We're talking about Ron Paul this week? Well then, I'm going to dust off an extended comment that's been gathering dust. The #1 reason to support Ron Paul, according to his supporters, is that he genuinely honors and respects the US Constitution. Let's examine that claim as it relates to the primary privilege of any American: the right to be American.
Ron Paul used to claim that birthright citizenship originates in the 14th Amendment (~2008), so he wanted to repeal or amend that Amendment. The latter is no longer true and the former was never true: birthright citizenship pre-dates the US Constitution and Ron Paul now says that it can be overthrown without a Constitutional amendment.
The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868. In 1830, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling in Inglis v. Trustees of Sailor's Snug Harbor which declared that "nothing is better settled" in American law than citizenship at birth. The Court discussed birthright American citizenship of children born in New York City between 4 July 1776 (Declaration of Independence) and 15 September 1776 (when the British captured the city). If birthright citizenship was the law during the American War of Independence and under the Articles of Confederation, then birthright citizenship clearly doesn't originate in a constitutional amendment enacted 90 years later.
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, eliminating the distinction between "free Persons" and "other Persons", but the 14th Amendment overturned the American caste system which denied equal protection to classes of free citizens. Consider Article IV of the Articles of Confederation
the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States
versus Sec 1 of the 14th
no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States
Ron Paul now claims that a constitutional amendment is unnecessary and all that is required to deny birthright citizenship is to reinterpret "subject to the jurisdiction" so as to exclude undocumented immigrants. 20 years before he picked up this argument, the US Supreme Court wrote (in Plyler v. Doe) that
[t]o permit a State to employ the phrase 'within its jurisdiction' in order to identify subclasses of persons whom it would define as beyond its jurisdiction, thereby relieving itself of the obligation to assure that its laws are designed and applied equally to those persons, would undermine the principal purpose for which the Equal Protection Clause was incorporated in the Fourteenth Amendment.
Is it deeply anti-constitutional to argue that over 200 years of American law, Supreme Court rulings and Constitution amendments can be overturned by a mere redefinition of "jurisdiction"?
Yes, I believe it is.
But let's take another look at his argument: When someone is not "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States, they are not subject to any of the nation's laws, courts, authorities or powers. In its 1884 ruling in Elk v. Wilkins, the Supreme Court ruled that the 14th Amendment did not apply to "Indians not taxed" (Art 1 Sec 2), as they belonged to sovereign nations with whom commerce would be regulation by treaty (Art 1 Sec 8); Indians were no more subject to the jurisdiction of the US than were subjects of any other foreign state. To be clear, at that time, the US had no jurisdiction over murder of Indians by other Indians (war) and the only punishment available for Indians kidnapping US citizens was a suspension of foreign aid to the responsible tribe.
Can anyone think of another instance in human history when a state looked at an undesirable class within its cities and territories and concluded, as Ron Paul has, that the proper response was to deny that the state has any power over that class? The near universal response to undesirable classes has been caste systems of the sort once codified by the Articles of Confederation and the US Constitution but now expressly prohibited by the 14th Amendment.
In the unlikely event that you're curious where Ron Paul got the weird idea that birthright citizenship could be overturned with a redefinition of "jurisdiction" and without a constitutional amendment, I previously traced the origin to rather dishonest piece of scholarship which came out of the University of Texas law school in 2009: see citizenship is not a birthright diary of April 2010.