Birthright Citizenship

“The debate is always about the theoretical. … Whenever you talk about the practical aspects of it, there’s silence,” says Margaret Stock, an Anchorage, Alaska-based immigration attorney who’s written extensively and testified before Congress on the subject. “Because anybody who understands how citizenship is determined in the absence of the 14th Amendment quickly realizes that we have a huge mess on our hands. And it will cost billions of dollars if we change the amendment’s current interpretation.”  (more…)

Anti-immigrant sentiment and the absurdity of the anchor babies argument aside, get rid of your birth certificate as proof of citizenship and your talking about a huge inflation of bureaucracy to keep track of citizens, somewhere on the scale of a national ID plan meets the Census Bureau with some elements of  the IRS thrown in for fun  (all this being the supposed anathema to your conservative base (except of course with defense)) . Someone needs to help the Republicans and the Teapers eat their young on this bullshit.