Trump Tells Supreme Court To Goooooooo F*ccccccccccck
Honestly, Joe Biden should have just done this.
It has been a little over five weeks since the Supreme Court (narrowly) decided that unilaterally rewriting the Fourteenth Amendment to eliminate birthright citizenship was one red line it would not cross. Thus was the Trump administration’s effort to fulfill Stephen Miller’s wet dreams of a whites-only America thwarted, at least for the moment.
But the thing about reactionary bigots is that, like the Terminator, they will never ever stop unless you can crush them in a hydraulic press or convince them to lower themselves into a vat of molten steel. (And believe us, we’re not standing in anyone’s way.) Which means that on Thursday, Donald Trump signed two executive orders predicated on the administration asking this question: Yes, we lost on this issue at the Supreme Court. But what if we pretended we didn’t?
As various scholars and lawyers and people who can read have explained ad infinitum to Trump and his merry klavern of people who stroke out when told to press 1 for English, the language of the Fourteenth Amendment is very plain. Or at least as plain as language in the Constitution gets. Chief Justice John Roberts noted this in his majority decision in June’s Trump v. Barbara: Children born in the United States and therefore “subject to the jurisdiction therof” are citizens at birth. The words do not mean anything else, no matter how much they give Sam Alito a sad.
Thursday’s EOs are based on the long-discredited claim that the writers of the Fourteenth Amendment only meant birthright citizenship to apply to the children of slaves, a claim that Ketanji Brown Jackson pretty much demolished in her concurrence in Barbara. But the Trump administration has a very simple argument: If we ignore Jackson, we can pretend there are still loopholes to be found here.
Thus, the first order claims to bar “automatic citizenship [for] specific categories of people” who fit certain criteria: Children born to two noncitizen parents who are in America to work for their nation in some other capacity, noncitizens in America temporarily on a student or work or some other sort of temporary visa, “birth tourists,” and anyone born to noncitizen parents if one parent is a member of a foreign terrorist organization. Whew, what a relief to know that all those Hollywood fantasies of foreigners raising sleeper cells of terrorists who will suicide-bomb a mall as soon as they are old enough will stay fantasies.
The second order goes into more detail on stopping birth tourism, which is a nativist bugaboo that has driven the Stephen Millers of the world insane for years. More insane, we should say.
If you can stand it, here is 20 minutes of Trump and his minions in the Oval Office signing the orders while Miller, who is so translucent that he looks like a bunch of egg whites that have barely set, yammers on and on about how he pisses his pants in terror every time he hears someone mention empanadas, so therefore all of America needs to be a safe space for white people:
By the way, why did none of you tell us that Stephen’s wife Katie had a fling with disgraced sex pest Eric Swalwell before she met and married her Nosferatu-lookalike motherfucker of a husband? Well deserved, Stupid Renfield.
Anyway, Miller spends a few moments first claiming that no one seriously ever thought the Fourteenth Amendment was about anything other than slavery (FALSE FALSE FALSE YOU BALD TROGLODYTE) before pretending that the Barbara decision meant the Supreme Court was giving the Trump administration permission to do things that it very much did not do.
Miller claimed that the president was “using the new ruling the Supreme Court issued to expand the definitions of people who are ineligible for birthright citizenship.” This is probably news to the Supreme Court. These orders are clearly aimed at getting someone to sue so the administration can go back to SCOTUS and say, Hey, how about now, can we be discriminatory assholes based on flimsy ahistorical arguments now?
The administration is also making the argument that it always makes, that its actions protect the “value” of American citizenship, like it’s a finite resource that will lose value if you flood the market. Newsflash, idiots: American citizenship is not the same thing as a goddamn collectible Cabbage Patch doll.
The good news is that these are executive orders, which have the legal force of wet cardboard. EOs are basically advisory memos to staffers. They would have more legitimacy if they ordered all federal employees to remember to make their weekly blood sacrifice of a foreign orphan to the Infernal Starspawn of Cthulhu. That order, for all we know, is still being drafted.
[AP]
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More time-wasting performative bullshit, while meanwhile we're getting humiliated in Iran, we've depleted our weapons supply, the economy is in a shambles, the Reflecting Pool is still a disaster, and the BALLROOM progress has been halted by the courts.
Ye gods, the place is looking like a flea market! Is that a taxidermied Miller?