Mark Levin’s comments came after Speaker of the House Paul Ryan made a statement regarding President Donald Trump’s consideration of an executive order to instruct federal agencies how to deal with the issue of birthright citizenship, Speaker Ryan suggesting that using an executive order in this instance is not in keeping with a proper interpretation of the “Constitution as it’s written.” Levin also challenged Speaker Ryan for his remarks on birthright citizenship in a Note on Facebook.
Mark Levin: “Let’s talk about birthright citizenship, and then we’ll get in to all the rest of it.
“Paul Ryan said something today that I thought was quite interesting, being the constitutional scholar that he is. And here’s what he said about birthright citizenship and the president.
“By the way, the president didn’t bring it up.
“I heard one of the miscreants on cable say the president brings this stuff up to divide the nation. First of all, he was asked about it. He didn’t bring it up. Secondly, it’s not about dividing the nation. It’s about upholding the Constitution, okay?
“Nobody really knows how birthright citizenship was instituted. We’ve investigated this. It started in the ’60s. Bureaucratically, the old INS started to interpret it that way, as the bureaucracy does this all the time. There’s been no law passed that conveys birthright citizenship onto illegal aliens. There’s been no Supreme Court decision that definitively confers birthright citizenship onto illegal alien children.
“Nobody’s 100 percent certain how this came to be, but everybody seems to be 100 percent certain that the president can’t fix it.
“So the executive branch unilaterally somehow, somewhere in the bureaucracy decided to interpret this as it’s being interpreted today – nobody knows exactly who, exactly what office, but there it is.
“And so when the president is asked about it, and says, ‘How did you find out about this? Yeah, we’re working on an executive order.’ ‘No, you can’t change the Constitution by executive order.’ Well, does the Constitution confer birthright citizenship on the children of illegal aliens?
“Of course, it doesn’t, which I’ll explain in a minute.
“But here’s the current Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who is silent for months, but now he feels compelled to speak out.
Levin: “The ignorance on this subject, like so many others, is unbelievable. This is the Speaker of the House, who cares not one whit about the history of the 14th Amendment, not one whit.