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More about David Smith who's quoted in the Houston Chronicle "I can judge David Smith by his writings and the writings of his students," said Katz. "I read the letter by `sickened' students about us murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians every year, bombing innocent civilians and dropping cluster bombs that are dismembering children as if we were doing it deliberately. No other country has gone to the pains that we have to keep what they now call collateral damage to a minimum.

"They didn't get that at high school. They didn't get that at home, I don't think," Katz said. "There's only one place they could have gotten that, and that's in David Smith's class." [end excerpt]

George Will: March 4, 2011 -- The immigration enforcer

[excerpt] WASHINGTON — During his first 18 years in Congress, the view from Lamar Smith's office was of a parking lot. Now, in his 13th term, he looks out upon the Capitol dome. Seniority confers perquisites.

Today he chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which has custody of the immigration issue.

America, he says, has the world's "most generous legal immigration policies. We admit as many legal immigrants as the rest of the world combined."

Regarding illegal immigration, however, he proposes a program of "attrition through enforcement." Workplace enforcement, that is.

He says such enforcement has declined 70 percent in the last two years, and fines levied on employers of illegal immigrants are treated by businesses as a bearable cost of doing business as usual. Nationally, 250,000 businesses are using E-Verify, the program to quickly validate the legality of workers, and each week another 1,300 businesses sign up for the system.

[snip]

Smith does not flinch from questioning the practice of "birthright citizenship" — awarding citizenship to anyone born in America, including children whose parents are here illegally. He cites a Houston Chronicle report that in 2005, 70 percent of births in Houston and Dallas public hospitals were to illegal immigrant mothers. Today they account for nearly 10 percent of births nationally.

He believes the practice of birthright citizenship rests on a misconstruing of the 14th Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court, he says, has never addressed the "precise question" of the meaning of this: "All persons born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

He favors ending birthright citizenship as currently administered and thinks it is possible to "write a statute to get five votes" on the court. If he does write one, this soft-spoken man will be carrying a big stick of legislative dynamite. [end excerpt]