Lieberman's Folly

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Amendment XIV, Constitution of the United States

This amendment, enacted after the civil war, sets the standards for citizenship in the United States. It has been used, over the years, to also extend many of the protections found in the Bill of Rights to state criminal proceedings, such important protections as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, protection from illegal search and seizure, etc. Many people today, however, only focus on the last part of this clause, forgetting about the first part, which defines citizenship in our great country.

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof..." means exactly what it says. If a person is born on US soil, regardless of their parentage, they are a US Citizen. Recently, Sen. Joe Lieberman, (Republican in all but name- Connecticut) introduced a bill which would amend 8 USC 1481 and add providing material support for any organization which is on the Secretary of State's terrorism list as grounds to revoke citizenship.

In Osborn v. Bank of the United States, 9 Wheaton 738 (1824) Chief Justice Marshall, held in dicta that "[The naturalized citizen] becomes a member of the society, possessing all the rights of a native citizen, and standing, in the view of the constitution, on the footing of a native. The constitution does not authorize Congress to enlarge or abridge those rights. The simple power of the national Legislature, is to prescribe a uniform rule of naturalization, and the exercise of this power exhausts it, so far as respects the individual." at 827. The history of citizenship in the US was then discussed in great detail in Afroyim v. Rusk 387 US 253 (1967)

Rather than force the reader to read this case, let's summarize. From the founding of the Republic it was widely accepted that Congress had the right to determine the qualifications for citizenship. As early as 1794, many members of Congress held the English common-law doctrine that provided for perpetual allegiance and many doubted that a person could in fact renounce citizenship. A bill that would have allowed a US Citizen to state before a magistrate that he was renouncing citizenship and then departing the country was defeated in Congress in 1794 and in 1818. There the matter stayed until the 14th Amendment which was ratified in 1868. There it was established that all persons born in the United States were citizens. Congress, in the Nationality Act of 1940, established naturalization procedures and requirements for naturalization. It set a number of ways in which a person could lose one's citizenship as well, including voting in a foreign election, etc. Most if not all of those ways, except for express renunciation of citizenship, have been found to be unconstitutional. The essential rule of the Court announced in Afroyim was that a person cannot be deprived of citizenship without his/her express act renouncing such status.

Senator Lieberman is an attorney, having a law degree from Yale. As a graduate of one of the top law schools in the US, Sen. Lieberman should know better, and/or should have staff who know how to research the status of the law. The cases at point in this, Afroyim and the debate in Congress years before would have given Sen. Lieberman and his cronies a good civics lesson and show how valuable US Citizenship truly is. The supporters of this law, in a knee-jerk reaction, seem to think that by revoking someone's citizenship, they can prevent terrorist actions. That is closing the barn door after the horse has already fled. It is true that in this case, the "wanna bomber" had been naturalized for a little under a year. However, he just as easily could have been here as a lawful permanent resident, (green card) or have even been here illegally. It would not have stopped the attack. The threat of losing citizenship would have no effect whatsoever, and would not give the US any further protection against terrorism.

This bill, riddled with constitutional infirmities, a knee jerk reaction of "patriots" who obviously forgot their high school civics lessons, should be quietly filed away and forgotten, never to see the light of day.