Rick Green [00:00:07] Welcome to the intersection of faith and culture. Thanks for joining us today on The WallBuilders Show. Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton, where we're taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical and constitutional perspective. It today is Thursday, so you get to choose the topics. Send those questions in the radio@wallbuilders.com that's radio@wallbuilders.com. First question guys is coming from Kirk in Texas He wants to know more about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship. Boy, boy. Have a lot of people been talking about this one. And of course, Trump, you know, had an executive order dealing with this. A federal judge said the executive order was unconstitutional. So we need to go all the way back to what was the 14th Amendment intended to do. And Tim, you actually had a great video on this from your I think from your truck. I remember right. I saw it on on X and Zoe where people can obviously need to be following us on on X and Facebook to get those updates when things happen. But yeah, let's kind of let's walk through this, guys. Birthright citizenship. What kind of the history of it? 14th Amendment. What was it actually intended to do? 

David Barton [00:01:10] And you got two separate things there that get joined together. You have birthright citizenship and you have the 14th Amendment. And the way they get brought together is kind of unusual. But if you understand the original intent of both of them, what they were designed to do, then it makes it a whole lot easier. So let's go to Birthright Citizenship. Article one The Constitution gives Congress the right to establish immigration laws and that that's a congressional duty. So when you go back and look at their very first immigration laws after the Constitution was passed, you have laws in 1790 and 1791. So congressional immigration laws, these are really kind of the first federal laws on immigration. And it goes back to debates they had in the Constitutional Convention and in the constitutional convention, the debates they had on citizenship. It was interesting that many of the the foreign born Americans and I think out of the 39 signers of the Constitution, seven of them were not born in America. They were foreign people who came to America and became leaders and were sent to the Constitutional Convention. But those seven particularly said that a man we did not understand how different America was. And if you're going to have citizenship here, you need to understand this nation, because one of them, Butler who came from Scotland or somewhere, he's the one who said you need nine years to live in America before you become a citizen. He said, Because when I got here, I would have voted just the way I was the country I came from, and I would have made America into that country. I didn't understand how different it was. And so that's where they settle on a five year. You have to have five years here before you can become a citizen, because you need to understand how this process works so you can protect and guard that process and keep it unique. So immigration law, that's why the Constitution requires a five year period of time. You've got to come you've got to learn about the nation. You have to reside here for five years. Then you can become a citizen. Birthright citizenship said, Let's skip the five years. We're just going to say, if you were born here from a different country, you're immediately made into a citizen. You don't have a clue what it is. And so this is led to to really kind of vacation citizenship where that if you this particularly in Mexico was was very prominent where you walk across the bridge and as a tourist you can walk across on a one day tourist visa. You don't have to have the immigration papers. You come over, you have the baby, the hospital, you take the baby back into Mexico. At some later point in life, you say, hey, this baby is an American citizen and we're the parents and we're all coming to America. That was not the intent of birthright citizenship at all. 

Tim Barton [00:03:32] Well, and by the way, it's not just Mexico that happens there. People are fly in from. 

David Barton [00:03:36] That's right. 

Tim Barton [00:03:37] I mean, you're not even supposed to fly right at a certain point in your pregnancy. But this is the kind of stuff that people are looking to come to America. Now, dad one thing I just I'm curious to clarify with you is I would say you're saying birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment are different. I would say no, there was no argument for birthright citizenship necessarily until the 14th Amendment because it was a different idea in the founding era. Obviously, if you were an American born American after America was a nation, yes, you were an American. But but the notion of birthright citizenship, really that I can see I don't see it discussed in a lot of places until you get to the 14th Amendment. And really, I mean, the 14th Amendment doesn't even explicitly say birthright citizenship. In Section one. It says 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 where they reside. Now, that's the first sentence. The 14th Amendment is much longer. There's multiple sections in it. But dad backing up, they had immigration laws, but they didn't have that. I can find birthright citizenship until the 14th Amendment. And so when you say that birthright citizenship is given the 14th Amendment, I would say no. Their immigration laws were different. The 14th Amendment, but neither here nor there. Right. The reality of. The 14th Amendment. The reason it was created was at the end of the Civil War when after slave because 13th Amendment right is where slavery ended, where no more slaves in the United States were done with slavery. But then there were, of course, some of the racist Southern Democrats who were saying, well, they have freedom, but we're not giving them rights and we're not letting them have these other privileges of American citizens. And that's what the 14th Amendment really was in response to. It was saying, no, hang on a second. Anybody who was brought here, they've been naturalized, which would be part of that process, even born here, they get the same rights. But this is specifically referring to a period in time in American history, a specific group of individuals who had been enslaved. This was not a blanket idea for all times going forward. Anyone who comes here breaking and violating the laws of America, or maybe they come across with a passport or a visa or whatever else. It is like the idea of you coming here and have a baby and leaving. And then what happens now with the way the laws are written? Because what President Trump was very clear on is the way that we do immigration laws or birthright citizenship is the way it is, not the way anybody else does it. He's correct, because what we do in America is say, okay, well, that child is now an American citizen. And then the way the law is interpreted and applied is if that child is a citizen, then all of the siblings, all of the parents have to get citizenship, too, because it's not right. A child will be citizen and they can come to America, but the rest of the family can. So we get to bring the whole family in. And then we couldn't leave out grandma and grandpa. They're just arguing that everybody that is connected and related to that baby should become an American citizen. And again, this is clearly not what the 14th Amendment was about. So, Dad, do your point that immigration laws and immigration laws for a reason and they didn't flippantly say that anybody that comes and visits America can be an American citizen. You had to come and live in America, go through the process of immigration. And it wasn't until the 14th Amendment in response to racist Southern Democrats arguing that these former black slaves should have no rights even though they were now freed. There are free American or free individuals living in America. The 14th Amendment gave them American citizenship to give them the full rights and privileges of America. But again, this is a very different situation than what we're talking about when you have an open southern border like we had under President Biden, that literally millions of people are coming into America and now if they have a kid, their whole family gets to be citizens. That's not what was intended by the 14th Amendment. And certainly President Trump is right. Is no other country does it like this. And America is crazy for trying to do it like this. 

David Barton [00:07:57] Yeah, that's exactly right. And the term birthright citizenship really is a product of the 14th Amendment. Now, the concept going back the founding era was there because the way you just explained it, for example, the founding fathers would not have said, you're an immigrant. You come here, you've lived here three years and you're required five years to become a citizen and you have children. Three years in that child is not a citizen because you've lived here three years and they were born when you become a citizen. The child then becomes a citizen, even though they were born in America and they're not a citizen until the parent. And that's what's significant. In the 1790-1791 immigration laws is Congress made it really clear that citizenship flows from the parent to the child in immigration areas, that it comes from the parent first, then to the child. If the parents lived here for five years and have children, those children are American citizens. But that's because the parent is an American citizen. If you've lived here one year or two, 3 or 4 and you have children here, they are not American citizens until you, the parent, become an American citizen. And so that's where everything really got goofed up when they took the 14th Amendment. And Tim, as you said, took it completely out of context. And because those slaves have lived their whole lives here, they've grown up in America, they're now free citizens. And you're saying that that their children are not going to be citizens after they are. I mean, that's crazy. And so that's what the 14th Amendment did, was extend state citizenship, American citizenship to all of those who had formerly been slaves in America who are now free. And so the context is really clear on both of those. There is no birthright citizenship that allows you to have children here. Those children suddenly become citizens and you can come back later to them, as you said, relatives out to the fourth level, whatever that might be. They're not citizens just because you are as a child born here. 

Rick Green [00:09:46] And, you know, we've we've always tried to look at these things from a principled approach as well. And we've used this analogy on immigration before with regard to a lot of our Christian friends, even pastors, you know, they act like you're cold hearted if you're not for just blanket open borders and help everyone from around the world. And we've always said the analogy is, okay, great. Well, you know, we help and we donate to organizations that feed the hungry and feed the homeless and that sort of thing. That doesn't mean we open our home and say we're just going to leave our doors and windows open. Anybody can come in at any time, sleep in the same bedrooms as our children and our grandchildren. You know, that analogy I think also applies here. This is this this would be like saying birthright citizenship would be like saying leave the doors and windows open. Anybody comes in in the middle of the night and has a baby in your house. Now they get to live there for the rest of that baby's life and you're going to pay for their college. You're going to pay for their food. You're going to pay for everything. I mean, that's essentially what they're doing with this birthright citizenship concept that they have created. 

David Barton [00:10:42] And understand, too, that America is unique. America is built on ideas. A Frenchman is a Frenchman because they're born in France. An American is not an American because they're born in America, but because they have American ideas. And if you can come here from another nation and absorb those American ideas, which is why the founding fathers said five years, you come here to live here, five years till you understand this, then you can be an American. It's all about the ideas and the philosophy. And that's what makes the difference. 

Tim Barton [00:11:08] And dad to with that thought also the values. The idea is yes, for sure. But the philosophy helped shape those ideas. Values helped shape the philosophy. But but to your point, if if people came here and this is what used to be promoted by presidents is we wanted the best and brightest around the world to come here, come make America better, come be an American. And it much more was a spiritual reality than it was a birth location. To your point, it's what we used to believe. We've gotten away from that a little bit, but certainly that would be a great value to restore understanding. It's the values. It's a philosophy. The idea is that makes America unique. 

David Barton [00:11:54] And Tim go in exactly what you said. I want to go back to the immigration book that was done by the that chief of American Immigration Naturalization. It was a book done right after World War one when people were flooding into America. There had been so much devastation in Europe. People wanted to come to America, get away from the war. And it came out with the book then in 1919 and then brought back out by the government as World War Two was starting and people started to leave in Europe, coming to America in hordes. This is what the chief of immigration said. He said, quote, An American is a man who is greater in his soul than in his class creed political party, or the section in which he lives to be an American. A man must have an American soul and believe in the spiritual realities upon which America rests and out of which America was born. America was created to unite mankind by those passions which lift and not by the passions which separate into base. We came to America to get rid of the things that divide and make sure of the things that unite. And going back to what Tim said, notice the chief of immigration said, To be an American, you have to have an American soul and believe in the spiritual realities upon which America rests and out of which America was born. And that's exactly the point, Tim, you were making. 

Rick Green [00:13:10] Yeah. And guess we saw just the practical effects of of this whole thing in the last few weeks with the almost riots around the country over the, you know, deportations where these, you know, you got people that are waving all kinds of flags that are not even the American flag. And it makes you wonder, like, why would you be waving the flag of the place you fled instead of the flag of the place you fled to and that you're, you know, seeking asylum or you're seeking a new life for them. It just tells you that their allegiances are not to the country. They're not subject to the jurisdiction thereof. They're not you know, they're not the sole part that you're talking about. So we're seeing the practical effects of that as well. And it does it divides and it leaves everybody in these, you know, toss salad different communities instead of the actual melting pot that we were supposed to be. Got to take a quick break. We got a lot more questions to get to. Stay with us, folks. You're listening to The WallBuilders Show. 

Rick Green [00:15:08] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. It's Foundations of Freedom Thursday. This next one is not actually a question. It's just a comment. Guys, this was somebody sent in this note after looking at the founder's Bible and having a chance to study it, they said, I really don't have a question. I just want to tell you how much I love the Founders Bible. I've been a Christian for 48 years. I'm an ordained minister and LE chaplain. You guys know what a LE chaplain is? 

Tim Barton [00:15:31] Law enforcement? 

Rick Green [00:15:33] Could be, Yeah. Law enforcement? Yeah. Okay. I collect Bibles and have more than 50. I've never found a Bible I love so much as this one. I should mention that I am also a combat marine and lover of history. I am starting to read in Genesis with the New Year and posting notes on Founder's Bible along with excerpts from the articles. Get it? A great response. Thank you for publishing this Bible blessings. I think that's fantastic, guys. I mean, you know, we say it all the time. You're on the program, but it is the best way to go through the Bible in a year and get some great history and get your mind in that mode of applying the scripture to whatever's going on in the world around you. That's what those articles do. They get you. Seeing how the founders and others throughout American history applied the Scripture to what was happening in the world around them. It's your founders Bible today. Wallbuilders.com is the place to get it. You can also get it on your phone or iPad but get you one of those beautiful founders Bibles. Give it to the family. Get anybody coming up with a birthday, get them a founder's Bible. That's that's my number one go to gift for members of family and and folks that you know and I've never had anybody not tell me they so appreciated pretty much what this guy said when he wrote in. All right. Let's get to another question. This one is coming in from Jamie. Can the era, the Equal Rights Amendment, really be ratified by President Biden before leaving office, as laid out by the letter sent from Congress on December 15th to the president? Well, Jamie, of course, if you have a dictator, the dictator gets to do whatever they want. I mean, if they can make you stay home, they can make you wear a mask. They can make you inject things. They can shut down airlines, you know? I mean, if you're a dictator, why not just add an amendment to the Constitution? Who cares if it wasn't ratified by enough? I mean, those rules guys were probably done by a bunch of white guys, you know, and wigs back when they used old English. And so, you know, let's ignore all that and just let the president do whatever whatever he wants. I mean, apparently that's all it takes to amend the Constitution. 

David Barton [00:17:26] Yeah, fortunately, it requires more than that. Nice try, Rick, but it requires a little bit more than that. And this is an amendment that came up and 1971 was pushed in 1972 through the House and the Senate. And it was really kind of based on what would be Title nine now. And Title nine is no guys and women's sports, etc.. And it was recognizing that there were two genders and those genders needed to be treated equally. Well, now genders have gone into identities and all sorts of other stuff, but back when this done a 71 and 72, it was saying, hey, both genders have equal now they really want it done today because the way they define gender is by identity and by all the other. There's, there's 81 different genders now as white American professors identify in America. So this would protect all 81 different genders constitutionally is the way they interpret it. But what happened was when they when they passed this, they put a seven year limit on it. This has to be ratified by by 1979 in order for this constitutional amendment to take effect. And then it didn't get ratified by then, which takes the Constitution requires three fourths of the states. The 38 states have to ratify. They didn't make it in seven years. So Congress extended another five years till 1982. If you can get 38 states to ratify this by 1982, then according to that, constitutional amendments provisions, it can become part of the Constitution. Well, it was actually last year, I think 2024, when Illinois ratified it. It became the 38th state. So here you are and 2024, which at this point you're 42 years late based on what the requirement is inside the amendment itself and you ratified it. And so what happened? The Democrats, 120 Democrats in the House and Senate, sent President Biden the letter and said, hey, we now have 38 states. Go ahead and ratify this amendment. You're the president. You can declare that this has to be added to the Constitution and that every edition of the Constitution that comes out now has to include this 28th Amendment, and it does this equal rights amendment. And so he did that. He issued his certification of it. He said this has now been ratified and therefore it will always be published as part of the Constitution. It is a 28th Amendment to the Constitution. That's interesting. Within two days, he had some pushback and it came from probably what no one would have expected. The archivist of the National Archives, the one in charge of keeping all the government documents, the archivist and the deputy archivist said, no, we're not going to accept your your certification, your ratification of the 28th Amendment because it does not meet the standard. And that goes. Back to both 2020 and 2022, when the Office of Legal Counsel, the U.S. Department of Justice, said that the ratification deadline established by Congress for the LRA is valid and enforceable. In other words, it had to be done by by the seven year period, by 1779 or that other added year of 1982, and it didn't get done. And therefore, this is not ratified. Bill, you cannot certify ratify this. And so even in his own administration, the Justice Department said this cannot be done. He really kind of did it, going out the door just as a head nod to all his constituencies who are radical in this area. But there is no way that this was ratified despite what he declared, despite what Congress tried to do. The officials in charge, it'll never happen. The constitutional amendments have had the provisions for how to ratify it, and it was not met. So it's a PR victory for him. And the left media, progressive media, they get to shout about all the good things he's done, but it's just absolutely not possible to ratify it. It is a dead amendment and they can keep trying ratify it for the next 20 years. If we're blessed that long and it's never going to be added to the Constitution the way it was done, then they would have to bring it back as a brand new amendment and run it back through from start to finish all the way through. 

Rick Green [00:21:27] Yeah. And you know, I remember correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is right. Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg before she died spoke to this because there were people trying to push this and push this argument. You know, that the that the deadline didn't matter and all that kind of stuff. And I mean, here's someone that, you know, probably would have been one of the greatest champions of the Equal Rights Amendment. And she said, that's crazy. You can't do that. That, on its face is, you know, you're you're literally breaking all of the rules. And I think it's a good time. Before we go to our last question of the day, guys, just a quick reminder for everybody on these constitutional amendments. It can either originate in Congress where Congress has to, you know, basically propose it with two with a two thirds vote, or it can be started with the states where the states get together in a convention and they propose and then it goes. But either way, then it goes back to the states and you had to have three fourths of states. That number you mentioned 38 ratified. So there's two ways to amend the Constitution. And so the Equal Rights Amendment, I had forgotten that that actually was, I guess, passed by two thirds of Congress in 71 when you were talking about it at the beginning of it. I don't know that you could get anything through Congress with two thirds amending the Constitution these days, which is why we all advocate for a convention of states so the states can do it. But anyway, folks, for those of you that are confused by those timelines and all that, because you may have taken our Constitution classes and learned about that 27th Amendment that was sitting dormant for 200 years and then was finally ratified by enough states that one did not have a deadline. That's the difference. There was no clause in there saying that it would expire was actually part of the original Bill of Rights. So there's not two different sets of rules. While voters are always going to call balls and strikes, Republican-Democrat, whatever, we're equal opportunity critics and equal opportunity umpires, regardless of who it is or what the issue is. Okay. Last one, guys. We'll see if we can get this one in. And this last one comes from Jeff. He said, I was wondering if it was legal for the Biden administration to auction off the unbuilt portions of the wall without the approval of Congress. And I think if I remember, I guess it was practically giving it away. Like I mean, it was pennies, pennies on the dollar. It's just a total waste. And I don't know if they actually got rid of any or not. I know Dan Patrick was the lieutenant governor of Texas. We're talking about using Texas money to buy it all up and save it. I don't I don't know what actually happened with it. But constitutional. I mean, you know, if you're the executive, I guess you can you can execute those orders on on how that money's going to get spent in that particular way. But I haven't looked closely at it. What do you guys think? 

David Barton [00:23:59] Well, what happened back then when he did that, the courts actually stopped it. So, no, Congress appropriated the money. You don't suddenly get to decide that you can change the law that was passed by Congress just because you don't like the result. And Trump has recently done this. He he ordered no spending to be spent that Congress appropriated and certain areas that Biden had wanted. And so he said, you can't do that. And the courts step back and said, no, no, it was appropriated by Congress for these specific purposes. You have to go ahead and you can't change the directive of Congress. Some people call this a doctrine of impoundment. Impoundment is the president can step in and impound the money and he can say, hey, I get to decide where this money is going to be spent. Well, that eliminates Congress. And Congress is the one who has the purse strings. So I don't buy into the doctrine of impoundment. It's a theoretical doctrine that would give the president the ability to shut down spending and get it under control. But in this case, Biden did not have the authority to do that, nor does Trump. And at this point, federal judges have struck down both acts. Biden lost that. Trump, I don't think, is going to appeal. What I saw is he backed off that order and rescinded that executive order. 

Tim Barton [00:25:06] And we have seen some presidents that were slow in rolling out some of these things that do not support them. Right. So it's not quite impounding. It is not I'm not going to spend the money, but maybe, you know, we're just we're not going to hire the most efficient people. You know, it's just whatever your general contractor is who's going to extend the deadline of completion forever. And so we definitely seen presidents that have not been the most efficient and carrying this out would be different than not spending the money, but then taking something that was designated and allocated and selling it instead of utilizing it. That's totally different then delaying the process and and going against what that appropriation was. 

Rick Green [00:25:48] Yeah. And like we've always said, guys like an executive order can be constitutional or unconstitutional. Every president has done tons of executive orders. It's if you're executing the law. So if there's, you know, wiggle room in that law on how you spend the money and maybe what kind of wall that you build, that's one thing. It's another thing to go against whatever the law was that was passed actually reverse or do the opposite of what Congress actually passed. That would be an unconstitutional executive order. And like I said, we're going to call balls and strikes. So whether Trump does it or whoever else, we're going to look at it biblically, historically and constitutionally. Here on WallBuilders, it's been Foundations of Freedom Thursday. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks to everyone that sent in questions. We'll get to more of them next week. Be sure you don't miss tomorrow. We got a lot of good news to carry tomorrow, so I think you're going to have to slow us down tomorrow because everybody's going to be at 100 miles an hour to get in as much as we possibly can. You've been listening to The WallBuilders Show.