Contributors

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Just What Does Trump Think He Is?

Donald Trump thinks he can erase the 14th Amendment with a scrawl of his pen and eliminate birthright citizenship. He has now claimed, “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years, with all of those benefits.”

Of course, like most everything this gasbag belches, this is an outright lie. Dozens of countries colonized by Europe, mostly in the Western Hemisphere, have what is called jus soli, or "right of the soil." For example, Canada and Mexico have birthright citizenship, like the United States does.

Birthright citizenship has been a bugaboo for white nationalists for a long time, though they usually use the derogatory term "anchor babies." Trump harped on this during the campaign in 2015. So why is he trotting it out again just now?

That's an easy one: the synagogue shooting in Pennsylvania. Just a week before an important election Trump had to publicly repudiate the murder of eleven American Jews by a fellow white nationalist.

But to assure other white nationalists he was still one of them, Trump had to do something to prove he's still a racist douche bag. Hence, the attack on the perennial favorite of white nationalists: anchor babies.

This looks like a cynical and transparent ploy to juice conservative turnout, because such an executive order cannot stand up in court. The president cannot overturn the Constitution all by his lonesome.

But if Trump really does believe he can do this, and that the Supreme Court he has packed with sycophants will rubber stamp a clear abrogation of the Constitution, it's even worse.

It means that Trump thinks he is a tyrant who can issue diktats according to his every whim.

That is what the Republicans accused Barack Obama of when he issued executive orders (which, by the way, numbered fewer than those written by George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, etc.).

You can make a reasoned argument that the Constitution should be amended so that only children born of permanent legal residents are citizens, as Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, etc., have done. A real president who was truly concerned about this issue would have proposed such an amendment shortly after his inauguration, not days before an election.

What you can't do is claim the president can do whatever the hell he wants, all to mollify sympathizers of racist nutjobs who shoot up places of worship.

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