It's not really a question of what's a good idea. It is in the text of the Constitution, about as plain as it can possibly be. If you want to change it, you have to change the Constitition.

Ironically, the same Court members who most often claim the plain text of the Constitution to support their ideas are the ones who put the most effort into finding a tortured reading of the 14th Amendment.

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xhkkffbf 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I thought so too. Then I read the arguments about the passage of the amendment. The people passing clearly stated that, say, the children of ambassadors wouldn't be eligible. It was mainly aimed at clearing up the questions about the various Native Americans who may have considered themselves independent. It wasn't about opening the doors to anyone.

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wang_li 2 days ago | parent [-]

It was about slaves. Native Americans didn't get birthright citizenship until the Native American Citizenship Act of 1924.

	▲	jkachmar 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		it was not (solely) about slaves; this was debated in Congress during the process of drafting the amendment and resoundingly put down by contemporary legislators. from Justice Jackson’s concurring opinion: > Senator Edgar Cowan, for example, argued that German immigrants’ children born in Pennsylvania should be citizens, but Chinese immigrants’ children should not—because Germans and Chinese were different. In response, Senator Trumbull emphasized that the law he had drafted drew no such distinctions. Undeterred, Senator Cowan would warn again—this time during debates on the Fourteenth Amendment—that the Citizenship Clause would let Chinese immigrants “overrun” California and “double or treble the population” of that State. Senator John Conness of California, where anti-Chinese sentiment was arguably most pronounced, responded that “the children begotten of Chinese parents in California . . . shall be citizens.” In fact, he said, the Civil Rights Act had already declared “that the children of all parentage whatever . . . should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States.” No Senator rose to agree with Senator Cowan or dispute what Senator Conness had said. And no Senator said what the principal dissent says today: that the text at issue conferred citizenship only on freed Blacks and those in analogous situations. - - - further down, Justice Jackson cites the most forthright example of how blisteringly ahistorical the Republican party’s arguments are on this topic: > During the ratification debates, Senator Cowan took aim at the Roma people too, characterizing them as undeserving of birthright citizenship because they “wander[ed] in gangs,” “infest[ed] society,” and “impos[ed] upon the simple and weak everywhere.” And again, Senator Conness dismissed Senator Cowan’s prejudices: “The only invasion of Pennsylvania within my recollection was an invasion very much worse and more disastrous to the State, and more to be feared and more feared, than that of Gypsies. It was an invasion of rebels [at Gettysburg].”

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nonethewiser 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Please re read his comment. He’s saying the constitution should be amended.

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danorama 2 days ago | parent [-]

I think it was edited to add that?

	▲	jjallen 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		No, it wasn't. I had it in there from the get go. I did not edit my comment for any reason, I don't think at least. Like I said in the original comment, you can be moderate/non-partisan and think this is a bad idea. You can think Trump's an idiot and still think birthright citizenship is a bad idea. That's all.

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mothballed 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

SCOTUS has not had anything remotely close to a plain text reading since the 1930s and probably longer. "Shall not be infringed" was changed to "if an infantry rifle was made after 1986 then magically it can be infringed" and (until about a week ago when it was overturned) "if you smoke a left-handed cigarette actually the second amendment doesn't exist." The 1st amendment protects freedom of speech but yet it's legal to ban appeals to "prurient interest" even though no such exemption is mentioned. "Interstate commerce" has been changed to mean basically "commerce" and interstate is now interpreted as if it was put there for funsies since everything can be construed as affecting something else in the universe even though the historical context makes clear that's not how the text was interpreted by the writers.

Every other amendment including the 1st, 2nd, etc even when explicitly spelled out the courts magically pull something out of their ass to "torture it." Yet the 14th amendment birthright citizenship, who's "history and tradition" was to right the wrongs of slavery, somehow has to be read absolutely in black and white.

Personally I am amenable to the plain text interpretation of the 14th, 1st, and 2nd, but lets not pretend that is the game SCOTUS or even most of government and society is playing. The constitution is referenced more as a religious document by all the above to mean whatever it is they say it means.

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archagon 2 days ago | parent [-]

An aside, but it’s a bit funny to focus on the plain-text reading of “shall not be infringed” and not “a well-regulated militia.”

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mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-]

Give me a plain-text explanation as to why a well-regulated militia can be infringed from having a 1987 select fire infantry rifle but not a 1985 one, both of which are probably the most bread and butter arms you could possibly consider as part of a well-regulated militia. (This despite the plain-text ascribes the right to "people" not the militia, and in any case US code defines virtually every able bodied citizen male as part of the militia). The NFA determinations by SCOTUS don't make sense even if the amendment said it was the militia's right rather than the people's.

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FireBeyond 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

So biological weapons are back on the cards then? As armaments doesn't mean "firearms" but "weapons of war".

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2 days ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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mothballed 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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archagon 2 days ago | parent [-]

“Immigrant women are biological weapons”

“Why are people censoring me for my opinions??? Cancel culture etc.”

Barf.

	▲	mothballed 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		If you're going to misportray about the qualifiers I used, why not just say "women are biological weapons" or "people are biological weapons." You selectively dropped them off, because you are acting with deceit.

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archagon 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, one could make the argument that "shall not be infringed" is pretty cut-and-dry. I'm just not sure how one could make that argument while at the same time yadda-yaddaing the militia part, which is often what actually happens.

Anyway, I'm not sure I have a disagreement with your original point. It just seemed a bit funny to use the second amendment as an example of a thing that (supposedly) has unambiguous meaning, but gets interpreted politically by the courts. I'd argue that the ambiguity of that amendment is one of the most notorious things about it!

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mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-]

Congress defines most every able body male as part of the unorganized militia and there is no public armory for them to store their arms (this only available to organized militia) at or use leaving only a private armory (consistent with historical at time of founding where private persons stored their militia weapon at home), so I'm not sure it makes much difference in practice whether the right ascribed to the people be connected to being a militia servicemember or not for the purposes of the example of owning a select fire infantry weapon.

Probably the main effect is to grant women and the more elderly the right to bear arms as well.

===== re: below due to throttling =======

>Congress defines… historical precedent… but we were talking about a plain-text reading of the Constitution.

That makes it easy then.

The plain text ascribes the right to the people not the militia so it's moot whether they're in the militia or not in such case to have the right to keep and bear arms.

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archagon 2 days ago | parent [-]

Congress defines… historical precedent… but we were talking about a plain-text reading of the Constitution.

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mothballed 2 days ago | parent [-]

We weren't, if we were this conversation couldn't get here. If we were you couldn't play the militia fuck fuck game, since the right to keep and bear arms is ascribed to the people and not the militia.

The answer is easy in the plain-text case, whether you are associated with the militia is moot, as the plain text unambiguously says the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

It's only in the non plaintext case can you start handwaving that right is restricted to militia yada yada.

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archagon 2 days ago | parent [-]

From Wikipedia:

> Until the late 20th century, there was little scholarly commentary of the Second Amendment. In the latter half of the 20th century, there was considerable debate over whether the Second Amendment protected an individual right or a collective right. The debate centered on whether the prefatory clause ("A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State") declared the amendment's only purpose or merely announced a purpose to introduce the operative clause ("the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"). Scholars advanced three competing theoretical models for how the prefatory clause should be interpreted...

	▲	mothballed 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Until the 1930s you could mail a machine gun straight to your door with no scrutiny. What point was there in arguing an individual right in the early 20th century when you could mail order a machine gun or TNT with no background check straight to your personal collection and people were literally inventing the precursor to the M1 Carbine in prison with the blessing of the warden. If you want to go back further to the 19th century, privately owned warships with cannons were owned, gattling guns, and everything under the sun by individuals (the main laws, were on storage of explosives/powder -- interestingly even up to this very day it's legal to possess but not freely store high explosives without any license). You can point out certain collective broad groups like blacks didn't get a collective nor individual legal access to arms, but given how racist the courts and "scholarly" academic institutions were at that time it's no surprise they spent little time covering it and found little representation in the legal system and little scholarly commentary. It was after the passage of the NFA and the GCA, the main gun control acts of the US, which happened in the mid 20th century, where suddenly all these militia fuck fuck games started to enter the chat (at one point, SCOTUS claiming short-barrel shotguns taxed by the NFA not being protected because the military didn't use them -- they were wrong but the defendant was a dead guy with no representation so it was a poisoned appeal case to set precedent and no one was there to show the light infantry at the time were actively using them).