low-hanging fruit #2

[quarrel]

Part 2 of an intermittent series where I try to prove that something obviously wrong really is.

The claim:

Virtually all people living in the U.S. today are not Citizens as the Founding Fathers understood. Initially, you were a Citizen of whatever state you lived in, and thus, by transitivity, a Citizen of this country. But in 1868, the 14th Amendment created a brand-new concept called a “citizen of the United States”. This amendment, which was ostensibly designed to broaden the definition of citizenship so freed slaves could attain it, actually created a new, distinct, and wholly artificial legal status that has no inherent rights—only transitory government-granted privileges—and is not protected by the Constitution or Bill of Rights like true Citizens are.

Proponents of this view cite the consistent capitalization of “Citizen” in amendments prior to the 14th and the consistent lower-case thereafter. They cite isolated snippets of case law and sound bites of judges’ rulings, culled from massive legal archives, that they allege support the notion of multiple coexisting versions of citizenship with different foundations. They point to commercial statutes, tax codes, and so on that contain exception clauses for people like “non-citizen nationals”, and they say those exceptions were not simply made to cover those actual categories of people but are, in reality, the vestigial remnants of the provisions that originally applied to old-style Citizens.

One would think such an outlandish idea would be easy to disprove, but I haven’t found it to be so. Any single court case can be dozens of pages long, and they’re all written in thick legalese; chasing down the flaws means going through a handful of these things, if not more. The IRS has a bit to say about the matter, but it’s likewise a wall of walls of legal text if you want anything more thorough than “because the government said so”.

I’m calling this one a loss.