Give me that old time Constitution
by Tom Sullivan
It was good for Samuel Adams. It’s good enough for me.
Donald Trump’s championing the elimination of birthright citizenshhip is a xenophobe’s dream. Trump is getting enough mileage out of hyping the “anchor baby” threat that many among the Republican presidential field are drafting off him, hoping to hang on long enough to pass him in the final laps. Talking Points Memo’s David Leopold debunks some of the nonsense, summing up Trump’s immigration reform plan in four words: They have to go.
When it comes down to it, the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment has very little to do with immigration; it is fundamentally focused on the preservation of civil rights. Trump’s extremist proposal to end birthright citizenship — whether by elimination or reinterpretation of the Citizenship Clause — comes at the grave cost of abridging civil rights, even hearkening back to the days of Dred Scott, when people were viewed as commodities to be bought and sold.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you listen to conservative talk radio in Iowa. Media Matters reports:
Iowa radio host and influential conservative kingmaker Jan Mickelson unveiled an immigration plan that would make undocumented immigrants who don’t leave the country after an allotted time “property of the state,” asking, “What’s wrong with slavery?” when a caller criticized his plan.
Calling the Iowa state fair “the carnival of the damned,” Charlie Pierce wonders why any American politician would ever engage, not with Mickelson, but with the audience that tunes in for this sort of vulgarity.
Michael Keegan from People for the American Way condemns Republicans for entertaining the notion that we abandon the 14th Amendment:
The Republican presidential contenders’ rush to badmouth a basic constitutional right — in an apparent attempt to appeal to their supposedly Constitution-loving far-right base — speaks volumes about what they really mean when they talk about constitutionalism. They use their pocket Constitutions for the parts that come in handy. The rest of it? Not so much.
Besides, the Founders didn’t pass the 14th Amendment, so technically it’s not really the Constitution, is it? Give us that old time Constitution, back when we didn’t need the specter of voter fraud to justify keeping lesser-thans from the polls.
“Flexibility is the first principle of politics,” Richard Nixon once told a new staffer, Rick Perlstein wrote. Whether it’s the Constitution or the Bible, that flexibility is baked into the right’s anti-gay wedding cake.
They not only tolerate the relativism of which they accuse the left, they embrace it. Betsy Woodruff at the Daily Beast explains that far from being shunned by the GOP’s evangelical base, the religious right is embracing Trump in spite of his whatever faith, his string of marriages, and advocating “getting even” in his speech at Liberty University. After all, an eye for an eye is in the Bible, right?
Watch how often believers in nominally Christian America reference the Bible. Except when the Savior’s New Testament teachings about loving your neighbor, caring for the poor, rendering unto Caesar and turning the other cheek make them feel that Christ is too soft on personal responsibility or too left on social issues. Then they turn to the 39 pre-Christian books of the Bible filled with good, Old Testament-fashioned smiting and stoning and vengeance and wrath of God stuff – hoping to get a second opinion.
Old Testament Patriots approach America’s founding the same way. The Constitution is holy writ, yes, but when keeping to its laws and principles makes them feel soft on terror and people less American than they are, right-wingers turn to pre-ratification letters and speeches by the founders – particularly the ones whose ideas lost early arguments as the Constitution took shape – hoping to get a second opinion.