Matthew

Nukes are arms. The Second Amendment says I have a right to bear arms. The Court in 2008 decided this means citizens have a right to firearms. The relevance here is it's a grey area unlike the language of the citizen clause.

On a simplistic level yes the Court could unilaterally declare that "persons" in the Constitution only means those with green eyes and a Hapsburg jaw. Realistically though there is such a thing as a strong and a weak precedent. Firearm precedents have long been and continue to be weak. Citizenship precidents are very strong. The Court has very few enforcement mechanisms, so they rely on a veneer of trust, consistency, and institutional impartiality to the law. Incrementally shifting the interpretation of grey areas in the 2nd Amended took place over decades and culminated in DC v Heller (2008). However, the 14th Amendment lacks the grey area open to interpretation and there is no prior case law on which to build a new judicial priniciple on citizenship or jurisdiction. Doing so would have to be out of nowhere. And would be a major strike against the Courts credibility and prestige, and would produce a weak precident easily overturned by a furure Court.

Yep, I agree with all that. There are reasons so many women ditched being a stay-at-home mom. Its frequently an experience of isolation, depression, dependency, and low social status. The technologies and rights-based discourse that made it possible for women to have more options does have a deleterious side effect on society's demographics. I think a modern society should have birth and migration incentives they could activate and adjust as needed to keep population levels within a stable desired range. Culture-wise it may be a survival of the fittest type situation in which society's where men overall fail to make themselves amicable to women may just cease to exist.

Not according to the Supreme Court. They have substantially changed their interpretation of the 2nd Amendment over time. The meaning has not remained constant. Meanwhile the meaning of the Citizenship Clause has never even slightly been altered at any point that the Court has used it.

For real. Clearly not a serious rationale.

Yeah ok. 🙄 As always, thanks for participating.

Yes, its expensive and the material middle class expectations people have today cause childraising to not be part of the plan until later in life or never. Dating and marriage customs are in a state of dramatic change. The internet has become the overwhelming way couples meet and its a fairly hostile environment towards women so many don't even bother.

The higher-end estimate currently published by the US government project the peak will be around 370 million around 2080. But after every census that projection is corrected downward to compensate for decreasing birthrates, so it's hard to know where that will actually level off.

The Supreme Court has weighed in a several times on the meaning of the juristiction clause of the 14th Amendment. In Plyer v. Doe (1982) they went back to the 1890s: "Justice Gray, writing for the Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U. S. 649 (1898), detailed at some length the history of the Citizenship Clause, and the predominantly geographic sense in which the term "jurisdiction" was used. He further noted that it was "impossible to construe the words 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof,' in the opening sentence [of the Fourteenth Amendment], as less comprehensive than the words 'within its jurisdiction,' in the concluding sentence of the same section; or to hold that persons 'within the jurisdiction' of one of the States of the Union are not 'subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.'" "[e]very citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States." Id. at 169 U. S. 693. As one early commentator noted, given the historical emphasis on geographic territoriality, bounded only, if at all, by principles of sovereignty and allegiance, no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment "jurisdiction" can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful. See C. Bouve, Exclusion and Expulsion of Aliens in the United States 425-427 (1912)." So if you think even a so-called conservative court is going to radically depart from such a long consistency of precedent, I think you'll be disappointed.

The roots of these two minor exceptions are ancient, apparently from English Common law. For example diplomats not wanting their diplomatic service to negatively impact their child via citizenship. No one on the Court is going to extrapolate from this a broader new meaning to the 14th Amendments citizenship clause.

Most developed economies have been in demographic decline for years. Some like South Korea and Japan will dramatically shrink in the decades to come. China's population started to decline in the last couple years and they have begun to strategize policies to encourage more births. The US is expected to hit its tipping point as early as the 2030s, a date which has been moved up serveral decades by more recent changes to birth rates. Birth rates in every continent except Africa have gotten close to 2 children per woman--even in most very poor and densely populated places like Bangladesh. So does a future of declining population and an increased percentage of elderly people concern you?

Nixon was infinitely smarter in terms of being literate, detail-oriented, and having cultivated knowledge and skill from disciplined study. He was even a decent pianist. Trump only has soft skills and no knowledge of any topic but is therefore more relatable and of good humor.

Hardly. The 2nd amendment is unclear compared to the first sentence of the 14th Amendment. Otherwise I think we would have seen some clever legal rationale by now casting doubt about some part of this very simple sentence. So far the right wing argument made in this thread is that the meaning of this portion of the 14th Amendment should just be deliberately altered via activist justices on the Court. Winning!

Thanks for admitting that you hate the US Constitution.

Were these hypothetical diplomats and combatants born in the US?

Your point? The law is what it is.

Bless their hearts. I love the poorly educated.

Thanks for agreeing that nothing in the consitution remotely allows trumps policy position and that the only way to do your immigration policy is via juducial activism beyond the meaning of the text and that liberals on the court have been just fine in doing that for the last 80 years. 👍

Well sure, nothing stops then from changing the meaning of any words of the consitution to mean something else. But there is nothing open to interpretation about the jurisdiction clause. If you're in a place where US laws have authority then the clause applies.

What are arms? Can i own a nuke? Is bearing arms meant to be done in context of a "well regulated militia?" None of these are clear from the 2nd amendment.

It's plain English.

Nah when the conservatives someday take back control of the republican party, they will just do like they did to Nixon and claim trump was not a true conservative, that they had nothing to do with the whole thing, and probably try to claim the MAGA cult was a leftist movement.

Sure whoever can be objectively shown to have committed treason should be tried and sent to the gallows. Hair splitting over planning to conspire vs actually conspiring is f*cking st*pid. And sure there is grey area. I'm not talking about people doing business, or engaging in activism, or ideas/ideologies. I'm talking about political schemes involving foreign influence.

Sure I said anyone. Policymakers secretly working with hostile nations to attack other Americans is obvious treason and should be treated as such.

I'm stating a general principle that should apply to anyone. Do you disagree with it?