politics
Who Counts as an American?
I listened to the oral argument on birthright citizenship & so many people on bluesky were just straight-up wrong.
E.g. people were saying that the mere Q of whether Native Americans are citizens due to birthright citizenship is racist… But Wang (arguing for the ACLU) says it is not birthright.
[image or embed]— Kate Sills (
[@katelynsills.com](http://katelynsills.com)
)
Even if the specific question isn’t racist, the project which led to yesterday’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court definitely is. My parents were not citizens when they had my sister and I in the 1970s. The 14th Amendment is why we have birthright citizenship. Dishonest arguments and political rhetoric are how “who is a citizen?” became subject to the whim of popular opinion rather than the 14th Amendment and 150 years of jurisprudence. Any and all arguments that the definition of birthright citizenship should be smaller than that definition are being advanced by people who want to return to either the pre-civil rights era caste system of this country’s history—or the pre-Civil War era one which drew the circle of citizenship around landowning white men and no one else. The rancid fruit of birtherism from the start of the Trump era fell from a tree with deep roots.
GORSUCH: Do you think Native Americans are birthright citizens under your test?
SAUER: Ah, I think … so. I have to think that through.
[image or embed]— Aaron Rupar (
[@atrupar.com](http://atrupar.com)
)
Gorsuch's question of whether or not Native Americans are birthright citizens was an obvious and predictable one. Sauer’s lack of preparedness to answer that question should be embarassing, if not a firing offense. But it lays plain the objective of Trump’s regime—to reinstate the caste system which existed in this country prior to the success of the civil rights movement. The question of whether or not invaded people want the citizenship of the invader—applicable to every Native American tribe as it is—also applies to the Hawaiian, the Virgin Islander, the Puerto Rican, the Samoan, and the people of Guam. I’m not a Spanish speaker, but the phrase “Hawaii no, no” during Ricky Martin’s segment of Bad Bunny’s halftime show seemed (to me) to refer to how Hawai’i became part of the United States and a possibly a wish for Puerto Rico not to be treated the same way (I learned later my guess was correct). Reading The Great Oklahoma Swindle and trying to fit it into the context of the broader history of the country, one conclusion I’ve drawn is that the treatment of Native Americans by the federal government was a key part of the template for how they would later treat people in the territories they conquered outside the United States.
What passes as history instruction to children in the United States has many gaps. Unlike the absence of teaching about the Great Migration (my experience of high school American history), we got a bit about the Spanish-American War involving “Remember the Maine" and a little bit about yellow journalism. What we didn’t get was the larger context of how much fighting the United States did with the kingdom of Spain, how many lands became U.S. territories as a result—and how citizenship became conditional or required legislation to become automatic. The rights and privileges the people in these territories have by virtue of their relationship to the United States vary significantly (just like that of Native American tribes). The Jones Act is one example of a law which interferes with the ability of Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawaii, and Alaska to directly import what they need—a significant and continuing problem for Puerto Rico’s full recovery from Hurricane Maria as visually-depicted in a different part of Bad Bunny’s halftime show. Another thing I learned from one of my Crucian (person from St. Croix, USVI) friends, is that you can be a U.S. national, but not a U.S. citizen. For some time after the U.S. bought what we now call the U.S. Virgin Islands from the Dutch, the people on the island were U.S. nationals. It took legislation to make them birthright citizens, just as it did for Native Americans. It may still be the case that people born in American Samoa are U.S. nationals, who can choose to become naturalized citizens once they become adults. The difference in rights and responsibilities between U.S. nationals and U.S. citizens still seems caste-like to me.
In any case, the heart of the matter is this: the executive branch is asserting the right to decide by decree who counts as an American and who does not. The objective of Trump’s regime is to do to non-white Americans within the bounds of the United States what has already been done to people in territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands—take away their political power and remove the duty of the state to treat them equally. The same Supreme Court who reportedly expressed skepticism of the government’s position during oral arguments has already acceded to Trump’s demands along these lines on numerous occasions. Not only did they grant cert to these specious arguments in the first place, they ruled 6-3 that lower courts couldn’t use injunctions to block nationwide enforcement of Trump’s birthright citizenship decree less than a year ago. What many of us now call “Kavanaugh stops” was the Supreme Court legalizing racial profiling by Immigration & Customs Enforcement, an obvious and egregious violation of both the 4th Amendment and the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
So even if the Supreme Court rules against the executive branch as they should, they deserve no praise at all. Their prior rulings enabled an inciter of insurrection to appear on the ballot again in the first place. Their shadow docket rulings continue to enable Trump to sow chaos in the country and abroad. John Roberts (and William Rehnquist before him if we’re being fully honest) led the Supreme Court to legitimize numerous arguments which have resulted in non-white people being treated as "less than”. They’ve turned the court away from undoing the harms of the past to enabling old harms in the modern day—just as Chief Justice Roger Taney did in his day. The damage they have done still remains, even if birthright citizenship is spared for now. The long-term project of shrinking the circle of citizenship is very much still in progress. We should keep that in mind, even as we acknowledge the specific ways in which a question of citizenship might not be racist.
Thoughts on the Press on World Press Freedom Day
Were it not for emails requesting donations from The Center for Investigative Reporting and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, I wouldn’t have known today was World Press Freedom Day. I’ve been donating money to these organizations for years because I value and admire their work. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of a great deal of the mainstream press.
Some will disagree but I believe it fair to argue that many in the mainstream press used their freedom to aid and abet the return of Donald Trump to the White House by consistently drawing false equivalences between him and Kamala Harris, and by normalizing and sane-washing his statements prior to the election when they were anything but. In many ways, the biggest organs of the mainstream press continue the work of normalizing the abnormal whether it comes to continuing flurry of executive orders from the White House or the work of DOGE to infiltrate government and non-government entities alike to gain access to everyone’s private data.
For in-depth reporting on what’s happening in the Nation’s Capital (effectively my backyard since I live in a Maryland suburb), I must depend on publications like Wired, ProPublica, and other independent media sources instead of The Washington Post. Independent journalists like Marcy Wheeler (of Emptywheel), collectives like Flaming Hydra, and others are doing the vital work of actually informing the public in this moment. So on this World Press Freedom Day, if you’re not already doing so, donate and/or subscribe to an independent media organization using their press freedom for good–and share their work.
The Muscle Memory of Surrender: A Brief History of the Modern GOP
All of these smart Republicans who frankly did not understand how thoroughly corrupted their party had become, or the fact that if you cave in over and over again, you develop a muscle memory of surrender, and it’s hard to get back.
Charlie Sykes, The Bulwark Podcast, November 9, 2023
The quote above effectively summarizes the modern history of the GOP. Given his pre-Bulwark history in Wisconsin, perhaps he should have explicitly included himself in that collection of smart Republicans. Syke's interview with McKay Coppins just one week earlier on his new book Romney: A Reckoning served as a speed run of recent GOP history of how far and how quickly the party moved away from those so-called smart Republicans many years before they actually realized it. Syke's interview with Coppins actually jogs his own memory around 17 minutes into the interview that he actually had Donald Trump on his radio show at the time back in 2004.
When I listened to the interview, Romney's book sounded like an extended attack of conscience regarding his own role in paving the way for the GOP to move even further to the right. To me, Mitt's father George looks much better than his son by comparison because at every possible point, Mitt looked at the choices his father made (and the negative political consequences of those choices) and decided not to follow his father's example. George Romney turned around a struggling automaker in Detroit in the 1950s. George Romney supported the civil rights movement, even trying and failing to prevent the GOP from surrendering to the likes of Barry Goldwater and his ultimately successful efforts to push black voters out of the GOP. George Romney served the Nixon administration as HUD secretary, trying to increase the supply of housing available to the poor and to desegregate the suburbs, but was deliberately undermined by Nixon in many cases.
His son Mitt by contrast wrote a New York Time op-ed titled Let Detroit Go Bankrupt in 2008. In his 2012 run for president, he famously told a private audience of wealthy campaign donors that "Obama backers will vote for the president 'no matter what.' Romney said that they account for '47 percent' of voters and he does not 'worry about those people.'" Also during that campaign, Romney actively solicited the endorsement of Donald Trump--who was still actively fueling the birther conspiracy about Barack Obama at the time. Coppins cites numerous earlier examples of choices he consciously made in the interest of political expediency. A couple that stand out (though not as baldly and badly as seeking Trump's endorsement):
- taking a pro-choice position to win the gubernatorial race in Massachusetts despite his personal opposition to abortion
- talking about "repealing the death tax" as an applause line to an audience filled with people who would never have to pay it
The interview goes on to talk about Romney bowing the knee to Trump in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to be appointed Secretary of State (effectively because he didn't bow the knee far enough and publicly repudiate all the negative things he had said about Trump).
Perhaps the clearest indicators of the lack of understanding of the so-called smart Republicans that Sykes would criticize the following week can actually be found in the part of his interview with Coppins when they talk about who wins the GOP nomination in 2012 and 2008. Coppins expresses the belief (and Sykes seems to agree) that the turn of the GOP was a sudden one when in fact it was not. Here's what Sykes says per the transcript:
You know, it occurs to me that his nomination in 2012 in many ways was a false indicator because, the party had already begun to change dramatically, but we were able to tell ourselves as conservatives that the center would hold that this was still the party that would nominate George Bush and John McCain and Mitt Romney. So it's not the party of Pat Buchanan. It's not the party of Don[ald] Trump. I mean, they're there, but there's a reason why, you know, people like Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich don't ultimately win. Yes.
Charlie Sykes, The Bulwark Podcast, November 2, 2023
Sykes is at minimum 4 years too late in identifying the "false indicator" election for the GOP nomination. The John McCain who won the GOP nomination in 2008 was a far cry from the man who ran in 2000. The John McCain of 2000 who specifically (and correctly) named Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as agents of intolerance on the political right was replaced in 8 years by a version who made peace with them, and cemented their support by choosing Sarah Palin as his vice president. What I was not aware of at the time, was that Palin was known commodity among the ardently pro-life in the GOP. Mitt Romney placed a distant third in pledged delegates in the 2008 GOP primary, behind Mike Huckabee. In 2012, Romney would follow McCain's playbook in staking out hard right positions (for political expediency) to beat his contenders for the GOP presidential nomination only to be defeated when voters didn't buy his attempts to move back to the center for the general election. As Romney (and others in the GOP) would demonstrate again and again in subsequent years (through the Trump presidency to the present day), having power was more important than having integrity.
Now, even one of those in the GOP who briefly showed sufficient spine to vote in favor of impeaching Trump for his role in the January 6th insurrection has begun to develop his muscle memory for surrender. Peter Meijer, one of 10 House Republicans who did so (and was ultimately defeated for re-election as a result), has pledged to support the Republican nominee for president in his current run for the Senate--going even further to say that Joe Biden had done more to disgrace the office of the presidency than the man he voted to impeach just a couple of years ago.
Meijer is no worse than the current pretenders for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024. Nearly all remaining contenders pledged to support Trump even if he is convicted on one (or many) of the 91 different felonies he has been charged with. One angry social media outburst from Trump and the House speaker candidacy of Tom Emmer (notable for his relative lack of surrender to Trumpist priorities) went down in flames. His replacement--Mike Johnson--is unknown and inexperienced as a legislator, but was one of the key advocates of the Big Lie regarding the 2020 election and still to this day refuses to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the election. Even as Trump-backed candidates and priorities continue to cost them victory after victory in ballot initiatives (like the one in Ohio that put the right to abortion into the state constitution) and in elections (like the ones in Virginia that saw Democrats retake full control of the General Assembly and the Kentucky gubernatorial election that kept the Democrat Andy Beshear in power and rejected the Republican state attorney general Daniel Cameron), the GOP's muscle memory for surrender to its most extreme elements is too strong for them to break.
Life and Religious Liberty for Me, But Not for Thee
With Amy Coney Barrett now on the Supreme Court and weighing in on cases, the payoff to the evangelical right for their unstinting support of Donald Trump becomes even clearer than it has already been. She joined a narrow majority to block COVID-19 limits on church occupancy. Despite numerous cases of COVID-19 outbreaks tied to church events (whether worship, choir practices, or other gatherings), despite over a quarter million Americans dead from COVID-19, the Supreme Court majority ignored the known science around how COVID-19 spreads because of "religious liberty". Much has been made of the fact that six of the nine justices on the Supreme Court are Catholic, but there were Catholic justices (including the Chief Justice) in the minority. Even the Pope was critical of those protesting restrictions on church attendance.
As someone who felt compelled to quit my first full-time job out of college because of constant pressure from my employer to work on my day of worship (as a Seventh-day Adventist, my family and I typically attend church on Saturday), I am angry that religious liberty is being used as the pretext to invalidate measures intended to preserve public health. When those measures (and stricter ones) have been applied elsewhere (parts of Europe, Australia, South Korea, New Zealand, etc), we've seen them work successfully in slowing and stopping the spread of COVID-19. Particularly because the same Supreme Court was not at all concerned about religious liberty when it came to the Muslim travel ban (the Quakers, among others, see the hypocrisy clearly), the ruling seems especially hollow. Plenty of churches (including my own) have stayed remote throughout the pandemic, either broadcasting services from empty sanctuaries except for themselves and musicians, or from home. I've given offering and tithed online. It is by no means an ideal experience, but given my own comorbidities it is better than risking my twins being orphaned.
Because Supreme Court confirmation fights (and the attendant press coverage) have focused so narrowly on where a nominee stands regarding Roe v. Wade, no attention has been paid to their stances regarding other issues quite relevant to life--and death. Invalidating restrictions on church occupancy during a pandemic is just one of the ways in which "pro-life" applies very poorly to describing where a justice actually stands. As the clock runs out on the Trump presidency, the Department of Justice under Bill Barr is accelerating the pace of executions. Barrett has already participated in her first capital punishment case on the Supreme Court. She did not recuse herself, nor register her opposition to the execution going forward as justices in the minority did.
I suppose it has always been this way, but when a lot of people talk about religious liberty, they only want it for themselves--and no one else.
The Real Problem with Biden's Bad Debate
The response to President Biden's subpar debate performance against Donald Trump creates an opportunity to talk about the poor choices black voters in particular face in seemingly every election in the United States. I'm talking about the reaction to the debate rather than the debate itself because I didn't watch it. Debates are not the same as governing, and what the Biden administration has accomplished legislatively (rather than just through executive orders) is more than enough to merit a second term. The immediate aftermath of the debate was filled with panic, both in my social media feeds and among friends I talk to regularly. The chattering class at the New York Times ran to fill their opinion columns with calls for Biden to resign (calls they very notably did not make when Donald Trump was convicted on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records). What I most noticed about every single panicked replacement plan I saw posed in social media is that they all involved stepping over Kamala Harris, the current Vice President of the United States who also happens to be a black woman (as well as southern Asian, on her mother's side).
When you call out liberals on this, you tend to get responses that look like this one:
Aside from the obvious virtue signaling, they tell you who has no clue, memory, or care of the way the actual Michelle Obama was treated while she was First Lady. I called it out as wishful thinking at the time, and while the original poster had very little to say in response, another person on Bluesky provided this helpful reminder of how both Barack Obama and Michelle Obama were once regarded:
The history of the Democratic Party taking black voters, our issues, and candidates from our communities for granted is not exactly a short one. As such, the idea among many hair-on-fire panickers about Biden's poor debate performance that they should simply replace Biden (and his vice president) with someone else that can beat Trump is not surprising. One proposed replacement, Pete Buttigieg (currently secretary of transportation), ran for president before and had his candidacy fail in large part because of a lack of connection to and interest in black voters and our issues. I haven't looked deeply at other prospective replacements regarding their connections to and interest in engaging black voters (in addition to other demographics), but the small percentage of black voters they represent suggests that they haven't had to care about black voters to win elections. The speed with which the powers-that-be in the party suggested that Biden be cast aside after the bad debate suggests to me a desire to no longer be beholden to black voters (and our interests) in the way Biden quite clearly is because his primary campaign was on life support before South Carolina and Jim Clyburn's intervention and now he is president.
Seth Moulton might be the best current representatives of the middle of a Democratic Party for whom the existence of black voters is an hindrance to his goal of having the party change its focus by "talk about [Biden's] bipartisan wins, like the infrastructure bill". Particularly when the GOP marches in lockstep behind the convicted felon who currently leads them, the insistence of Moulton's fellow "centrists" on bipartisanship dooms good policy to defeat. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema prevented the child tax credit from being expanded, erasing the gains made in the reduction of child poverty--which helped everyone while it was in place, including black folks.
According to Moulton, his party colleagues have "lost the middle" due to Biden's push for student-loan debt relief and "identity politics". When I looked up the demographics of the congressional district Seth Moulton represents, it turns out to be not only one of the whitest congressional districts in the country, but also rather well-off financially on average. It's quite revealing of a so-called centrist to point to "identity politics" as why the Democrats have supposedly lost the middle in an environment where the Supreme Court has made affirmative action in higher-education illegal and conservative school boards in so-called red states are busily banning books by and about black people. Despite not treating black people as a constituency to be respected, the Seth Moultons of the Democratic Party will be the first ones to turn around and blame us when his party loses elections they think they should win.
This isn't to suggest that the Biden administration has been an unambiguous plus for the black community either. While he did choose Kamala Harris as his vice president and nominated Ketanji Brown-Jackson to be the first black woman on the Supreme Court, along with passing economic recovery legislation that helped reduce unemployment among black people to the lowest level on record, he hasn't succeeded in reviving the Voting Rights Act from its nearly-dead state (thanks to judicial overreach from the conservative activists who sit on the Supreme Court). Biden has also been relentless pro-police, despite decreasing rates of violent crime, and despite the disproportionate impact of police violence on black communities. And that's before you get to the prior years of his political career which included mishandling the hearings which would ultimately result in Clarence Thomas being elevated to the Supreme Court, co-sponsoring a crime bill that paved the way for decades of mass incarceration of black folks, and legislation that stripped student borrowers of bankruptcy protections--which would ultimately be shown to disproportionately impact black borrowers.
The "indifference, unless it's an election year" approach of national Democrats is obvious enough that the GOP has made it part of their pitch to black voters. But a GOP approach that veers between the cartoonish (such as Trump's continuing insistence on the appeal of his mugshot to black voters), the insulting (literally anything Vivek Ramaswamy says), the dishonest (Tim Scott pretending that systemic racism doesn't exist), and voter suppression manages to be even worse. Any messages they might try to put forward about values, or fiscal responsibility, or entrepreneurship are largely undermined by Trump's corrupt business dealings, nepotism on behalf of his incompetent children, and his unconvincing attempts to even pay lip service to the idea of Christianity mattering even a little bit to him personally. But in the debate where Biden performed poorly, Trump may have managed to hit a new low even for him by warning both during the debate and a recent campaign rally that migrants are taking "Black jobs" and "Hispanic jobs" from Americans.
Predictably, we took "black jobs" and ran with it for fun on Black Twitter #BlackJobs, to flip Trump's nasty xenophobia into a way to highlight the variety of different work we do in this country. Sadly, given the disrespect I've observed and personally experienced online directed at black immigrants who are naturalized U.S. citizens or who have parents from abroad, there is definitely a small segment of black Americans Trump will succeed in attracting to his camp with xenophobia. Nor will I rule out the possibility of xenophobia succeeding in attracting a small number of Hispanic Americans. But the press is so focused on Biden's poor debate performance that they've almost entirely missed and failed to even comment on why this particular remark by Trump is revealing and important. Quinta Jurecic touches on why political media's handling of this might be inadequate:
Adam Serwer's reply provides necessary context as well:
Beyond nobody in the GOP even thinking to push back on the xenophobia of these remarks by Trump, having developed a very strong muscle memory for surrender during his reign of the party, it is necessary to take certain "never Trump" Republicans to task as well. Whether they recognize it or acknowledge it or not, the GOP we see today is one that to a man (and virtually all of them are men) that they helped create. On their watch, the GOP changed into a party that embraced the vision of Pat Buchanan and rejected the "kinder, gentler" conservatism of George W. Bush which despite the many flaws of his presidency (both foreign and domestic) managed to appeal to enough voters to win the popular vote in 2004, including between 40 and 44% of Hispanics. So while they have predictably joined the chorus of panic that would push Biden out in favor of some mythical moderate candidate who would appeal to enough of the electorate to beat Donald Trump, they are operating from the same Seth Moulton perspective that sees black voters and our issues as a inconvenience. They may oppose Donald Trump, but their views of black voters don't appear to be much more sophisticated than his.
So these are the choices of black voters--a Democratic Party that takes our votes and interests for granted, or a GOP who would rather suppress our votes and divide them than compete for them. Black voters ceased to be the largest minority group in the United States years ago, and both parties appear far more interested in pursuing Hispanic-American and Asian-American votes than black votes.