re: #98 EPR-radar

Strike the ‘only’ and this actually becomes reasonable.

Birthright citizenship pretty much was the only way to grant citizenship to freed slaves, and any language broad enough to do that job would also give citizenship to children born in the US, independent of their parents’ legal status.

The reason birthright citizenship had to be used for freed slaves is that the only other way to define citizenship is by the status of the parents, which obviously wouldn’t work.

They could have tracked the language of the 13th Amendment and said something along the lines of “all persons previously held in slavery or involuntary servitude within the jurisdiction of the United States shall, upon ratification of this amendment be natural born citizens of the United States.”

Instead, they chose to ratify the common law understanding of natural born citizen. (And I can hear so many judges and law professors shout in unison: there is no federal common law. To which I say, “bullshit, y’all know there is.”)