CSotD: The Next Generation Wins One
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This is the day the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. July 4 is the day they announced it. One of the great “Who cares?” of history.
It turns out John Adams cared, according to this 1976 clipping I found when I was looking for Bicentennial stuff (stay tuned).
You have to bear in mind that Adams also thought the president should be called “Your Highness” and when his wife famously asked him to remember women’s rights in the new Constitution, his response was kind of a pat on the head.
Sometimes you don’t get your way in a democracy. And sometimes you do, as the Supreme Court demonstrated in the birthright matter.
As Heller points out, babies won and the Trump contingent lost. It’s important to point out that the anti-birthright people were not against babies, just against immigrants and mostly against the wrong immigrants, “right” and “wrong” not only being an issue of where you were born but whether you can pass the Brown Paper Bag Test.
It’s a fairly simple matter, and while in overturning the Voting Rights Act the Supreme Court said that it isn’t racism unless someone specifically says it is racism, they had no problem with the president saying that some African, South American and Asian countries are shitholes while countries in Scandinavia are terrific, because he didn’t use the N-word.
And as Jones points out, he feels justified in admitting white South Africans based on a totally ridiculous cock-and-bull story about them being murdered for racial reasons, even though the president of South Africa explained to him how bogus the story is, and even though you’d have to be either a bigot, a moron or Elon Musk to believe something so racist and stupid. And, yes, I know I just committed a redundancy.
But speaking of things you’d have to be an idiot to believe, the bots and trolls and occasional humans over at Xitter are exploding over the farcical notion that the birthright decision will trigger a flood of pregnant women coming to the United States to whelp little American citizens.
We’re told this occasionally happens, but, then again, we’re told that white South Africans are being targeted by mobs and that Haitians dine on their neighbors’ pets and that Donald Trump graduated from Wharton with honors. So I did a little quick poke around to see how easy it would be for poor women from shithole countries to come to America, give birth to tiny citizens, and go home again, kind of like Angela Lansbury in the Manchurian Candidate. (In the timebomb sense, not the actual birthing sense.)
Let’s assume — to choose two cities a reasonable distance apart — that a woman from Rome decides to have a baby in Boston. And let’s assume she’s okay with average costs of everything in Boston, and that the baby, bless its cooperative little soul, arrives on its due date via uncomplicated vaginal delivery.
To start with, humans have an average gestation period of 40 weeks, but airlines won’t let a pregnant woman fly after her 36th week. Nor should you fly home until six weeks following childbirth, so she and the father must stay here a total of 10 weeks.
Two roundtrip tickets: $1,334
70 days in a hotel: $16,310
Birth w/o insurance: $28,888
Meals for parents: $6,020
————–
TOTAL COST: $52,552
And please don’t tell me they’ll just sneak across the Southern border and birth the kid in a field somewhere, because we’ve been told that Dear Leader and ICE and the Border Patrol have completely sealed that off, and they wouldn’t lie.
Also unattended births produce trouble getting that all-important documentation.
“Birth tourism” is obviously a really stupid idea, since any couple who can drop 50 large would be welcomed here anyway.
The idea is nearly as stupid as thinking we’re going to suddenly have enough Muslims living here that they will be able to repeal the Constitution and install a highly conservative form of strict theocratic law that I’d bet most of them came here to get away from.
One of the nice things about being an idiot is that you can readily believe anything. One of the Thank God things about it is that stupid people would have trouble locating all the documents they’d need to vote if the Save Act somehow became law, the Save Act being something like Sharia Law for the Christian Taliban.
Better just try not to think about it at all.
The frightening part of the birthright decision is not that it will set off birth tourism, but rather that it was a 6-3 decision. And speaking of stupid people, these guys are not stupid nor are they illiterate, and yet they have trouble reading the plain words of the 14th Amendment. Or at least they claim to.
Sheneman boils down their reasoning to the notion that the framers of the 14th Amendment had something else in mind. This makes little enough sense even before you get to the part about the justices claiming to be originalists. If someone else said they could read the minds of the dead, you’d worry about letting them walk around unsupervised.
Though some cuckoo bird the other day opined that people don’t realize that Dwight Eisenhower was a general. Maybe he meant those people who can’t spell “dumb” because they don’t know it has a silent B in it.
Though we oughtn’t to be too snide, as long as there are people on the other side of the aisle who either think the XIVth was part of the Bill of Rights or else that people still wore powdered wigs in 1868.
McKee’s right, however, that the language of the amendment is perfectly clear. I gather the clause that dissenting justices puzzled over was “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which excluded Indians-not-taxed and babies born to diplomats.
I like their interpretation that undocumented immigrants are not subject to the jurisdiction of the federal government, because I guess that means they, too, have diplomatic immunity and can do pretty much whatever they want.
Show me your papers.
I don’t have any.
Okay, you’re free to go.
Here are some non-citizens singing about one of their kids:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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