Arizona is the headquarters of the dispute over birthright citizenship. REPUBLICAN SPLIT: Birthright Citizenship Spat Imperils GOP Legacy
February 14, 2015
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Persons born in the United States are citizens, right?
Not according to Sen. Lindsey Graham, leader of a new breed of radical conservative Republicans bent on denying citizenship to the U.S.-born offspring of illegal immigrants.
The Republican Party, started by abolitionists in Michigan and Wisconsin in 1854, is being split asunder 160 years later by this immigration issue.
Heart of the question is the 14th Amendment, whose basic ideas were formulated by abolitionist Bay City pioneer James G. Birney and adopted by its authors, including Michigan Senator Kingsley Bingham, who in 1854 had been elected the nation's first Republican governor.
Known as the "Reconstruction Amendment," it forbids any state to deny any person "life, liberty or property, without due process of law" or to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Politico reports that the aim of congressional Republicans to deny automatic citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants has opened the split in the GOP.
Several former Bush administration officials warn that the party could lose its claim to one of its proudest legacies: the 14th Amendment.
An official Republican history states: "The Republican party began as a spontaneous grass roots protest against the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which allowed slavery into western territories where it had been forbidden by earlier compromises."
The most inflammatory part of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a provision denying the right to vote to immigrants who then were flooding into the western states like Wisconsin and Michigan.
History.com states: "The Civil War firmly identified the Republican Party as the party of the victorious North, and after the war the Republican-dominated Congress forced a "Radical Reconstruction" policy on the South, which saw the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution and the granting of equal rights to all Southern citizens."
Authors of the 14th Amendment embraced Birney's contention that all Americans were entitled to due process and equal justice under the law. He cited the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution as sources of the foundation concepts.
Birney's legal defense of the Cherokee who were being driven from Georgia and Alabama in the 1830s is considered the start of the abolition movement and key to the concepts of equality laid down by Birney.
Politico states: "For Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) and other conservatives, the solution to what they regard as one of the greatest flaws of U.S. immigration policy is obvious: Amend the amendment, which grants citizenship to anyone born on American soil regardless of whether their parents are legal residents."
Now, former aides to both former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, who pushed for comprehensive immigration reform, have condemned the calls by top Republicans to end birthright citizenship.
Enacted during Reconstruction by a Republican Congress, the 14th Amendment officially overruled the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision and defined citizenship not only for newly enfranchised blacks but for all Americans, wrote Politco's Scott Wong.
For more than a century, the 14th Amendment has been interpreted by the courts to include children whose parents are not U.S. citizens, including illegal immigrants.
"That is the wisdom of the authors of the 14th Amendment: They essentially wanted to take this very difficult issue -- citizenship -- outside of the political realm," Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, a former Bush speech writer, said Sunday on ABC's "This Week." "They wanted to take an objective standard, birth, instead of a subjective standard, which is the majorities at the time. I think that's a much better way to deal with an issue like this."
No naturalization statute ever made native born children of aliens citizens at birth. "Naturalization," by definition, only applied to the foreign born. This was agreed to by all justices in the Dred Scott court. One reason we have the 14th Amendment is that it was emphasized in the 39th Congress (1865-1867) that native-born blacks could not be naturalized. The amendment was a Republican initiative aiming to make all blacks citizens with voting rights.
A fresh look at historical records appears to confirm Michigan's claim to being the birthplace of the Republican Party.
The Republican Party, seeded in Michigan by abolitionist James G. Birney, this year marks the 160th anniversary of the inauguration of the nation's first Republican governor.
Kingsley Bingham, a former Democrat, was elected governor as a Republican in 1854, the same year the Republican Party sprang up in Michigan and Wisconsin. The first Republican governor of Wisconsin was elected in 1855.
Bingham was known as the farmer-governor of Michigan and was instrumental in establishing the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan (today, Michigan State University) and other educational institutions such as the State Reform School.
Bingham had emigrated in 1833 from Camillus, New York to Green Oak Township, Livingston County, where he practiced law and became probate judge.
The Republican Party emerged from the political maelstrom of conflicting ideas about whether slavery should be extended into the territories under the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska bill.
The name Republican was first publicly applied to the movement in a June 1854 editorial by New York editor Horace Greeley, who said it would "fitly designate those who had united to restore the Union to its true mission of champion and promulgator of Liberty rather than propagandist of slavery."
Birney's work in organizing Michigan abolitionists of the Liberty and Free Soil parties, forerunners of the Republican Party, is recounted in the book Apostles of Equality: The Birneys, the Republicans and the Civil War." It was published in 2011 by Michigan State University Press and is available on amazon.com.
Birney had moved to Lower Saginaw, that became the Village of Bay City in 1859, in 1842, distraught after gaining only about 7,000 votes in his first Presidential bid in 1840.
He ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1843 and 1845 on the Liberty Party ticket, continuing to campaign for the abolition of slavery.
Lower Saginaw was Birney's base for his 1844 candidacy under the Liberty Party banner. He got about 62,000 votes in the third party bid, still insignificant nationally but showing growing anti-slavery sentiment.
The anti-slavery movement was strongest in New York, where Birney got about 15,000 votes, thus denying the Whig candidate, Henry Clay, the victory. The winner was James K. Polk, whose expansionist policies led to the Mexican War in 1846 and laid the groundwork for the Civil War, according to historians.
The Kansas-Nebraska bill provoked outrage in Wisconsin. Other anti-Nebraska meetings in Michigan, New York, and throughout the North that spring also recommended the organization of a new party to protest the bill.
In July of 1854, a convention was held in Madison to organize the new party. The members resolved, "That we accept this issue [freedom or slavery], forced upon us by the slave power, and in the defense of freedom will cooperate and be known as Republicans."
Michigan abolitionists met in Jackson "under the oaks" on July 6, 1854 to found a new party combining former Whigs, Anti-slavery Democrats, Liberty and Free Soil party advocates.
Organizing by the Republicans also included a warning, according to the Apostles book, of the threat of white slavery. Republican Bulletin No. 9 issued in 1859 put working men on notice that Southerners, should they win an expected conflict, intended to subject the working class of all colors and races to slavery.
To some of Irish descent, the threat of white slavery was only too real since hundreds of thousands of captive Irish came to America on British ships as slaves in the mid-1600s. Republican warnings no doubt fired the hearts of the Irish and all working men who joined the Union Army when the Civil War broke out.
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