When the political history of the early 21st century is written, it will undoubtedly examine how the acolytes of Presidents Obama and Biden rapturously worshipped at the Alinsky Church of the Here and Now.
Their minions reveled in the teachings and commentary from Saul Alinsky’s 1971 training manual, Rules for Radicals. At the core of their belief system was this political decree: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”
Fortunately, the Founding Fathers of the United States anticipated future partisan maneuverings of this sort and provided the means to strike down, in this case, Alinsky’s philosophical diktats.
Those perspectives are being swept aside because of the Founders’ vision of the free marketplace of ideas. For instance, after U.S. voters endured four years of the disastrous Alinsky-Biden open border policies, voters had seen enough, and President Trump’s rational ideas are now dispatching them to the ash heap of history.
What a concept. The free marketplace of ideas.
The Founders understood this notion had to be at the core of the new government structure they envisioned. No matter how contentious or problematic, it was necessary to provide the public a means to test any and all ideas. The voters could assess and discuss the merits, dismiss concepts outright, or accept them and communicate their wishes to their respective representatives. Also, the Founders made sure to include a failsafe process under Article V of the Constitution to allow for amending enacted laws and govern for the greatest good when new information came to light.
By doing so, they recognized that lawmakers would have to grapple with the most contentious of problems emanating from differing, and in many instances, irreconcilable points of view. Indeed, the Founders had witnessed firsthand more than a few acrimonious debates during the 1787 Constitutional Convention when debating governance.
During the Convention, political debate about counting slaves to determine the number of Congressional representatives was extremely divisive. At one point, the bitter exchanges found each side seemingly arguing contrary to their original beliefs. The southern states took the stance that each member of their slave populations should be counted as a “whole person” to increase their clout in Congress via more representation; the northern states vehemently opposed their whole people position because slaves at that time had no legal standing. After much debate, the North allowed Southern states to count three out of every five slaves as “whole people” in calculating the number of each state’s congressional representatives.
According to James Madison’s notes, it was only political expediency that allowed the noxious Three-Fifths Compromise to remain in the founding document; without it, the Constitution would never have been ratified. However, the Founders never took their eyes off the goal to create the highest ethical standards they had visualized. To do so, they demanded a constitutional clause be included that ended importing slaves (although that term was never used anywhere in the Constitution) after 1808. That was their signal that, eventually, there was going to be a transformation in American society.
But changing the reigning laws was one thing; changing some people’s minds was quite another. By 1861, the long-simmering tensions erupted into a devastating four-year conflict between the states.
Although the Civil War finally ended in 1865, the open wounds of the slavery debate still festered in the nation’s psyche. Many understood that solving this particular issue could take generations, if at all.
So, some Members of Congress decided to further enhance protections of the newly freed blacks under the 1865 13th Amendment by promoting the 14th Amendment. The purpose was to negate the Three-Fifths Clause and to grant full citizenship and equal protection to the formerly enslaved population. The record indicates that the singular motivation behind introduction of the 14th was to further cement in citizen’s minds that discrimination and involuntary servitude was not only despicable and inhumane but had no basis to remain in U.S. law.
What is also clear about these 14th Amendment deliberations was that there were no attempts to include any language, objectives, or other intentions to allow foreign nationals entering the U.S. illegally to qualify as legal citizens.
Fast forward to 2025, bringing us to the current debates regarding the 14th Amendment and its relation to border control. The current day Alinskyites, including Hillary Clinton, The New York Times’ editorial pages, and Lane Polozola, an attorney for the state of Washington, are trying to equate the plight of the freed 1880s slaves’ rights with 2025 illegal border crossers and their offspring.
This is a desperate ploy. Attempting to link the motivations behind the 14th Amendment of righting immoral wrongs to granting citizenship or amnesty to illegal border crossers and their children is absurd. And both the 14th as well as the 10th Amendments present immediate legal problems.
When reviewing the first sentence of the 14th, it reads: “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.”
It can be argued that there is a serious legal difficulty evident for illegal border crossers in the key phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”.
In the view of many, if a person illegally crosses the border, that individual should not instantaneously gain residency status and be subject to the jurisdiction of the state where they have arrived. That individual could not be considered a legal citizen of that state, or the U.S. for that matter, the moment they stand on its soil because there has not been a legal retraction of citizenship of the country from which he or she departed. Thus, they are still subject to the legal jurisdiction where they were already established citizens.
Furthermore, there is a related problem which should rule against the concept of illegals’ immediate citizenship, residency, or amnesty.
The 10th Amendment reads that it “reserves powers not delegated to the federal government… to the states or the people.” This was specifically enacted to clarify lines of authority between federal and state power. It is clear that the 10th was purposely written to ensure that states retained rights over questions not expressly indicated as responsibilities of the federal government. Consequently, if the Constitution is silent on an issue, it would then be up to the states to decide whether or not they wished to address a matter. It is no surprise, then, that all states have codified their own residency qualifications under their respective laws.
Consider, it takes 12 consecutive months to reside and maintain domiciles in Texas or New Mexico to become legal residents in those states. Whether one walks or flies across the border, it does not automatically confer legal residency status upon entry into the U.S., since there is no established, year-long record of permanent domicile in those states.
What is more, outside of the 14th Amendment, there is no mention anywhere else in the Constitution that the federal government could dictate the manner in which the states must determine legal residency for its inhabitants.
The Alinsky citizenship strategy of falsely equating 2025 illegals and their offspring to the freed 1880s slaves under the 14th are relying on the courts finding their equal protection theory as valid. It should fail. They are attempting to convince citizens that there is absolutely no distinction between those who were brought in chains to the U.S. against their will and those who eagerly cross the nation’s borders illegally to take advantage of the U.S. political economy. Despite the Alinsky calculus, these two groups are in no way analogous.
There are more salient arguments against granting residency rights, citizenship, or amnesty to the approximate 20 million individuals whose first act in the U.S. was illegal entry. One specific phrase in the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4 comes to mind:
“The United States shall……protect each of them [states] against Invasion……”
All in all, it seems improbable that Alinsky’s negative tactics and twisted logic can stretch the intent, history, and definitions of the 14th Amendment to win the day in favor of illegals’ citizenship. That’s assuming, of course, that we can still rely on the concept of a government of laws, not men.
