Lindsey Graham is second to none when it comes to shameless pandering and preening. Impress the liberal media? Why else slam the Bush administration’s position on detainees and enhanced interrogation techniques? Show he’s about the mere partisanship of his fellow Democrats? Why else vote to confirm unqualified judicial activists for the Supreme Court? But nothing quite tops this:

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Thursday that he’s talked with other senators about crafting a constitutional amendment that would deny American citizenship to illegal immigrants’ children born in the United States.

Graham’s idea is a stunning reversal for a senator whose advocacy of giving legal status to the country’s 12 million undocumented workers is so well known that conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh and many of his listeners call him “Sen. Grahamnesty.”

Graham, along with President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., were GOP leaders of a 2007 failed Senate effort to enact comprehensive immigration reforms including a path to legal residency or citizenship for illegal immigrants.

Even the most aggressive figures on immigration reform think this is idiotic. Although we agree on practically nothing concerning this issue, I fully concur with Mark Krikorian on this one:

Children who would have been citizens, Krikorian said, would become illegal aliens were Graham’s constitutional amendment pass Congress and be ratified by the states.

“I’m exactly against changing this,” he said. “I think it’s sort of a stupid thing. You would end up with lots of U.S.-born illegal immigrants. There’s something like 300,000 kids born here to illegal immigrants every year.”

Graham is, of course, talking about changing the Fourteenth Amendment, which has become the cornerstone of civil-rights jurisprudence for a century and a half. The idea of mucking with the definition of citizenship and tossing out those born to foreigners on American soil is so alarming and lacking in common sense that one has to question what Graham is doing on the Senate Judiciary Committee. That after all, is the committee meant to host those senators who have some interest in and grasp of our Constitutional traditions. Graham routinely demonstrates he is short on both. Maybe it’s about time he were booted from his perch.