Chalk it up perhaps to election-year bizarreness, but suddenly the capital is debating whether the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution ought to be repealed, refined or left alone.

Specifically, the back-and-forth, which started among Senate Republicans and was joined Tuesday by the White House, focuses on the amendment's citizenship clause.

A pair of Republican senators -- Jon Kyl of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- are not so sure the amendment's intent was to grant automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to parents here illegally.

On Monday, Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) raised the stakes, saying, "We ought to take a look at it -- hold hearings, listen to the experts on it."

"I haven't made a final decision about it, but that's something that we clearly need to look at," he told The Hill newspaper. "Regardless of how you feel about the various aspects of immigration reform, I don't think anybody thinks that's something they're comfortable with."

Enter the White House, which has spoken loudly of the need for comprehensive immigration reform but, in the view of some senators and Latino activists, failed to push very hard in favor of the politically difficult legislation during a mid-term election year.

Asked to respond to McConnell's assertion Tuesday that the federal government's lawsuit challenging Arizona's strict immigration law was "a blatant political move to help [Obama's] reelection," White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs referred to the senator's comments of the previous day.

"Didn't he ... surmise that we ought to take a look at the 14th Amendment?" Gibbs asked reporters at the daily briefing. "I don't know if that was based on 2010 or 2012, but my hunch is it's based purely on politics."

Okay, so it's all about politics. And immigration politics are difficult for both parties, a wedge issue that divides Republicans and Democrats by geography and philosophy.

So talking about the 14th Amendment - repeal or not to repeal - is a way of talking about immigration to the party bases without much chance that anything will actually happen as a result.

Perfect politics in an election year.