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Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

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Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#651

Post by lazide »

ceejayoz wrote: post #645
lazide wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because words have meaning, and ‘handgun’ can mean anything from a muzzle loading musket to a literal MAC-10 that can fire 1800 rounds per minute. And if you can’t understand or articulate what is going on, then good luck doing anything about it? I provided a concise term that actually has a concrete meaning. That is the thread we are in. Care to join? Or do you want to scream incoherently into the void more?

> Because words have meaning, and ‘handgun’ can mean anything from a muzzle loading musket to a literal MAC-10 that can fire 1800 rounds per minute. Yes, that's what this thread's about. You argued Gatling guns being legal makes gun control overall silly; someone else noted that the theoetical regulatory gap exists because in practice no one uses Gatling guns in crimes . > And if you can’t understand or articulate wh…

And for any given thing that meets the criteria for ‘handgun’, what percentage do you think has ever been used in any significant number of crimes or accidents? I’m guessing way less than 1%.

Either by make/model, or by individual items. Statistically, by item, it’s likely .001% territory.

So again, care to make your screaming more coherent? Right now you seem to be doing the equivalent of screaming about ‘cars kill people’. When, okay, there are a lot of car accidents. Plenty of people murdering each other with cars too!

But how does that add anything to the conversation?

and I gave an example of a historically high power piece of military equipment that would still strike fear in anyone on the other side of it - that is also completely legal to own in even a high ‘ban’ state like California - and apparently also not ‘causing a lot of crime’. there are new manufacture ones out there. they are pretty cool! [https://tippmannordnance.com/gatling-guns/].

so what is the actual deal, eh?

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#652

Post by expedition32 »

lazide wrote: post #452
semiquaver wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no practical way to ever update the Bill of Rights in the 21st century What on earth do you mean? The practical way is the same as it always was: subsequent amendment. The fact that it requires consensus is a feature. This reads the same way as people who say things like “we just have to accept that Congress is broken and can’t pass new legislation.” Like hell we do!

They mean ‘have you seen congress? Good luck’, not that the mechanism is mechanically harder to use.

People in my country hate eachother yet nobody pretends it's still 1848- the year the Dutch constitution was written.

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#653

Post by matthewdgreen »

MisterMower wrote: post #648
matthewdgreen wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trying to impute complexity to a thing in order to achieve a goal that is not achievable. The 1866 Congress that debated the amendment understood and intended that Indian tribal nations would not be covered by the clause because they were separate nations not under the jurisdiction of US law . Here's an example of the debate [1] where they discuss it. Far from making your point, examples like this make it obvi…

Can you link to the portion of the debate where everyone agreed on what “under the jurisdiction of” means? The issue was contentious then as it is now. They wouldn’t have spilled so much ink on the topic if it wasn’t. Your link is proving my point.

Sure, I already did explain it. They explicitly said that "not under the jurisdiction" would cover children belonging to Indian tribes, the children of ambassadors, and they discussed the need to be able to expel occupying armies. Someone said "what about the kids of Chinese people" and the sponsors said "yep, if we adopt this language they'll get to be citizens too".

None of it's complicated. You could read this as an 8th grader and have no doubt what they were trying to do.

Most of the discussion was of the form "hey, could we add an exception to exclude even more people from citizenship" and then the sponsors would say something like, "yes, we agree that those people aren't excluded under the current language; that adding extra language could exclude those people; and that we don't want to exclude those people or change the language." And then Congress voted for the language exactly as it was originally proposed.

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#654

Post by anamax »

camgunz wrote: post #547
AngryData wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully automatic guns maybe not, but the founding fathers definitely knew about repeating firearms, they had more than a few offers to purchase them, both for military uses and as private citizens. They just denied to because it was expensive to purchase and maintain.

No. While originalists and textualists purport to refuse to extend any principle into the modern day ("no right to privacy in 3A, 4A, etc"), one they do is that 2A doesn't merely apply to arms of the day, but also to modern arms. It's... pretty blatant.

Electric presses seem to be covered by the 1st amendment, and there's a much bigger "output" difference between electric presses and manual presses than there is between machine guns and flintlocks. (Not to mention that flintlocks weren't the most sophisticated personal firearms in the 1770s, just the most common.)

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#655

Post by malnourish »

like_any_other wrote: post #570
malnourish wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States has always dealt with this - the North Virginian voters circa 1960 were not, by and large, indigenous.

> The United States has always dealt with this Did you mean to write "America" instead of "the United States"? Because when the continent had only American Indians, there was no United States. And in fact for a long while after it was founded, they were excluded from citizenship. Regardless, I'm sure we both agree that European conquest and colonization represented a giant change. It's false to imply that another suc…

If I wanted to be that pedantic, I could have looked up one of the many words for the land the displaced indigenous peoples used.

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#656

Post by triceratops »

rayiner wrote: post #505
coldtea wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And some other country might be liking those Founding Fathers concepts' even more. So? Doesn't change the fact that they weren't very good with not letting class/race/gender/etc position influence their policy making. And that's the claim we're discussing whether they've been good at, not whether they came up with some good new concepts like "due process" and "the right to free speech". They had "due process" but the…

[flagged]

> Such mass fratricide for the sake of non-kin was completely unprecedented in history. Africans never did that. Middle Easterners never did that. Asians never did that.

That also means that only in America brother fought against brother to preserve slavery. Not something to brag about.

Most of these other countries were able to abolish slavery* without having half their population preferring fratricide over freeing their slaves.

Even in the New World other states just abolished slavery with far less bloodshed. Example A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolitionism_in_Brazil

> One where (mostly British) Americans killed hundreds of thousands of their own cousins to free enslaved people belonging an entirely different ethnic group

A quote from The Great Emancipator's inaugural address: "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." [1]

Abolition wasn't the war aim at the outset. Preserving the Union was Lincoln's goal. He did everything he could to prevent the slave states from seceding.

Abolition became a goal halfway through the war.

"The abolition of slavery became a Union war goal on January 1, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves in rebel states to be free". [2]

Which makes sense. If half your countrymen are driven to take up arms against the other half just to keep some people in bondage, you may as well end that evil institution. Otherwise they're bound to try again.

*With varying degrees of success in the actual implementation.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln#Secession_and_...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#657

Post by lazide »

expedition32 wrote: post #652
lazide wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mean ‘have you seen congress? Good luck’, not that the mechanism is mechanically harder to use.

People in my country hate eachother yet nobody pretends it's still 1848- the year the Dutch constitution was written.

Count yourself lucky.

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#658

Post by Breza »

jjallen wrote: post #7

You can be pro/fine with legal immigration (and moderate/non-partisan) and still not think birthright citizenship is a good idea (like I do). Also ~95% of countries don't have unconditional birthright citizenship. It creates perverse incentives. Reminds me of legal abortion: practically everywhere in the world has it. If you are not in that vast majority you should be taking a very close look at yourself/things. So y…

The United States is different from 95% of countries. We're the place you are supposed to flee to when those other countries oppress you. That's just not the history of a place like Italy or Japan.

My great great grandparents left Quebec in search of a place where they could earn enough money to make it. They immigrated to America. They lived in communities of other Quebec emigrants and spoke French their whole lives. They never pursued American citizenship. Without birthright citizenship, would my great grandma have been American? OK then what about my grandpa? What about me? I'm not sure if any of my immigrant ancestors formally pursued American citizenship.

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#659

Post by Breza »

ithkuil wrote: post #275
thehoff wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question. Isn't this statement aimed at citizenship tourism or whatever its called? I used to live in a state where some new friends had told us about places that facilitated pregnant women's trips to the US solely for the purpose of staying and giving birth in the US so the child could become citizens. They then head home. I have no idea how prevalent this is.

If people really want to stop this kind of birth citizenship tourism they must vote for people who will pledge to amend the constitution using the proper democratic process. But today's climate is so hostile to any kind of rational discussion about how to change laws. One faction just wants to deny citizenship right now to any people they seem not "american enough" while the other faction cannot possibly entertain an…

What change would you suggest? A minimum period of time in the country before birthright citizenship applies? What about people who enter the United States illegally and then have a child twenty years later? What about my ancestors, who entered the country legally but never pursued American citizenship?

The 14th amendment was written the way it was to create a bright line that was easy to implement. I'm sure they considered other ways of framing the issue. I think it's brilliant just the way it is.

Re: Supreme Court upholds broad conception of birthright citizenship

#660

Post by Breza »

JeremyNT wrote: post #307
fmobus wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it doesn't matter. If the SCOTUS decides that some people, in certain circumstances, are not in jurisdiction of US law, then they have to apply that notion everywhere. They can't pick and choose "oh no they are in jurisdiction of law A but not in law B". Jurisdiction is a fundamental concept, there's no middle ground. As for whether people are really doing birth tourism: sure, there might be some cases, but wel…

> They can't pick and choose "oh no they are in jurisdiction of law A but not in law B". Jurisdiction is a fundamental concept, there's no middle ground. I mean, they shouldn't do this but clearly they can rule however they want with any pretext they want, because they answer to nobody but themselves. Who's going to tell them they can't do something? Who is left to appeal to? It's a deeply corrupt and undemocratic in…

I'll point out how many cases are decided unanimously. It's quite rare for a case to be decided 6-3 on ideological lines.
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