In a fiery post on X (formerly Twitter), United States Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) went scorched earth on NBC News for what he alleged was the network’s attempt to selectively omit parts of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. He argued that Trump’s commitment to end birthright citizenship could be achieved by Congress, in contrast to what NBC’s Welker was claiming.
In the clip at issue, from NBC’s “Meet the Press” on the Sunday before Sen. Lee’s post, Kristen Welker asked Trump, who has said he would end “ridiculous” birthright citizenship “on Day One,” if it would be constitutional to do so. She claimed that the 14th Amendment “states all persons in the United States are citizens. Can you get around the 14th Amendment with executive action?”
Sen. Lee sounded off on X, noting that the words Welker omitted mattered. He said, “@MeetThePress omits six words about birthright citizenship from the 14th Amendment. The omitted text is set off by asterisks: ‘All persons born … in the United States, *and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,* shall be citizens of the United States’ Those words matter.”
Continuing, Sen. Lee noted what the angle of attack that Congress could launch on birthright citizenship should be, describing why the words that Welker committed are so critical to that attack. He said, “Congress has the power to define what it means to be born in the United States ‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'”
He further noted, on that same point about definitions and Congress, “While current law contains no such restriction, Congress could pass a law defining what it means to be born in the United States ‘and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ excluding prospectively from birthright citizenship individuals born in the U.S. to illegal aliens.”
Sen. Lee then noted that the idea is a bipartisan one, saying, “This is an idea that has attracted lawmakers of both political parties.” He further added, “In fact, one of the first bills (at least in recent memory) that attempted to impose statutory limits on automatic birthright citizenship was introduced in 1993 by then-Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat, who later became the Democrats’ leader in the Senate.”
Then, noting how Democratic Sen. Harry Reid had launched such an attack on birthright citizenship, Lee said, “Senator Reid’s bill was called the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993. Title X of that bill would have limited automatic birthright citizenship to children born in the United States to mothers who were either U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents at the time.”
He then explained, “The fact that federal law doesn’t currently impose such a restriction doesn’t mean that it couldn’t, and that’s why Senator Harry Reid proposed that change.” He further added, “Nothing in the Fourteenth Amendment limits Congress’s ability to enact legislation limiting birthright citizenship along the lines of what Senator Harry Reid proposed in 1993.”
Returning to the issue of the omitted words and why they matter, Sen. Lee said, “Those who suggest Congress is somehow powerless to limit birthright citizenship ignore important constitutional text giving Congress power define who among those ‘born in the United States’ is born ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”
Then, wrapping things up by attacking Meet the Press, Lee said, “It bothers me that @MeetThePress, long revered as America’s leading Sunday political news program, has become so one-sided.” Continuing with that concluding attack, he said, “In this instance, @MeetThePress seems to try to render a debatable matter beyond debate by selectively omitting key words from the Constitution, making it appear incorrectly that the Fourteenth Amendment proscribes any and all restrictions on birthright citizenship.”
Watch the incident here:
Featured image credit: screengrab from the embedded video
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