October 31, 2018

Harry Reid Renounces Past Support to End Birthright Citizenship While Blasting Trump

“He can tweet whatever he wants while he sits around watching TV, but he is profoundly wrong.”

Tom Williams/ZUMA

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On Wednesday, after President Donald Trump picked up on 25-year-old remarks from then-Sen. Harry Reid supporting an to end birthright citizenship, the former Democratic majority leader, who is undergoing cancer treatment, issued a withering statement blasting Trump and his anti-immigrant policies. Reid noted that his previous call to change the 14th Amendment had been “a mistake.”

“In 1993, around the time Donald Trump was gobbling up tax-free inheritance money from his wealthy father and driving several companies into bankruptcy, I made a mistake,” Reid said, alluding to Trump’s family history of engaging in possibly criminal tax schemes. “After I proposed that awful bill, my wife Landra immediately sat me down and said, ‘Harry, what are you doing, don’t you know that my father is an immigrant?’ She set me straight.”

“Immigrants are the lifeblood of our nation,” the statement continued. “They are our power and our strength. This president wants to destroy not build, to stoke hatred instead of unify. He can tweet whatever he wants while he sits around watching TV, but he is profoundly wrong.”

Shortly after Reid’s statement was released, Trump tweeted a 1993 video of Reid arguing that “no sane country” would offer birthright citizenship. The issue has been highlighted amid Trump’s anti-immigrant push ahead of the midterm elections, after Axios released a clip of the president discussing supposed plans to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship.

Most legal scholars agree such a move by a president would be unconstitutional.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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