To the editor:

In an executive order on Jan. 20, President Trump declared that “the Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” My mother’s father arrived on Ellis Island in 1908 when he was 4 but was not naturalized until 1940. My mother was born in 1937, meaning that, according to Trump’s interpretation, she is no longer a citizen. To complicate things further, her mother was born in the U.S., but her grandparents were probably not naturalized at the time.

If my mother was never legally a citizen, then I was born to an illegal alien and should be deported to Poland.

President Trump’s executive order notes that its provisions would only be applied to those born in the U.S. thirty days after the signing. So, I am okay for now — but the arbitrary nature of the executive order leaves the possibility that the 14th Amendment could be reinterpreted by Trump to extend back further. If the administration arbitrarily decides for whatever reason that I am “un-American” it could arbitrarily end birthright citizenship back to 1937 and deport my mother, my siblings, and me.

Through this executive order President Trump has taken upon the right to interpret the Constitution, which is exclusively the power of the courts under Article Three of that document. In other recent executive orders, President Trump has refused to disperse Congressionally-mandated funds to support government agencies, violating the power of the purse granted to the legislative branch in Article One. The Founders who wrote the U.S. Constitution had just liberated the Thirteen Colonies from the arbitrary acts of an unelected king and set up important checks on the chief executive to prevent a similar despot from rising in the United States. This includes impeachment.

I call upon Mr. Roger Baumann, who has written glowingly about the Constitution in these pages, and all who made the mistake of voting for Trump, to join me in calling for Trump’s impeachment, in the spirit of citizen solidarity. Or, as they say in Polish, solidarnosc.

Dr. Thomas J. Williford

Marshall