*By Conor White*
Donald Trump may be looking to score points with his base ahead of midterm elections by turning the conversation back to immigration.
With one week to go before Election Day, Trump proposed ending birthright immigration with an executive order during an interview for "Axios on HBO" [released Tuesday morning](https://www.axios.com/trump-birthright-citizenship-executive-order-0cf4285a-16c6-48f2-a933-bd71fd72ea82.html).
"It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don't," the president claimed in the video.
Birthright citizenship is protected under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and any effort to end it would come under immediate legal challenge. Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan broke with Trump to make a firm statement against his proposal shortly after the interview was released.
"You cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order," he said in an interview with Kentucky radio station WVLK.
Trump's birthright proposal came one day after the Pentagon said it would send more than 5,000 U.S. troops to the southern border to prepare for what Trump has called an "invasion" of asylum-seeking migrants slowly making their way through Mexico.
Some observers see the focus on immigration as politically-motivated.
"One gets the sense that he hasn't thought through the details very strongly," David Graham, staff writer at The Atlantic, said about Trump's birthright proposal in an interview Tuesday on Cheddar. "What he's really concerned with is the rhetoric and how it plays politically."
"He's remembering 2016 and seeing the magic he got talking about immigration," Graham continued, "Hoping he can recreate that and pull a win out."
However, Shannon Vavra, a political reporter at Axios, noted that Trump has long railed against so-called "anchor babies" and other longstanding immigration policies such a "chain migration," which refers to immigrants sponsoring family members to come to the U.S. She said the timing may just be Trump being Trump.
"The timing of it is definitely questionable at this point," she said, "but President Trump tends to do what he wants to do."
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/trump-says-hell-end-birthright-citizenship).
The National Emergencies Act of 1976 was passed in an attempt to regulate the president's ability to declare open-ended national emergencies. The point of the law, commentators said at the time, was to give Congress the power of oversight on matters of national urgency. It is perhaps ironic then that President Trump announced he will, under the provisions of that law, declare a national emergency as a way to circumvent Congress and build a border wall.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Friday, Feb, 15, 2019.
Amazon's decision to pull its new HQ2 out of New York City is very bad for the city ー and a sign that the home of Wall Street is falling victim to anti-business attitudes, according to former CKE Restaurants CEO Andy Puzder. "I think it's a hit to the New York economy. New York is a big city, it's a strong city, but it used to be the home to capitalism. Now it's coming under some of these socialist policies and it's going to lose companies like Amazon ($AMZN)," Puzder told Cheddar on Thursday.
Amazon has backed out of its plan to build a second headquarters in Queens, New York. The abrupt decision shocked even those who opposed Amazon's planned expansion in Long Island City. Cheddar spoke with Jimmy Van Bramer, deputy leader of the New York City Council.
A day before the anniversary of the Parkland shooting, a massacre that re-framed the debate over gun control as a defining cause of Gen Z, Congress advanced its first piece of gun legislation in decades. Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a newly elected Democrat from a Parkland-adjacent district who sits on that committee, discussed the victory with Cheddar.
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Thursday, Feb. 14, 2019.
Catching a ride in New York just got more expensive, and passengers aren't the only ones complaining. "It's a problem for the drivers," Aleksey Medvedovskiy, the president of NYC Taxi Group, told Cheddar Wednesday. "It's a problem for the general public."
These are the headlines you Need 2 Know for Wednesday Feb. 13, 2019.
The daunting task of paying back astronomical student loans may soon be less taxing, California Congressman Scott Peters tells told Cheddar Tuesday. Rep. Peters (D-Calif.) has received 99 co-sponsors on his bipartisan Employer Participation in Repayment Act, which would allow employers to contribute to their employees' student loan payments, tax-free.
The shocking rise in teen vaping is a public health crisis that the FDA has been slow to address, according to a nationally recognized cardiologist. Dr. Kevin Campbell, who is also CEO of Pace Mate, a digital cardiac monitoring service, said the recent study from the CDC that linked vaping to a spike in teen tobacco use shows that more serious steps need to be take. The first step? Get rid of the flavored nicotine "pods," which Campbell said are acting as a gateway for teenage beginner vapers to get hooked on nicotine.
