government doesn't think about a budget when in fact the existence of this phenomenon is specifically the result of budgetary constraints.

And the reason that NASA doesn't have a big budget is that we've already done this "government efficiency" dance over and over again.
 
superrific said:
Says who? There are only nine justices whose opinions matter, and those justices loathe the 14th Amendment, except when they use it to strike down diversity initiatives. If they want to end birthright citizenship, the fact that the text and original intent of the 14th clearly establish it will not matter to them at all.
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ChapelHillSooner said:
To add to what super said, I believe their argument revolves around the "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" phrase. That phrase is why children born in the US of diplomats aren't granted citizenship because they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the US. The same if a foreign army invaded the US and some soldiers had children while here. Since they are foreign invaders they wouldn't be subject to the jurisdiction of the US.

Conservatives are trying to make the argument that an undocumented immigrant - via their status - and children are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Most people think it's a weak argument but it doesn't matter what most people think.
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Thanks. I realize that SCOTUS is going to do whatever it wants irrespective of constitutionality and legal precedent. That became abundantly clear with the Presidential immunity ruling. I was posing the question to verify that the Trump admin had no valid legal argument and instead would again be relying on the conservative hyperpartisans on SCOTUS to do their bidding.
 
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superrific said:
I think this is identical to what I wrote above. You've reproduced the arithmetic argument precisely, and the fallacy can be named "but for" or "excess causation."

Legal theory addresses these problems because they come up in court. There's a famous case where an ambulance was driving an injured person to the hospital when it was hit by another vehicle and rendered undriveable. It wasn't like a hit-and-run or a reckless driving or anything like that -- it was just an ordinary accident. But the patient died because they didn't get to the hospital in time, and the patient's family then sued the driver for wrongful death. If the driver hadn't hit the ambulance, the patient would have survived. And the court said (and this is either a view of all states or a large majority of them) that the accident was not the cause of the patient's death. It was a "but for" cause, but not the "proximate cause" (which was whatever caused the injury in the first place).

There was also a subplot in the third season (I think, maybe second season) of The Good Place that indirectly addressed the issue. It was the discovery that nobody had been able to get into the Good Place for centuries because so many of our actions cause harm that we can't see, and thus we aren't "good." Like if you eat chocolate, you are subsidizing slave labor in Africa so you're bad.
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Gazelles in a pack understand it. More gazelles = less likely to be eaten by the lion.
 
I keep wanting to reply to different threads but I'm just having a hard time finding the words at the moment. All of this (re-election, cabinet picks, etc) is pretty crushing. And honestly I'm very concerned about big ticket items (the geopolitical situation and nuclear proliferation, human rights, climate change) and how this next administration is shaping up to be completely unprepared to handle any of these topics. I vacillate between putting my head in the sand and despairing. But in response to this thread, I just know that mass deportation or detention will be terrible for so many people, including LE and military members who will be handling this situation. I have talked with several former military (usually NG) who were deployed down to the border at various times. I've also had conversations with veterans who were involved in the withdrawal from Afghanistan and it was awful. People get desperate when they feel like their freedom and options are ending (think people hanging onto the wheels of a plane when it is taking off, people getting crushed in crowds, etc). Also when you have detention camps, you have to decide how much you are going to police the detainees... I've heard of veterans witnessing murder, child molestation, etc in these situations. I hear a lot of trauma in my job, and I know there is so much suffering to come on all sides of this equation. :(
 
wmheel1287 said:
It's really too bad that he loathes them in return.
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Suckers, losers, things of that nature?

I don’t have a longer frame of reference than this because I’m not old enough, but wonder if the reason that the GOP such substantial support from military members right now is because of how it seemed (not saying it was actually true) in the early to mid 2000s that the Republicans were the “support the troops” party and the Democrats were the “Bush lied, thousands died” party?
 
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