The Birthers and the 14th Amendment
| 17 August 2009
The Zeskind Fortnight No. 19
by Leonard Zeskind and Devin Burghart
[Devin Burghart, my colleague at the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, joined in researching, writing and thinking through this Fortnight. Thank you Devin.]
Taking umbrage at the attention that the Doonesbury comic strip has drawn to a "Birther Bill" sitting in a House committee, Texas congressman Louie Gohmert (Republican) recently told Washington Post blogger Mary Ann Akers that the bill, H.R. 1503, has nothing to do with needling President Obama. If it ever was voted up and signed, Gohmert says, the bill would not take effect until the next presidential election in 2012. It would mandate that the campaign committees of the various contenders for president submit birth certificates and "other documentation as may be necessary to establish that the candidate meets the qualifications for eligibility..."
Gohmert served as the Chief Justice of the Texas 12th District Court of Appeals before his election to Congress in 2004. He voted for the Central America Free Trade Agreement, supported drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness, and he opposed same sex marriage. Gohmert also and joined the House Immigration Reform Caucus- - the hard core nativist group of 93 representatives opposing any legislative measure that smells even faintly of amnesty for undocumented immigrants. From that platform, he also co-sponsored H.R. 1868, the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009, which would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to preclude automatic citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants that are born on American soil. This bill, which currently has 41 co-sponsors, is unlikely to get out of committee, and if enacted in the future it would run smack dab into the birthright citizenship provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment.