And away he goes. In our round-up of Sen. Stacey Campfield's blizzard of bluster last week, we neglected to highlight the most patently unconstitutional proposal in his legislative loopiness. SB132, introduced last Tuesday, would require at least one parent to provide documentation proving their U.S. citizenship before a birth certificate could be issued for a newborn child. This is, of course, in direct contravention of a little thing called the 14th Amendment, which begins, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
Campfield's bill is part of a national, Republican-led movement to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants--the latest in a wave of xenophobic efforts by the increasingly hysterical GOP to fight off imagined hordes of scary brown people determined to undermine our way of life and corrupt our precious bodily fluids with their dirty DNA.
Even if passed (not likely), it doesn't stand a prayer of surviving a court challenge. But that is not the point. The point is to continue to gin up nativist fear right up to the 2012 elections and beyond. (It is also in line with Campfield's long-running obsession with duplicitous mothers and his willingness to use government documents to bully vulnerable women.)
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