The 14th Amendment gets HOT

Who would have thought? The 14th Amendment has been popping up all over the place. I know I'm spending an extraordinary amount of time on this, but I am flabbergasted by all of this. Let's review.

Samuel Alito relied on the 14th Amendment to bring down Chicago's hand gun ban, arguing that the 14th Amendment incorporated the protections of the 2nd Amendment, making the right to possess guns a right that states (and municipalities) could not strip away. He went further, making the claim - which I ridiculed - that the authors of the 14th Amendment were deeply concerned with assuring recently emancipated blacks the right to hold on to their guns, despite the efforts of the Southern states to take them away. In actuality, the City of Chicago was closer to being right - the 14th Amendment was concerned with discrimination; the Amendment's goal, when combined with the aims of the 13th and 15th Amendments, was to assure African Americans full citizenship by ending slavery, promising equal protection under the law, and guaranteeing the right to vote. By reaching into the debate associated with the Amendment's passage to extract random claims that link the 14th Amendment to concerns about gun rights, Alito discredits himself. He hangs his decision on the words of Samuel Pomeroy, an undistinguished Senator from Kansas, who said:

“Every man . . . should have the right to bear arms for the defense of himself and family and his home-stead. And if the cabin door of the freedman is broken open and the intruder enters for purposes as vile as were known to slavery, then should a well-loaded musket be in the hand of the occupant to send the polluted wretch to another world, where his wretchedness will forever remain complete.”

In Alito's world, the 14th Amendment was designed to assure that emancipated blacks could preserved their freedom, and the sanctity of their homes, through the use of their shotguns. Clarence Thomas echoes this concern, quoting Frederick Douglass: "The black man has never had the right either to keep or bear arms, [and until he does] the work of the Abolitionists was not finished." So for these two conservative justices, deeply distrustful of government, emancipation and full citizenship was something African Americans won at the barrel of a gun, not through prolonged struggle, legislation, court decisions, protest, and the timely deployment of federal troops. What a peculiar and narrow view of American history.

Now we have the surging demand from the Republican leadership for the repeal of the 14th Amendment. Mitch McConnell, John Kyl, and Lindsay Graham want to overturn the 14th Amendment because it gives citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States." They believe that the children of illegal immigrants, born here in the U.S., should not be granted citizenship. Or, rather, they pretend to believe that. In actuality they are playing for the votes of the tea partiers and patriots who believe that illegal immigrants sneak across our borders, and quickly have sex, for the very purpose of producing an "anchor baby," a little miracle that guarantees the child's legal rights and allows, in many cases, the infant's mother a chance to stay in America, collecting, in the view of the extreme right, "welfare and other state and local benefit(s)." Again, my mind can't comprehend a view of the world, and human activity, this narrow. This view of undocumented aliens - imagining them as diabolical plotters, scamming the system - reaches into two despicable narratives. On one hand, it portrays them as criminals, engineers of a vast welfare fraud which victimizes all Americans, by stealing our tax money. This strategy of portraying immigrants as criminals is an old one, and has been used to mobilize resentment against immigrants time and time again. Paul Gilroy, for example, points to how the right in Thatcher's England typically blamed immigrants for the collapse of law and order in Britain's rusting cities.

This depiction of immigrants as welfare cheats also plays into another narrative the right has been promoting since 2008. As I have discussed in other posts, the Republican party has been playing dangerous games with our sense of collective identity. One view of American identity looks at our Anglo Saxon roots, and makes the claim that we are a white, Christian nation. And as part of that cultural legacy, we are a hard working people, drawing on a religious predisposition to labor, and save, and provide for our families. We are at risk, the right claims, because immigrants are contaminating our protestant culture with alien practices and beliefs. These foreign cultures don't value work, but instead celebrate laziness, indolence, and sloth. In their most disturbing and racist fringe formulations, these opinions portray Latino immigrants as the product of backward cultures, that have inhibited their development for generations. When they cross our borders, this fringe believes, they bring their sickness with them, and as we absorb their culture into ours, through multicultural curriculums and the celebration of Latino heritage, we weaken ourselves, and lay the foundation for our nation's failure and decline.

These are the voters Republican politicians are reaching out to with their proposals to repeal the 14th Amendment. It isn't a legitimate debate. It's an appeal to hate.