President Donald J. Trump speaks at CPAC 2025. Photo courtesy of the White House via Flickr.
During the entire 2024 presidential election campaign, Democrats used lawfare tactics to personally attack President Trump and his associates. Now, they’re turning their lawfare against the President’s policies. In The Knoxville Focus, former Congressman John J. Duncan Jr. criticizes the current lawfare efforts against Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, writing:
As I write this column, there are three federal judges who are at least temporarily stopping Trump’s executive order to do away with birthright citizenship.
I have been interested in this issue for a long time, and was asked by The Tennessean newspaper to write a column which was published on August 15, 2010 under the title “U.S. Citizenship Is A Privilege.” That column follows here:
I spent 7½ years before coming to Congress as a Criminal Court Judge in Knoxville. Because of this and other experiences, I believe there is a right way to do things and a wrong way.
Thus, I am strongly opposed to illegal immigration and do not believe those who are here illegally should be given the same status and rights as those who are here legally.
This, in part, is why I believe children born to those who are here illegally should be treated as citizens of the countries from which their parents came and not as citizens of the United States.
When I was a judge, I was probably toughest on crimes against children, and I believe children of illegal immigrants should be treated with the greatest of kindness.
But, citizenship in the United States should be regarded as a very great privilege, and it should not be granted lightly to anyone.
I am supporting an effort that is just beginning in Congress to change the birthright citizenship provisions in the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment has been changed before. It refers only to voting by men, and this was changed by the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.
One of the original purposes of the 14th Amendment was to grant citizenship and count as a whole (instead of just 3/5 as in the original Constitution) those persons who had been slaves. This was right and proper and should have been done long before it was.
Those who imply or say that being tough on illegal immigration is somehow racist are resorting to the sort of scurrilous personal attacks and childish sarcasms that people often use when their case is weak.
It is very difficult to change the Constitution, and it should be. And the odds are very much against changing the birthright citizenship provision.
But the 14th Amendment was not written to deal with anything related to illegal immigration. Our leaders in 1868 could never have envisioned the numbers we have coming here illegally today.
Read more here.
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