During a House Judiciary Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) spoke about prior legal conclusions on birthright citizenship, which is protected under the 14th Amendment.
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NewsTranscript
00:00I recognize the gentleman from Maryland and the ranking member of the committee.
00:03Mr. Chairman, thank you very much and thanks to all the witnesses for being here and special
00:08greetings to my former colleague Professor Frost. I want to start with you because there's been a
00:15major flurry of litigation about the onslaught of unlawful and unconstitutional executive orders
00:21that have come down from the administration and this executive order has appeared in four
00:27different courts and as I understand it all four of them have worked to stop it either through a
00:34temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction and they were appointed by my count
00:40by Presidents Reagan, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, two Republicans, two Democrats
00:45and take a look at what they said. Here's Judge Kuhnauer who was nominated by President Reagan.
00:53Citizenship by birth is an unequivocal constitutional right. It's one of the
00:58precious principles that makes the United States the great nation that it is. The President cannot
01:03change, limit or qualify this constitutional right by executive order. I can't remember a case
01:08that presented a question as clear as this says Judge Kuhnauer and the fact that the government
01:15cloaked what is in fact a constitutional amendment under the guise of an executive order is equally
01:20unconstitutional. The constitution is not something the government can play policy games with.
01:25Here's U.S. District Judge LaPlante from New Hampshire been nominated by President Bush.
01:30The plaintiffs are likely to suffer irreparable harm if the order is not granted. Here's U.S.
01:36District Judge Deborah Boardman nominated by President Biden to the court in my home state in
01:41Maryland. The executive order interprets the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment in a
01:46manner that the Supreme Court has resoundingly rejected and no court in the country has ever
01:52endorsed. And finally check out Judge Sorokin nominated to the district court in Massachusetts
01:58by President Obama who says the 14th Amendment says nothing of the birthright citizens' parents
02:05and efforts to import such considerations at the time of enactment and when the Supreme Court
02:09construed the text was rejected. No federal judge to my knowledge has upheld this executive order
02:18against legal attack. Tell me why you think there's such unanimity across the spectrum among the judges.
02:27Well first of all the language is crystal clear of the 14th Amendment. There are thorny and
02:32complicated and broad and vague provisions of the constitution but the citizenship clause
02:36could not speak more clearly. That's what the court said in Wonka Mark. Its language is universal.
02:41You know I did a little research on this last night and I found that the leaders of the writing
02:47of the first section of the 14th Amendment were Republicans from Ohio, right? John Bingham
02:54was described as the primary author of the citizenship clause by Supreme Court Justice
02:59Hugo Black who said he was the 14th Amendment's James Madison, the second founder who most worked
03:05to realize the universal promise of Madison's Bill of Rights and Jefferson's Declaration of
03:10Independence and another great Ohio Republican, U.S. Senator Benjamin Wade, insisted on making
03:16the citizenship clause perfectly clear to avoid any backsliding in times of high partisan feeling.
03:22He said, I've always believed that every person of whatever race or color who was born in the United
03:28States was a citizen of the United States but by the decisions of the courts there's been a doubt
03:33thrown over the subject and if the government should fall into the hands of those who are
03:36opposed to the views that some of us maintain, those who have been accustomed to take a different
03:41view of it, they may construe the provision in such a way as we do not think liable to construction
03:46at this time unless we fortify and make it very strong and very clear. If we do not do so there
03:54may be danger that when party spirit runs high it may receive a very different construction from
03:59that which we, the founders, put upon it. Now, so I wonder what you think Senator Wade might be
04:06saying about the debate today about whether it's okay just to throw away the first sentence of the
04:1214th Amendment. Yeah, he was remarkably prescient. He foresaw a future in which a future political
04:18party would want to take away citizenship and voting and political power from groups of Americans
04:23it didn't like and didn't view as fully American. All right, I'm sorry to rush you along here but
04:28the original purposes of the 14th Amendment remain perfectly clear for anyone who's an
04:33originalist, right? They wanted to stop the government from reconstituting a racial or
04:38ethnic caste system based on the inheritance of a subordinate or a superior legal status from
04:44one's parents. In post-reconstruction America nobody would ever become a slave or a serf or
04:50a legal outcast or a prince or a princess or a king or a count at birth because everybody here
04:57would attain equal citizenship at birth. Am I capturing it correctly? You are. All right,
05:03I yield back to you Mr. Chairman. I thank the ranking member of the committee and I will now
05:09recognize Mr. Grothman for five minutes. I'd like to ask one of the three gentlemen on the right.