For your consideration, some light reading
Let’s start this morning with an aside.
Trump The Ignorant’s longstanding claim that the U.S. is “the only country in the world” that awards citizenship to persons born within its territory is not true. The years have not informed the “stable genius” otherwise. Donald Trump thus signed a disputed executive order on Day One of his second term purporting to revoke the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.
It is an institution with English roots and a U.S. tradition before Americans codified it in 1868. Nativist radicals like Trump, his coterie, and his cult now wish its destruction. We’ll see them in court. A federal judge on Jan. 22 temporarily enjoined the order for fourteen days.
The Cato Institute, the D.C.-based, Koch-funded think tank, features on its landing page this morning “There Is No Good Reason to Revoke Birthright Citizenship.” The practice stems from as early as Calvin’s Case in 1608:
In 1869, the British jurist Lord Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn summed up English law as:
By the common law of England, every person born within the dominions of the Crown, no matter whether of English or of foreign parents, and, in the latter case, whether the parents were settled or merely temporarily sojourning, in the country, was an English subject, save only the children of foreign ambassadors (who were excepted because their fathers carried their own nationality with them), or a child born to a foreigner during the hostile occupation of any part of the territories of England. No effect appears to have been given to descent as a source of nationality.
That was the aside.
David J. Bier, Director of Immigration Studies at Cato, testified before the House Judiciary
Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement last week on the same day as the judge’s order (C-Span). He described an immigration system left “in shambles” by the first Trump administration and improved by Joe Biden, thus drawing the ire of Republican members.
Since Republican members doubted data in his presentation, Bier decided to present them Sunday in a long thread on X as he had in a Substack on Jan. 16. (“Biden Didn’t Cause the Border Crisis“).
Bier told the committee:
“President Trump abused his authority to cut legal immigration from abroad by nearly 80 percent.”
“Refugees by 92 percent.”
“He shut down asylum for legal crossers.”
“He removed requirements to target public safety threats. As a result, he released twice as many convicted criminals from detention as President Biden.”
“He forced US attorneys to prioritize misdemeanor family separation prosecutions of parents over sex offenders.”
“By the time President Biden took office, the US immigration system was in shambles. Immigration courts, consulates, ports of entry—all shuttered. Even detention centers were at half capacity.”
There’s more (with charts) you can review at the links above.
The other posting I invite you to review comes from historian Heather Cox Richardson.
Abraham Lincoln, then 28, in his 1838 Lyceum speech, “The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” warned of the sort of men who, “Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane,” thus “make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much as its total annihilation.”
(You don’t need a weatherman to know which way this wind blows.)
The Lyceum speech argued for the defense of American institutions and law while arguing that bad laws should be repealed. “But the underlying structure of the rule of law, based in the Constitution,” Richardson recounts, “could not be abandoned without losing democracy.”
Lincoln didn’t stop there. He warned that the very success of the American republic threatened its continuation. “[M]en of ambition and talents” could no longer make their name by building the nation—that glory had already been won. Their ambition could not be served simply by preserving what those before them had created, so they would achieve distinction through destruction.
For such a man, Lincoln said, “Distinction will be his paramount object, and although he would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire it by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down.” With no dangerous foreign power to turn people’s passions against, people would turn from the project of “establishing and maintaining civil and religious liberty” and would instead turn against each other.
And hand men of cruel ambition the power to do it, Lincoln didn’t say.
The passions that gave birth to the American experiment must fade, Lincoln said, and they had. To sustain it would require “general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”
Lincoln would face in just over 20 years a different kind of passion, one fed not by a thirst for national liberation but by the need of a regional privileged class to maintain the bondage of a permanent underclass and its own cultural and political supremacy. That passion has not faded in over a century and a half and may yet unmake “the proud fabric of freedom” for us all.
Lincoln invoked the name of Washington as inspiration for maintaining what the Revolution had birthed. Don’t expect to hear Trumpists invoke Lincoln’s name as inspiration for saving the constitution and laws they mean to destroy.
