Birthrights and Black Pills

Introduction

The Supreme Court’s failure last week to uphold the president’s executive order on birthright citizenship was genuinely disappointing. At the same time, it should not be an occasion for outrage or despair. There is all kinds of maneuvering room here. And. when you have maneuvering room, there are better things to do than to screech about it online. Let us pull ourselves together.

A Battle Is Not the Whole War

As all of us should know by now, if the decision had gone the other way, the progressives would be back by the middle of next week with some sort of workaround scheme that would still get them to the place they intend for all of us to go. They don’t discourage easily, and neither should we. We should also be back next week, full to overflowing with fresh proposals.

Quick breakdown. The SCOTUS vote was 6-3, and the three who supported Trump’s EO were Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch. The disappointing voices against were Roberts, Barrett, and Kavanaugh. The predictables against were Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson. So there you have it.

But right around the same time, there was another case coming out of West Virginia and our own Idaho (including representation from our kirker community), which banned men from participating in women’s sports. Righteousness prevailed in that one (6-3, not 5-4), and did so with Roberts, Barrett, and Kavanaugh all driving in the sane lane.

And also, just last month, the Supreme Court recognized and upheld the president’s authority to fire heads of federal agencies that are part of the executive branch. That was a significant blow against the deep state, and was also 6-3. That was a big one, and a good one.

So just remember . . . we still have swing votes on the Court, which does result in real disappointments from time to time. This decision on birthright citizenship was one of them. But everybody should also realize that the swing votes swing right far more often than they used to. It used to be that Kennedy was thought to be a swing vote. So we lost a knight, but don’t forget we took a bishop or two. And for us to treat our current swing votes as treasonous agents of Sauron seems counterproductive to me. Disappointed in them yes, but we need also remember that on the tranny case, and on the executive firing case, the left is also deeply disappointed in them.

And one of the justices who voted against Trump on the birthright issue (Kavanaugh) wrote a partial dissent, one in which he laid out a different path to eliminate birthright citizenship—just not by executive order. Kavanaugh said that eliminating birthright citizenship was not unconstitutional, but believed it needed to be dealt with in another way. So do it another way. On birthright citizenship, we are closer to victory than it feels.

A Short History

Prior to the War Between the States, the Dred Scott decision (1857) denied citizenship to the runaway slave Dred Scott, and did so on the basis of him being black. As an aside, this decision denied that Scott was a citizen, and did not deny that he was a person. Those two things must never be muddled.

After the war, in order to address the problem posed by this precedent, and to clarify the status of all the former slaves, the Reconstruction Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, which was a precursor to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (1868). And the money quote from that amendment reads as follows:

In his dissent, Justice Thomas was exactly right to argue that this was never intended to apply, say, to a pregnant Norwegian woman, seven months along, visiting here for the World Cup. What with all the excitement of so much soccer, and Buc-ee’s, and free soft drink refills, and the friendliness of small town Oklahoma, she went into labor early, and delivered an American man child. There are two key places in the phrasing above that don’t apply to her. They are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” and “wherein they reside.”

An originalist reading of this amendment requires us to recognize that we are talking about freed slaves, who were as American as their former masters were, who had lived here their entire lives, and who were not subject to any foreign jurisdiction. That is what they were talking about.

Still less does that phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” apply to an illegal alien who has come here, in defiance of the “jurisdiction thereof,” to give birth to an anchor baby. The fact that even her temporary presence here is against the law demonstrates that she is not intending to be subject to the jurisdiction thereof. She is temporary. She just got here. She is not a resident. She is not domiciled here. She remains a citizen of Guatemala, or Mexico, or Colombia. If she were a criminal back there, she could be extradited back to her home country and to the jurisdiction thereof. In short, she is not a freed American slave.

Now in 1898, there was a significant case that helped steer us wrong on all this, although it was not nearly as bad as this recent decision that was just handed down. This was United States v. Wong Kim Ark. That gent was born to Chinese parents residing in San Francisco, and doing so legally. As an adult, he visited China, and when he returned, he was denied entry. That case went up to the Supreme Court, and the Court decided in his favor, saying that his birth here had granted him citizenship. But residence was still a factor in that case, as it no longer is, although they were starting to fudge on “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

And so here we are now. It turns out that slippery slopes are pretty slippery.

Not Arcane Law

Back when these precedents were being set, it was hard to get all the way to the United States. You had to have both money and time. This meant that all the interesting cases were going to be in small enough numbers to be on the margins, always. It actually made very little practical difference to the general public how things fared for Wong Kim Ark as an individual.

But that is not the case anymore. If you couple this decision with the fact that in the last decade we have seen millions of illegals enter the country—somewhere north of 13 million—it makes a huge practical difference. And in fact, the obvious practical difference—when it comes to elections—is why this is happening at all. File the entire controversy under electoral shenanigans. The libertarian right wants cheap labor and the progressive left wants cheap votes. And don’t tell me that these folks can’t vote because they are not citizens. Citizen schmitizen. Have you been paying any attention at all? We are rapidly headed toward the argument that to deny any citizen of Earth the right to vote here is the same thing as denying his or her humanity. Absurd of course, but many conservatives have repeatedly demonstrated their inability to refute absurdities.

Decency and the Average Christian

Now most Christian citizens are not political geeks. They vote, and they pay some attention as elections approach, but they do not eat, sleep, or drink the latest political news. It takes quite a bit of a disturbance to get their attention—hot inflation will do it, an endless pointless war in which a kid from their church died will do it, and their hometown in Ohio turning into something Pakistani will do it. Middle East, Mid-west, to may to, to mah to.

Take that last example for an example. You average normie and griller blinked a couple of times, and then one day he noticed a Somali flag flying at the courthouse. He called the DMV and had to press 2 for English. And on another day his kid came home from school saying that the Palestinians discovered America. This is outrageous, he thinks to himself. The beginning and end of his assessment was that the whole thing was obviously bonkers, and not anything that a decent American should put up with. Correct.

But it turns out that the definition of American is as up for grabs as the word woman is. You see, this sort of new Americanism thinks that Americanism is sort of a universal civic religion, and that anybody in the world who embraces the American propositional ideal is an American. The problems with this are manifold, but I will just mention two. Does that mean that a commie like Mamdani, who flatly denies the basic American propositions, is therefore not an American? No church can long exist if you refuse to excommunicate, you know. This leads to the second problem. The propositional nation people are less interested in building out a consistent propositional nation, and more interested in changing out all the propositions that were central to the building of the America that we have.

That is why your ancestors have been here for 350 years and yet you are still living on stolen land, and a guy who hotfooted it across the border fifteen minutes ago is to be considered the younger brother of Captain America.

And so in the last few years, the open borders policy of the left (and the libertarian right) has finally revealed itself to people in this normie category as being full-fledged demented. That was on the positive side of the ledger. That was a great realization, as in, a good thing. And about the only thing that would give people like that pause in this process of red-pilling would be if some folks on the reactionary right side of things started doing things that were equally heinous and bonkers.

And so, right on schedule, a coalition formed, made up of malicious malcontents and based morons—and feds, don’t forget the feds—who began reviling the illegals for exactly the wrong thing—how brown they were instead of how illegal and numerous they were.

It used to be that the normies were kept in place through fear they would be accused of racism if they objected to the mass importation of people from an alien culture. “You just don’t like it because they are darker than you.” “No,” the normie would say. “I don’t like it because assimilation is clearly not your goal, and is impossible besides, and this whole thing is just obviously bonkers.” So the normies became restless and got to the point where they were willing to deport them all.

And then, the reactionary right came to the left’s rescue, doing their level best to turn all the ethnic slanders into charges that were actually true, thus dampening the support of the normie group that could actually make mass deportations a possibility.

Citizens and Humans

If I were in the UK on one of my periodic visits there, and an election were in progress, and I attempted to vote in it, I would be turned away. I would be turned away because I was not a citizen there. I would not interpret this as an attempt on the part of the UK to deny my humanity. Or suppose I overstayed my visa there, and they found out about it and escorted me to Heathrow. Again, this would not be a denial of my humanity. Citizenship confers certain privileges that an alien does not have.

At the same time, the authorities in any given country do have a responsibility before God to recognize the humanity of all those within their borders, however they got there. Human rights are one thing, and the privileges of citizenship are quite another. If I wrote a post for Mablog while there, and the post was critical of the UK’s policy toward Muslim immigrants, and I was arrested for it and charged, which is the kind of thing that is actually happening there now, that would be an act of tyranny. They don’t have the right to do anything like that—not to their own citizens and not to aliens.

It is ironic, but not surprising, but the dank right is making the same mistake that the left does. They have blurred and smudged the definitions of citizen and person. If an illegal alien is apprehended, he should be deported. Of course. But in that process of deportation, he should be treated with dignity and respect, as someone who is created in the image of God.

The unthinking Christian progressive thinks, “Oh, he’s created in the image of God. We have to let him stay.” The Hitlerian adjacent among us think, “Because we must deport him, so it is most necessary to forget he is my neighbor.”

My contention here is that it is quite possible, and is ethically necessary, to be a sensible human being and a decent human being at the same time. There, I said it.