Get the Libs
Part of the price of living in our current political era is the constant drip, drip, drip of adrenaline. There’s always something, some issue, some act, some comment, that immediately raises concerns, anxieties, and the good old “fight – flight” reflex. (Not to be confused with the Trump cheer from Butler, Pennsylvania, “Fight, Fight, Fight” which he echoed in his Mt. Rushmore speech on the Fourth of July weekend).
The best part is that a lot of those “issues” aren’t real. Unfortunately that doesn’t make them any less stress producing. Often, from the Reflecting Pool to the “YMCA” song, it’s simply a MAGA tactic to “get the libs”. But one concern is, that for a certain segment of the US population, these issues are real problems that us “Libs” just don’t get.
Under the Flag
Let’s take “Birth Tourism” for a second. “Birth Tourism” is the idea that women come to the United States for the sole purpose of having a child here. Under the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, “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.” So if a child is born in US territory, “under the flag of the United States”, they have a claim to US citizenship. (That’s Black Letter Law). The US Supreme Court confirmed this in last week’s decision.
That claim does not include the parents. So if Mom returns to wherever home is, the child goes with her. But, once the child reaches adulthood, they can claim US citizenship by presenting their US birth certificate. They are, to quote Springsteen, “Born in the USA”. And they’re right.
The leading research body in the field of immigration, the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, estimates there are 26,000 children born a year in the United States as specific result of “birth tourism”. That sounds like a lot, until seen as a percentage of total births in the country. It’s eight tenths of one percent. So there’s not going to be, eighteen years from now, a mass of “birth tourist citizens” overwhelming us at the polls, or demanding benefits.
Stephen Miller, Deputy Chief of Staff to the President suggests we should ban all pregnant women from entering the country. Is ICE going to do pregnancy tests at the airport or charge them with fraudulent entry (two for one)? Attorney General Todd Blanche wants to focus Federal law enforcement agencies on this “crime”.
Shiny Balls
(one of my first essays, back in 2017, was about Trump’s Shiny Balls).
Why are they doing this? Because it distracts from the serious issues here in America. It’s the “shiny ball” that takes attention from the very real concerns about inflation, the denial of civil rights to migrants, and the almost enumerable acts of corruption in the Trump Administration. But most of all, it adds to their efforts to control the vote.
They claim that elections are being stolen by “illegals”, who, without citizenship, vote. The “birthright citizenship” arguments lend a certain patina of “truth” to this overall theme of the MAGA movement. Even worse, they claim that Democrats are encouraging illegal immigration, to make them citizens, in order to win their votes. So those 0.8% of “babies” are part of the great “scheme” to anchor Democratic control of the American government, forever.
Voting “anchor babies” becomes a key example of the need for the “SAVE ACT” to restrict voting. Trump says the real reason he needs the Act out loud: “Pass the SAVE ACT and we (MAGA) will win elections for one hundred years”.
Stolen Election
The “stolen election” is a foundational principle of the MAGA movement. But the real “trick”, is to restrict access to the ballot. It doesn’t matter if a lot of Republicans are denied the right to vote under the SAVE ACT, as long as a lot more “Democrat” voters are included.
This is just the beginning of an existential fight, as MAGA sees it. Because there is one incontrovertible fact. The United States of America will no longer be a white majority country in two decades, according to the US Census (Brookings). And since MAGA has always had a stand against people of color, their nightmare of losing control is more than likely to come true.
So look away from the “shiny ball” of the black letter law of the 14th Amendment for a minute, because there’s a “real” attack on voting going on. The White House National Intelligence apparatus and the FBI are supposed to be worried about terrorism. Instead they are turned onto the 2020 election results from Georgia. Then Director of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard led the “raid” on the Fulton County Board of Elections. Current acting Director, Bill Pulte, has no experience in the intelligence field. But he does have bona fides as a full scale election denier. And the FBI committed its massive resources into investigating the social media of election workers in Atlanta. So expect something soon about how “Trump actually won in 2020”.
Who cares? Trump does. And it’s not just so he can make snide comments about how this should be his third term as President, instead of second. Trump needs the false premise to give him “probable cause”. He’ll try to send Federal officials into the swing states to take “control” of the election in 2026. It’s not really about 2020, it’s about “securing” the current elections. That’s another way to say Trump will rig the outcome: a real stolen election.
And that’s a massive risk to our Republic. It ought to turn your adrenaline on like a firehose.
