It Is Bad for Your Mental Health to Learn About the American Right's Truly Believes: HORROR OF THE DAY
Kate Riga has (some of) the goods on the Republican Party's core supporters today...
The key thing to understand about this is that for every one who says this, a hundred think it—but have the shame or the fear to not say it—and a thousand believe that it may be overstated, but they have a point. That is the lesson from watching who Red State Republicans vote for in primary after primary and, with only a few of them holding their noses, for office after office…
Over at Talking Points Memo <http://talkingpointsmemo.com>:
Kate Riga: Republican Meltdowns Over Birthright Citizenship Decision, Ranked in Order of Sanity <https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/republican-meltdowns-birthright-citizenship-supreme-court>: ‘The right is incandescent with rage over the Supreme Court…. 6-3 ruling (but really 5-4 on constitutional grounds), the Court ruled that children born on American soil to undocumented immigrants or those temporarily present are citizens, despite a Trump executive order to the contrary…. [That] is cause for prolific online tantrums…
She notes:
Troy Nehls (R-TX): <https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/2072082822941262138>: ‘We gotta put a bedsheet―a big bedsheet ― over the Statue of Liberty. She’s gotta go to sleep for a while ’cause we’re not letting anybody in anymore…. Instead of having a torch, maybe it needs a stop sign…
Matt Walsh: ‘It turns out that Amy Coney Barrett is a DEI hire, little better than Kentanji Jackson. Terrible pick…
Andy Ogles (R-TN): <https://twitter.com/RepOgles/status/2072014309614346549>: ‘Under my bill, under my legislation, we fix that and go back to what our founders intended. So in short, what this bill does is if you are a pregnant woman, you can’t come into this country. You got to be a citizen, be here, you have to be a green card holder. So if you’re pregnant and you don’t have one of those statuses, no admittance allowed…
Lauren Boebert (R-CO): <https://twitter.com/RepBoebert/status/2071997114222071920?s=20>: ‘The State Department should IMMEDIATELY cease to give out visas to pregnant applicants. Sorry, Birth Tourism cannot continue…
Stephen Miller: ‘The idea that you could have a cruise ship filled with foreigners and they just dock at a port for an hour, and someone has a baby, Jesse, the baby’s an American citizen!” They can vote in every election for the rest of their lives! They could be living in a foreign country and be cashing welfare checks for American citizens!…
Sean Davis: ‘Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners…. Deny entry to all female foreigners…. Require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry…
Donald Trump does not understand—and nobody is willing to tell him—that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, not something that can be undone by legislation (unless Jackson, Sotomayor, or Kagan were to be replaced by a Trump lackey, or Barrett or Roberts were to be replaced by a more complete Trump lackey):
Donald Trump: ‘The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process. No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support! President DONALD J. TRUMP…
And Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch are out-and-out liars about the legal history, or out of their minds, or both:
Katenji Brown Jackson: Concurrence <https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/trump-v-barbara/>: ‘Despite his longstanding endorsement of a “colorblind” Constitution, JUSTICE THOMAS now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure, relating only to “freed slaves such as Dred Scott,” and those who shared with them certain characteristics (“no other homeland”); (“called America home”). It is for this reason, he says, that “children who were born in the United States but [to parents] not domiciled here” are not entitled to claim birthright citizenship. But that narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification….
Consensus about the Fourteenth Amendment’s central motivation does not justify JUSTICE THOMAS’s myopic treatment of it. The Amendment caused a paradigm shift in the trajectory of our Nation; the teacher who scolds a student for bullying a classmate hopes the student learns the broader lesson of treating everyone with kindness, not just that one kid. In the aftermath of the Civil War, those who championed the Fourteenth Amendment—both within and beyond Congress—understood the assignment. Their work product used “language that transcended race and region,” and thereby “changed and broadened the meaning of freedom for all Americans.”2 Instead of the limited salve the principal dissent makes it out to be, the Citizenship Clause reflects this universalist approach….
Do note this: The citizenship thesis of the Colored Conventions was thus not that some new status should be created and conferred on freed Blacks. It was instead that freed Blacks already had a rightful claim to citizenship because they had been born on American soil…. Freed Blacks did not advocate for a unique set of rules that catered only to their situation. Nor did they seek to advance their own position relative to, or at the expense and exclusion of, other marginalized groups. Instead, those whose gatherings helped galvanize the push for full equality understood that “[a] diverse origin does not disprove a common nature, nor does it disprove a united destiny.” The firmest foundation for freedom would require an anticaste reset—“both for his sake and for ours”—and would benefit all….
Senator Trumbull, along with those colleagues who took up the same mantle… expressly rejected… [the] narrow framing…. Notably focusing his attention beyond freed former slaves, Senator Edgar Cowan, for example, argued that German immigrants’ children born in Pennsylvania should be citizens, but Chinese immigrants’ children should not…. Senator Trumbull emphasized that the law he had drafted drew no such distinctions…. Senator John Conness of California, where anti-Chinese sentiment was arguably most pronounced, responded that “the children begotten of Chinese parents in California . . . shall be citizens.” In fact, he said, the Civil Rights Act had already declared “that the children of all parentage whatever . . . should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States.” No Senator rose to agree with Senator Cowan or dispute what Senator Conness had said. And no Senator said what the principal dissent says today: that the text at issue conferred citizenship only on freed Blacks and those in analogous situations….
The debates went similarly with respect to the Roma people, who were referred to at the time as “gypsies.” When asked whether native-born Romani children would be birthright citizens of the United States under the proposed Civil Rights Act, Senator Trumbull replied: “Undoubtedly.” President Andrew Johnson apparently agreed. In his message vetoing the Act, Johnson noted with disapproval that, under the law, “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” would be birthright citizens. Without making any changes to the bill or responding that Johnson was mistaken in his understanding of it (or otherwise capitulating to Johnson’s views in any respect), Congress overrode that presidential veto.
During the ratification debates, Senator Cowan took aim at the Roma people too, characterizing them as undeserving of birthright citizenship because they “wander[ed] in gangs,” “infest[ed] society,” and “impos[ed] upon the simple and weak everywhere.” And again, Senator Conness dismissed Senator Cowan’s prejudices: “The only invasion of Pennsylvania within my recollection was an invasion very much worse and more disastrous to the State, and more to be feared and more feared, than that of Gypsies. It was an invasion of rebels [at Gettysburg].” When ratified, the Citizenship Clause thus vindicated the universalist vision of the delegates at the Colored Conventions and their allies in Congress…
Unless a large number of lifelong Republicans make a permanent break with the party, the US is doomed, even in the event of a big Democratic win in 2028. No democracy can survive when 40 per cent of the population are reliably fascist.
Justice Jackson demonstrates a thorough command of the history and law surrounding this point. Thank you for presenting it. I might have missed it and it was a pleasure to read.