I guess Fredo was an appropriate nickname — Alberto Gonzales’s piece in the Post Outlook section is everything that we’ve come to expect from his years of government service. That sentence Ramesh quoted below is in this paragraph:

I do not support such an amendment. Based on principles from my tenure as a judge, I think constitutional amendments should be reserved for extraordinary circumstances that we cannot address effectively through legislation or regulation. Because most undocumented workers come here to provide for themselves and their families, a constitutional amendment will not solve our immigration crisis. People will certainly continue to cross our borders to find a better life, irrespective of the possibilities of U.S. citizenship.

That’s basically all he says about our citizenship practices, in a op-ed that’s ostensibly about the subject: the headline in the paper version is “‘Anchor babies’ aren’t the problem with immigration” and the online headline is “Changing the 14th Amendment won’t solve our immigration crisis.” But this piece doesn’t even try to make an argument — Gonzales simply asserts, once, that changing citizenship rules wouldn’t do any good, and spends the rest of the piece arguing for amnesty. I happen to agree that citizenship changes “aren’t the problem with immigration,” but why not? What would be the implications of changing citizenship rules? What are the real problems caused by the phenomenon of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizen children being born each year to illegal aliens? Why doesn’t any other country of immigration have such leniency? These aren’t extraneous questions — they’re the core of the debate. And yet this former attorney general and judge simply has nothing to say other than “our immigration process is broken” and “there are jobs Americans do not want.”

In the wake of Google News, Google Earth, Google Translate, and so on, maybe Gonzales’s article was the product of beta testing for Google Op-ed — type in a few trite phrases, hit enter, and out comes an 800-word opinion piece.