THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXCERPT FROM THE SEPT/OCT ISSUE OF BOSTON REVIEW: The Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection and due process clauses are never far from the news. The ongoing federal marriage-equality litigation lies at their intersection. Many transformational events of post-Reconstruction America, from the dismantling of Jim Crow and the protection of reproductive autonomy to the Supreme Court’s decision in the 2000 presidential election, would have been impossible without them.

But recently two less familiar elements of the amendment—its citizenship clause and its public-debt clause—have taken center stage. Efforts to twist these clauses in the service of policy preferences should remind us that there is a real line between constitutional interpretation and argument in defense of political goals.

One of those efforts concerns birthright citizenship. The first sentence of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that “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.” This phrase overturned the Supreme Court’s notorious Dred Scott decision (1857), which held that persons of African descent could never become citizens. When the amendment was ratifed in 1868, it conferred citizenship on the newly freed slaves and marked an important turning point in the United States’s definition of “We the People.” TO READ THE FULL ESSAY, GO TO:
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.5/pamela_s_karlan_fourteenth_amendment_citizenship_debt_ceiling.php