The Truth About the Birthright Citizenship Nonsense

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."-U. S. Constitution, Amendment 14

Before getting to my argument, I would like to remind you of a little history.  The absolute nature of this provision, which allows for no exceptions, exists for one reason:  by the time of its passage, in 1868, it was already clear that Southern dead enders were engaged in serious attempts to strip former slaves of their citizenship.  The law was passed to prevent this.  Its absolute character is  a result of the racist inclinations of many white Americans, and it is that racism, therefore, which bears the blame for the consequences of the fourteenth amendment.  Had these white people done the decent thing and truly reconciled with the victims of slavery, this amendment would have never been necessary; if they don't like it, it is their own fault that it exists.

Well, leaving that aside, I now want to talk about the true purpose of Trump's attempt to destroy this passage of the Constitution through royal decree.  And in stating what I am about to say, I feel called upon to state openly that I first realized in the 1980's that it was the intent of the Republican party to destroy any semblance of popular government in the United States, to replace it with an oligarchic dictatorship responsive only to the couple thousand sociopaths whom they would deliberately enrich until they had the money necessary to finance its takeover.  I have suffered endless derision over the years by my absolute defense of that notion; these days, I don't think it seems far-fetched to many.

This issue needs to be tied to another issue, to make the Republicans' attempts clear for what they really are, and that is the imprisoning of thousands of immigrant children in what are, not to dodge the issue, concentration camps.  This has been taken by the left as a racist attack, and it is certainly that, but it is also something far more malignant.  By selecting just about the weakest and most defenseless group they can find, and throwing them in these camps, the Republicans have begun the process of establishing that it is perfectly legal for the President of the United States to imprison people who have committed no crime, merely on his own whim.

Now, birthright citizenship, which is basically the same vicious story.  Trump and the Republicans have selected a large group of Americans who they have decided have essentially no support at all among his xenophobic base, and they are now claiming the right for the President of the United States, by fiat, and in a clearly unconstitutional act, to strip millions of their citizenship and eject them from the country (or perhaps place them in concentration camps, where history tells us what is likely to happen to them.)  If this happens, Republicans will have established the right of the President to revoke any passage of the Constitution.  There is a name for that sort of leader, as there is for those that claim the right to imprison citizens without any legal process whatsoever.

There is no doubt about this any more.  We are facing a highly developed and financed open attempt by the Republican party to reduce this country to a fascist dictatorship, and at this point the attempt is succeeding.  The dodging of the obvious necessary in order to deny this today is overwhelming, yet there are many millions of propagandized zombie voters out there who refuse to see the truth, and are thrilled to contribute to the open destruction of everything that ever made this country different from Nazi Germany, or fascist Italy, or Saudi Arabia  or Putin's Russia.  That is what these people yearn for, and any supposedly liberal person who refuses to acknowledge that is hastening the end of the American dream.