Trump means not only to remake Washington, D.C.
Is this the man we want reinterpreting Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s design for Washington, D.C.? A man whose vision for our democratic republic, birthed in the overthrow of a monarch, is a cheap knockoff of Habsburg monarchs and Tsar Nicholas I?
It’s bad enough that this tasteless lowlife (and convicted felon) has bulldozed the East Wing of the White House to build an outsized ballroom gaudy enough to shame Versailles. He also plans a triumphal arch across the Potomac River tall enough to interfere with Reagan National Airport (DCA) traffic patterns. For Donald Trump, if it’s not about gold, it’s about size.
But those are just the cosmetic changes SprAyTAN hopes to make to our republic. Worse than those is his Stephen Miller-inspired attempt to eviscerate the 14th Amendment and resurrect a caste system in our 250-year-old democracy still struggling to realize its ambition to be a nation where all people are born equal.
Jamelle Bouie this morning posts an excellent commentary on Miller’s and the MAGA right’s “intent on whittling down the 14th Amendment to essentially nothing.” The Supreme Court on Wednesday hears arguments on Trump’s executive order declaring its birthright citizenship provision null and void for the infants of undocumented immigrants and temporary residents. Trump would strip it of its original context, Bouie writes (gift link):
It seems obvious to say, but it’s worth emphasizing anyway: The 14th Amendment is tied directly to the 13th. The 13th Amendment states that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It then adds, in section 2, that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
Today, as a matter of legal interpretation, we read the 13th quite narrowly; it simply ends slavery. But the authors and ratifiers of the 13th Amendment saw it more expansively. To them, it was the foundation for the society they hoped to build.
That society, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts argued in an 1864 floor speech, “was meant to outlaw hereditary caste as much as it was meant to end chattel slavery,” Bouie writes.
The anti-subordination aims of the 13th Amendment are why, almost immediately after ratifying it, Republicans in Congress leveraged their newfound authority under Section 2 to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which established birthright citizenship, guaranteed equal rights, nullified the “Black Codes” — laws passed by the former rebel states to reimpose the conditions of slavery — and empowered the federal government to prosecute violations of civil rights.
Bouie moves on to the 14th Amendment’s egalitarian purpose. The U.S. would have no castes:
A straightforward reading of the most important part of the amendment, Section 1, makes this clear. It says, in short: There will be a national American citizenship. That this citizenship will, except in very select cases, be established by birth. That all such citizens will be entitled to the “privileges and immunities” of American citizenship, and that — citizen or no — everybody on American soil is to receive the due process of law and the equal protection of the laws.
I’ve argued for a decade and a half that since the founding there have been among us royalists, both rich and poor, for whom the notion that some Americans are more equal than others is, Trump might say, baked into their genes. They don’t want to govern. They don’t want to share power with people they consider inferiors. They want to rule them. The last-place-averse need others permanently consigned to the lowest rung on the social ladder so that no matter how low they fall, they never become untouchables.
America did not just import enslaved Africans to work southern plantations. They imported a social safety net for white people, rich and poor. A permanent underclass. Since the Civil Rights era, the advancement of Black Americans has threatened that safety net. Many whites over the decades reacted to that the way Southerners did to the fall of slavery. They’ve not been able to reestablish Black Codes. They’ve been more subtle. (Under Trump, not so subtle.)
Since the turn of this century, those same last-place-averse Americans have discovered themselves living beside more brown people as well as Blacks. They lapped up Great Replacement hysteria. Under Trump, Stephen Miller weaponized white xenophobia and turned ICE into 21st-century slave patrols. The administration sent DHS agents to terrorize American cities wherever taco trucks and Latino construction workers are abundant. They’ve been sent to sweep up at random and to brutalize people Trump-Miller consider unworthy of constitutional protections, and not just those guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Trump means not only to remake the U.S. Capitol architecturally. He means to redefine who is and is not an American. Trump and Miller don’t care who gets harmed in the process.
Ann E. Marimow writes for the Times (gift link):
The Trump administration is asking the court to reinterpret the 14th Amendment, which was added to the Constitution in 1868 after the Civil War. The amendment reversed the Supreme Court’s infamous decision in Dred Scott, which in 1857 had denied citizenship to Black Americans. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the amendment declared.
The key question for the justices is what it means for a person to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, a phrase that courts have for more than 125 years interpreted as meaning nearly everyone born on U.S. soil.
The administration is acting now as if its interpretation is already operative.
But the Justice Department says the passage has been misread for decades to grant citizenship to the children of hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, incentivizing foreigners to travel to the U.S. to have babies.
Groups challenging the legality of Mr. Trump’s order, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, emphasize that courts, Congress and past presidents have all embraced a broad reading of the text of the 14th Amendment, which they say embodies fundamental American values of equality and opportunity.
Perhaps you’ve noticed, but Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and MAGA royalists do not.
