Too Far Even For Keyes
by digby
When Alan Keyes sounds like their voice of reason you know the GOP has gone over the cliff:
KEYES: The 14th Amendment is not something that one should play with lightly. I noticed, finally, that Lindsey Graham, used the term — as people have carelessly done over the years — referring to the 14th Amendment as something that has to do with birthright citizenship, and that we should get rid of birthright citizenship. Now let me see, if birthright citizenship is not a birthright, then it must be a grant of the government. And if it is a grant of the government, then it could be curtailed in all the ways that fascists and totalitarians always want to. I think we ought to be real careful before we adopt a view we want to say that citizenship is not a reflection of our unalienable rights. It is not a grant of government, but arises from a set of actual conditions, starting with the rule of God, that constrain government to respect the rights of the people, and therefore the rights that involve the claim of citizenship. Those are really deep, serious issues, and when the amendment was written, and when it was first referred to in the Slaughterhouse cases, the Supreme Court declared that they knew they were touching on something that was absolutely fundamental. And I think before we play games with it in any way, we need to remember that ourselves.
And when “the rule of God” starts sounding like the reasonable alternative you know we’ve all gone over the cliff.
What’s going to be the “bipartisan compromise” on this one, do you suppose? All babies “dropped” by immigrants must pass a citizenship test? Only good European and Canadian anchor babies are allowed automatic citizenship because they will be born of “producers” rather than “parasites”? I don’t know where they can go with this one.
I knew they were going to eventually get to this nativist crapola. It’s an All American response to economic stress, after all, and always a fond fallback of Know Nothings under any circumstances. I guess we have made progress because I thought they’d get to it much earlier.
After all, the major thinkers of the right have been talking about this for quite a while. This was from 2007:
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