Stripping Terrorists' Citizenship and Obama's Blueprint

In the wake of last week’s attempted terrorist bombing in Times Square, legislation is being proposed to strip the would-be bomber of his American citizenship. Team Obama is opposing this bill, a bill at odds with the president’s blueprint for America.

The man who attempted to detonate a car bomb in New York City on May 1, Faisal Shahzad, was born in Pakistan and recently became an American citizen. Senator Joe Lieberman is now pushing legislation to strip Shahzad of his citizenship so that he can be treated as a foreigner in the U.S. legal system.

The pushback from President Obama’s supporters has been swift. Senator Chuck Schumer immediately declared such a bill unconstitutional. On a Sunday morning talk show, Attorney General Eric Holder expressed reluctance to pursue citizenship stripping. And others on the left are spouting off about this as well.

The constitutional law on this question is muddy. In 1958, the Supreme Court upheld a citizenship-stripping law in Perez v. Brownell. But then in 1967, the far-left Warren Court overruled Perez by a 5−4 vote in Afroyim v. Rusk, holding that Congress cannot strip anyone of citizenship unless that person voluntarily renounces it.

Then in the 1980 case of Vance v. Terrazas, the Supreme Court split the difference, moving back in the opposite direction. The Court modified its 1967 holding to clarify that in addition to renouncing American citizenship verbally or in writing, a person can renounce their citizenship by their conduct. The Court also held that whether their conduct amounts to renouncing citizenship can be determined by a “preponderance of the evidence,” meaning that the odds only need to be better than 50−50, instead of a higher standard such as “proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”

So the law is unclear in this case.

The United States is at war with Islamic terrorism. You can make a good argument that conferring with Islamic terrorists and pledging your allegiance to them, and then trying to blow up Americans in the middle of New York City, might reasonably be construed as renouncing your U.S. citizenship.

In fact, there’s another issue in play here that wasn’t on the table in either 1967 or 1980. In order to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, you must take the Oath of Allegiance. In that oath, you swear that you renounce all foreign allegiances, that you will “support and defend the Constitution” against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that you will bear arms in the service of this country against America’s enemies, and that you take this oath “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.”

Shahzad took that oath in 2009. Shortly thereafter, he went to Pakistan for five months, where reports are surfacing that he may have sought out terrorist training and contacts.

The question arises: When he took the oath, did he mean it? If not, then he was lying under oath. This very much strengthens the case that a court could hold that his citizenship can be stripped from him.

What should be surprising here is that Team Obama isn’t jumping at this possibility. Although a court might find in Shahzad’s favor, ruling that he cannot be stripped of his citizenship, there’s no precedent that automatically dictates that result. So the government should vigorously press to have such legislation enacted against him, and argue in court as to why the court should uphold it. It should be surprising that they’re willing to throw in the towel instead of fighting.

But it’s not surprising, for one sad reason. As I explain in my new book, The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency, this president seeks to erase the distinctions between citizen and alien in this country. The Constitution draws bright lines between foreign policy versus domestic policy, and between Americans versus foreigners.

The Far Left has long tried to erase those bright lines. They speak of “human rights” and employ other global, universal language when referring to rights. They think that any right good enough for Americans is good enough for every human being on the planet. That’s important for the Shahzad case because being a citizen gives Shahzad a massive battery of rights under U.S. law, which he could use to try to escape punishment.

Such constitutional lines highlight American exceptionalism. As my coauthor and I show in our book, President Obama’s rejection of American exceptionalism is partially designed to further entangle us with transnational organizations like the United Nations, which are beset with rampant corruption, fraud and mismanagement. It’s part of a global “share the wealth” mentality, whereby American treasure goes to other countries (when we’re drowning in debt ourselves) and foreign values and laws are imported into this country and imposed on American citizens.

This makes us more like other countries, where governments have far more power over their citizens and where critical safeguards such as the U.S. Bill of Rights are not in place to protect people against government abuses.

If there’s one area of policy where politics should not intrude, it’s national security. But we’re witnessing yet another example of Team Obama advancing its blueprint to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” to quote the president himself. These bright constitutional lines exist for our own protection, and we should oppose every effort to erase them.