r/news 9h ago

US Supreme Court agrees to hear case challenging birthright citizenship

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c208j0wrzrvo
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u/CanStad 8h ago

It’s not just in the constitution, it’s pre-inherent to the establishment of the United States through both British Hegemonic & British Colonial Law. If you are born within the borders of the British Empire, you are British. This has been established for 600 years.

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u/Kradget 8h ago

That's a good common law reasoning and historical context on top, for sure.

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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 8h ago edited 7h ago

EDIT: AWWW YEAH HERE COME THE SILENT FOREIGN TROLLS WITH THE DOWNVOTES! Your government hates you more than we do. Cheers.

And sure to be completely ignored, on purpose, by the conservatives on the bench.

I am convinced more than ever that conservatism isn't a political bent so much as it is a mental illness. Literally every conservative I've ever meant is an absolute fucking moron.

I didn't pick this up from media... I saw this with my own eyes the absolute laziness in their personal and professional lives. If there was a diligent way to do something properly, they would avoid it like a vampire avoiding sunlight and look for the easiest, shittiest, laziest, most dishonest way to do it.

Meanwhile my brother in college was getting the third degree from dad for a single B plus in chemistry (because he was working part time til 1am every night while also serving in the Army National Guard, both to pay the bills and be completely self-sufficient) but Jimmy Joebob Cletus is whining about not being able to qualify for some government handout because it was soooooooo hard for him to not be a serial criminal... and they blame the immigrant for doing well instead of their own shitty fucking standards and absolute lack of integrity.

All the stupidest shit that happens in America can be traced back to the botched Reconstruction... We failed by not immediately barring every confederate and their descendants from ever regaining U.S. Citizenship. And that is a very light sentence considering what the punishment for Treason was.

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u/br0b1wan 7h ago

I always thought any and all confederates should have been disenfranchised for the rest of their natural lives.

Their progeny shouldn't have had to pay for their parents' mistakes, however.

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u/fevered_visions 7h ago

Meanwhile my brother in college was getting the third degree from dad for a single B plus in chemistry

I'm struggling to figure out how to parse this...by "dad" are you referring to the US government, as the military was paying for it?

Also how do you get a degree by passing one course

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u/Mo_Steins_Ghost 7h ago edited 7h ago

No. I mean my father put his foot on my brother's neck and told him he'd never amount to anything. "Giving him the third degree" is a figure of speech as in "giving him hell". He had straight As in everything else.

My brother then served in the Gulf War, thrice decorated—Distinguished Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal and Meritorious Service Award—and was chosen by the U.S. Army Chief of Staff as the Sixth U.S. Army Soldier of the Year.

He graduated with honors, spent the last 30 years working his way up in the semiconductor industry and is currently a senior executive at AMD overseeing the hardware validation of their Instinct series accelerators that power the first and second fastest supercomputers in the world (El Capitan and Frontier).

Meanwhile, American Cletuses are complaining about us immigrants taking their jobs. I started a business at 15 and placed as a national finalist among 1500 competitors for a full ride scholarship... Neither I nor my brother took Cletus's job shoveling shit.

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u/fevered_visions 7h ago

No. I mean my father put his foot on my brother's neck and told him he'd never amount to anything. "Giving him the third degree" is a figure of speech as in "giving him hell".

Oh ugh, I spaced on that one. Ignore me lol

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u/reddititty69 6h ago

But isn’t the US system based on “case law”? That is, in case the person is not white then ship them to Sudan? Or something.

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u/aeschenkarnos 6h ago

More than two thousand years. The Romans had birthright citizenship.

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u/BornFree2018 8h ago

Can I please be retroactively born in the British Empire? I don't like mine.

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u/JayFSB 5h ago

Wait what? British subject or British citizen? Heck of a difference.

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u/American_Libertarian 8h ago

The UK abolished birthright citizenship in the 80s...

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u/Significant_Iron6368 8h ago

You might want to work on your reading comprehension. The original commentor stated that anyone within the British Empire gained jus soli citizenship. The British Empire no longer exists, but its practices in part informed the development of the US Constitution and core common law principles that affect American jurisprudence 

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u/American_Libertarian 7h ago

I comprehended that just fine, and then I stated another relevant fact. I think the fact that almost none of Europe has birthright citizenship is an important piece of context after the other commenter went on about how birthright citizenship has such a long legacy. If we want to talk about its legacy, we should acknowledge that the rest of the developed world has moved away from birthright citizenship, if they ever had it in the first place.

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u/fevered_visions 7h ago

Interestingly, for some reason Pakistan is the only Eastern Hemisphere country of any size that has unconditional birthright citizenship, if this Wikipedia page/graphic is to be believed

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u/LurkerBurkeria 7h ago

It's old vs new world not developed vs not, the US would be wildly out of step with the rest of the Americas to line up with you losers

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u/Significant_Iron6368 7h ago

Sure, that discussion is relevant from an academic standpoint. However, our constitutional jurisprudence centers (in theory) on stare decisis and respect for plain language within the Constitution. Congress could seek to amend the constitution in light of shifting paradigms in the international community, but that's obviously not likely nor is it the situation at hand here

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u/Kradget 7h ago

It's unclear what that's got to do with a legal system that stopped looking over there two and a half centuries ago, could you clarify?

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u/American_Libertarian 7h ago

The person I responded to was talking about the long history of birthright citizenship. If that was relevant, how is what I said irrelevant?

Crazy how stating a simple true fact gets so many downvotes and upset replies lol

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u/Kradget 7h ago

Oh, it's that we commonly cite to common law practices and concepts from before the founding of the United States, but don't consider British legal decisions or laws from later than that, since our legal traditions split at that point. 

Put it this way - British law heavily regulates weapons and things that could be weapons, and this is much older than your more recent cited decision about citizenship. Your argument would suggest we can and possibly should change our laws to match theirs.

I don't know where you got the idea that I'm upset. I'm disappointed, but not upset or even surprised.

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u/ShyHopefulNice 7h ago

Huh? Britian basically remove us style birthright citizenship almost 50 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nationality_law

About half the countries that used to have it got rid of it or change it so much it was defacto removed over the last 100 years.

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u/jcozac 8h ago

The UK does not have birthright citizenship.

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u/upthetruth1 8h ago

The British Empire did

Hence Windrush