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Happy Independence Day to those who celebrate!
First they came for the Nazis, and CNN did not speak out--because CNN reporters are not Nazis.
From CNN Politics today: Law used to kick out Nazis could be used to strip citizenship from many more Americans
This is not a meaty article--it seems like "the news" these days is mostly breathless speculation over the worst possible outcomes of things the Trump administration might be thinking about doing. As a rule, the "unprecedented" things Trump does are in fact wholly precedented--just, you know, not like that! But the substance is approximately this:
The article is light on numbers--well, it's a speculative article--so I went poking around and was surprised (not surprised) to discover that this is nothing new. An AXIOS article from President Trump's first term (but updated just two days ago, apparently) suggests:
This sounds about in line with the CNN article's suggestion that
The CNN article does at least include information about the history of denaturalization, which is more bipartisan than you might initially imagine...
That's more direct quotes than I intended to use, but the point is that I was really struck by the article's framing. Yes, the law has been used to "kick out Nazis," though it was originally intended to kick out Communists. But it has also been used to kick out e.g. scammers and child pornographers. Basically, the weight of history and legal precedent is that naturalized citizens absolutely can be denaturalized and expelled from the country for a variety of reasons, substantially at the discretion of the executive.
Several thoughts: first, even if aggressively prosecuted, I have a hard time imagining more than perhaps several thousand naturalized Americans being returned to their countries of origin in this way. This is not an approach intended to change actual demographics; rather, it is a way for the government to influence public attitudes and perceptions by identifying "enemies" and distinguishing them from "friends." Deporting Nazis, even after naturalization, sends a strong signal that we don't take kindly to Nazis around here. And who would object to that? Object too strongly, and you might start looking like a Nazi yourself...
I don't think this is a deep or surprising point, but as a consequence I was a little surprised to run into such a self-aware wolf moment on CNN this morning. "We made a law to expel Nazis, but now it might be used to expel Hamas supporters! Everyone: clutch your pearls now!" What I think of as the obvious question--"should we maybe have been criticizing the ideological slant of this law when it was being used to expel Nazis?"--never even gets asked. From the perspective of the CNN reporter, it's not the law that is bad, it's just that Trump is the one using that law, and against people CNN would prefer it not be used against.
"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup," indeed!
Anyway, add this one to the "Trump opposition continues to be mad at him for enforcing their favorite laws against them" file. I feel like, in a sane world, this would be inducement for Democrats to reconsider their historic commitment to infinite expansion of federal power. Imagine how things would look right now if Joe Biden (or his handlers, whatever) had made it his mission to dismantle as much of the federal government as possible. The easiest way to prevent a "Trump Tyranny" would have been to make law in a way that precludes tyranny, rather than to insist on empowering the executive and conspiring to ensure only the "right" tyrants ever ascend.
Why is it so hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events?
As I said--neither deep nor surprising. But I thought it was at least a thematically appropriate question on July 4th (even if Constitution Day might have been a better fit). The document of "enumerated powers" that is the putative core of our government practice is... "dead letter" might be an exaggeration, but maybe not. I do not usually perceive the federal government as in any meaningful way limited. Those bothered by Trump I would invite to consider the possibility that Trump is only a symptom; the disease is the statism toward which the United States has been creeping since, oh, probably July 5, 1776, but certainly since the Civil War, and more recently without even token opposition from any of its major political parties (since, I suppose, the Tea Party of 2007). DOGE makes many of the right noises, but the Big Beautiful Bill looks at best like one step forward, and one step back. (Republicans do not appear to have learned the lesson, either!)
Whether a reduction in liberty is worth the occasional schadenfreude of seeing one's ideological opponents kicked out of the country, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
It's hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events because lizard brain instinctively understands that the levers of power are like, right there.
If you think you've won forever and for all time, what possible reason would you have to build in checks and balances to the infinite expansion of state power? They were wrong about this, but there were a significant amount of people in America - some of them reasonably intelligent, just isolated in their own bubbles - that did in fact think they were going to win forever, for all time, and the only thing left to do was consolidate and grind down the boot.
I like libertarians. I lean libertarian. But they're losers. Their win state is to check out and to be left alone to do what they're doing. This is inherently a losing position, because those who show up to the game are those who get to play.
There are other games than using democracy to grab state power for yourself. Libertarians will never have more than 10% of the population as a genuine constituency. If you still care about liberty there are better things to do with your time than to try to wrestle away power from collectivists.
I'd say that serious libertarians have pursued a very successful political program that got them a lot of what they wanted in the recent past. But it's always going to come as a compromise and through the vessel of a larger coalition.
Call this losing if you must. That doesn't change the nature of the choice.
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Indeed. There was actually a fairly large media case the other day over this exact issue. A 20-something naturalized Palestinian what caught with a large cache of child pornography, much of it depicting pre-pubescent girls, the youngest estimated to be 3. He also had multiple discords, one of which he used to communicate with other pervs about his desire to penetrate 12 year olds, and on the other he fantasized about Hamas killing Jews. Seems like a good candidate for this process, but there was a large cadre who came to court in support of him. Apparently, many quietly left as they are made aware that the charges were for CP.
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Happy Independence Day!
America is an awesome country filled with great people. It's responsible for many of the best things that have happened to the world over the past 100 years, and I say this quite genuinely as someone who doesn't live there. It deserves appreciation.
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I think the point about discretion here is more nuanced. Yes, the Executive has the discretion on who to go after (same as most other fields) but they can't just invent any grounds they want.
As always, it helps to start right with the US Code rather than all the news articulate.
8 U.S.C. § 1451 provides, in relevant part, for revoking naturalization "on the ground that such order and certificate of naturalization were illegally procured or were procured by concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation" and 1424 prohibits "advocating or teaching opposition to all organized government, or advocating (A) the overthrow by force, violence or other unconstitutional means of the Government of the United States or of all forms of law; or (B) the duty, necessity, or propriety of the unlawful assaulting or killing of any officer or officers (either of specific individuals or of officers generally) of the Government of the United States or of any other organized government, because of his or their official character; or (C) the unlawful damage, injury, or destruction of property; or (D) sabotage; or (E) the economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world communism or the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship".
This covers a lot of cases (and indeed, I don't think anyone seriously objects to denaturalizing someone that willfully lied during their application) but it doesn't give the Executive that much discretion to determine the grounds for denaturalization completely freeform.
The "concealment of a material fact or by willful misrepresentation" portion is what Democrat activists are afraid of, because many, if not most, of said people failed to list "material support of Hamas" on their applications, which many/most have done.
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We live in a world where supreme court precedent has determined that growing your own grain and feeding it to your own stock on your own land can be regulated under the aegis of "interstate commerce". That ship has sailed.
This is statutory construction, not constitutional.
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Wickard v Filburn is insane mental gymnastics, but in the politics of its time it makes sense: Every farmer wanted regulation to prop up stable prices and Filburn defected (always hated). Wheat couldn’t be exported as world prices were much lower. Congress was seen as doing their job and any other decision by the court would have been seen as head-in-clouds-lawyers screwing up a common sense solution, that is why the decision was 9-0.
A constitional amendment would have been cleaner
Literally anything would've been cleaner. Wickard v Filburn is one of the most bad faith interpretations of the law in our country's entire history. There might be worse, but there aren't a lot of them.
It's not interpretation (good/bad) of a regular law, it's interpretation (good/bad) of the constitutional assignment of powers.
It makes a huge difference. A bad interpretation of a law can be corrected by the political branches. So the stakes are quite different.
Sure, the stakes are higher in this case. But it doesn't make the reasoning any less bad faith on the part of those supreme court justices.
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I think this fits into a more general pattern that I'm becoming more aware of.
There's this idea, from some irritated younger dissident right types (and others), that America's conservative party has long existed as something like a controlled opposition. And I get where that kind of frame is coming from.
But I think there's an alternative viewpoint that goes more like this, that I'm coming to think has a lot of explanatory power. From the 1930s on, a certain version of liberalism became so overwhelmingly dominant in America that its native conservative tradition was essentially sidelined into a permanent minority status, really, and given no public oxygen at all. And the New Deal state absolutely had a massive role in that (I've brought up Hoover under FDR inventing and promulgating the slur "isolationist" and pushing it hard to delegitimize the foreign policy of most American elites up to the point, for example, and the significant censorship campaigns that government employed against conservatives, as happened under JFK as well). But liberals of a certain sort really were so dominant, under the New Deal coalition, that in a two party system, it was inevitable that a lot of the differences within liberalism would inevitably, for game theory reasons, spill over into the other party and be given an airing there. You could call that bipartisan consensus, but I don't think really captures the dynamics at play. When Eisenhower ran for president in the 50s, both parties wanted him to run for them, and what came to be called paleo conservatism (I think the public fight with Taft captured that) became marginalized and sidelined. Groups like the John Birch society came to look fringe in part because a certain broad strand of liberalism was so dominant that everything normal looked like it, and all broadcast media reinforced it.
And this, I think, is the broader social context where all sorts of 20th century laws and polices and Supreme Court rulings were developed. There were assumptions about the values and worldviews of anyone who would be wielding these laws or rulings or state power, because that broad strand of liberalism had been so dominant that it was easy to assume that surely anyone who had access to the highest levels of state power would be a liberal in that sense.
And this is the background for the rise of the Reagan coalition, which included (as thought leaders and political operatives) many more hawkish or more pro market liberals who left the Democratic party with the rise of the New Left, and with the turn towards more nakedly radical left politics, and the rise of antagonism to internationalist American foreign policy. You could call those people flooding in and bolstering the Republican party of the 70s, and 80s, 90s, and 2000s entryist or controlled opposition, but I think it's just as easy to see them as a natural consequence of a very dominant strand of liberalism reallocating itself between the two parties in a two party system, which, again, you should expect for game theory reasons. And those people (many of them really, truly elites) understood American state power, because it literally had been created by people like them, for people like them.
And thus, when Reagan came to power, he may have had some sympathies that point in some more populist conservative directions that sounds like the old, marginalized paleo conservatives, and there were important public voices like Pat Buchanan that pointed in that direction, but the coalition Reagan brought into power was still absolutely packed with those sorts of statist, more conservative liberals that existed in huge numbers in the original New Deal coalition, the ones that all state power and court rulings and so on had been written for in the first place, and the ones that were comfortable expanding the state power of Civil Rights regime and letting the CIA do whatever it is that it does. George H. W. Bush fits cleanly in this pattern.
I think part of what makes the current moment so messy and complicated is that between 2001 and 2008, those more hawkish, more internationalist, more market oriented liberals absolutely dominated the Republican party and got their way. They sidelined more traditional paleo conservative voices even more (again, bringing up Pat Buchanan is instructive here). And then Iraq happened, and the 2008 financial crisis happened, and they basically obliterated their version of conservative liberalism in the public eye (which was always much less popular with rank-and-file conservatives, who much more often were more religious and somewhat isolationist in a Jacksonian sense and more distrustful of the remote Federal state). That was the specific sequence of events that opened up the chain including the Tea Party, and the online rise of Ron Paul, (both of which were really important for making intellectual space, especially online, for younger disaffected types to start entertaining new ideas that weren't just more rehashes of conservative liberalism), and then eventually the rise of Trump. And the rise of Trump meant the rise of RINOs, who for the most part really were those older conservative liberals who suddenly found that they were losing their iron grip on those tools of state power.
The entire system of federal government power has been built with the assumption that some variety of liberal, from a certain very specific intellectual tradition, would always be given the reigns of state power. There were certain filters in place (especially through unelected credentialing bodies and universities and professional organizations) that would ensure that, regardless of party, the sorts of people who make their way to centralized power would hold certain world views and values.
And... now we're in an era where it looks like that's possibly no longer true. And that is clearly disruptive.
(And for this narrative, too, it's worth recognizing that the current 6-3 conservative Supreme Court is the first time America has had a Supreme Court that conservative since the 1920s. That, on its own, is a radical, radical shift, considering how much liberals of all stripes used their dominance of the court in the middle of the 20th century to remake America in their vision, and how central it has been to their moral story of progress)
Anyway, given that story, I think it's very likely we'll see many more examples of this, of liberals becoming shocked and horrified to discover what happens when the central state they built with the assumption of permanent broad liberal control falls into heretical hands. I'm not saying this with pleasure, exactly, because I personally would have preferred many of those tools dismantled long ago. But...
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I didn't like denaturalization well-after-the-fact when they were doing it to superannuated Nazis. Now that they're threatening to do it to Hamasniks (and not nearly as far after the fact!) my attitude is that the precedent is established and now the people and organizations who supported it before ought to suck it up. On a meta level, the reasons for not establishing bad precedent in the first place don't hold if you can ensure said precedents are only used against your enemies, so using such bad precedents against those who supported them is the correct moves for opponents of those supporters.
I don't think it was done to the Nazis qua being a Nazi, it was done because they materially lied about it during naturalization.
If some guy was admitted in a process during which they knowingly presented a doctored birth certificate claiming to be 15 when they were really 22, I think it would be totally fine to go back and revoke it. Saying otherwise is invited gaming an already extremely gameable immigration system with the idea that if you perpetuate a fraud, tough luck it's just done.
That seems like a fine precedent, and one that's sufficiently cabined not to be applicable to just anyone the President pisses off.
Well, yeah; this is 100% an autistic Christian thing.
You make yourself an enemy of the God of America when you lie on the form, because He knows the contents of your heart and what is done in secret.
That is why "lying on the form about the contents of your heart" is accepted by American culture as both valid, and an offense that strips you of any right to participate in it so long as they see fit that the question remains on the form.
Interestingly, it doesn't actually make any moral judgment- it still maintains the presupposition that there are good people who are also [disqualifying class]- but then, if the man be good, he would not lie on the forms because [see above].
Thus lying on the form is, while a completely natural thing to do, a sin -> if you were good, you're certainly an enemy of God [and by extension, the country] now -> OK to revoke and eject on those grounds.
I would disagree entirely - I think it’s an “Al Capone was arrested for tax evasion” type thing.
If someone lies about intending the downfall of America, you have a much better excuse to kick them out than if you have to find an example of them stepping outside the bounds of free speech.
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These are not materially different things. GK Chesterton actually remarked on this:
"What I saw in America" 1912, pgs. 3-9
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Yes, but if they'd admitted to being a Nazi, they wouldn't have been naturalized. The proposed Hamasnik deportations are for the same reason.
My preferred solution would be a statute of limitations; maybe 3 years for ordinary stuff, 7 years for really bad stuff.
This is the sort of gamification that just encourages the evil doers. 7 Years is already plenty of time to spread around a few anchor babies so the judge will look favorably on you and maybe violate black letter law in your favor.
Even with no statute of limitations, children of the denaturalized person wouldn't be affected.
Indeed, damage enough to the country.
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The difficulty is that a determined person could easily maintain their allegiance without overt signs especially in service to a greater cause. If I’m a person allied to hezbollah I don’t want the USA to know that, and especially if I’m joining a cell in the USA. If all I have to do is hide my allegiance to hezbollah for three years, I can probably scrub my name from official records, purge my social media, and keep my mouth shut for three years and be fine.
Yes, there are negative consequences of such limitations. Of course, if that Hezbollah cell does anything, the citizen can still go through the criminal process for it as a citizen. The alternative is that 40 years post-naturalization you've got people poring through old records looking for a lie big enough to denaturalize someone.
And note it is longer than 3 years -- it take 3 years to become a citizen from getting a green card, if you're married to a citizen, and 5 years otherwise.
I mean 40 years is a bit long, but I’d put it to at least 7-10 years simply because scrubbing your feeds, removing yourself from lists, etc. is unlikely to be that successful beyond 5 years because you forget about old accounts, you forget that mailing list you signed up for, or buy something incriminating with a credit card and those things will still be there because you won’t be paying attention to something that far back.
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I can agree in principle to limiting the look back period
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Possibly, Probably. and the HAMASniks would have likely (or at least ought to have been) denied entry if they had gone into thier naturalization hearing chanting "death to America" and "globalize the infitada".
Have you ever aligned yourself with an enemy of the United States, if so explain the circumstances. is exactly the sort of question we ought to be asking someone before letting them in.
What is the definition of an "enemy of the United States" though? Hamas is primarily an enemy of Israel, and though Israel and the US share a relationship that is as close as lips and teeth at the moment, "dump Israel and ally with Hamas instead" is a real political position that is represented by a non-trivial number of native actors in the American system. If against all odds those actors were to come into power and implement their agenda, should pro-Israelis be (retroactively) denaturalized? Would there be a way at all to get legally and irreversibly naturalised in a futureproof way without staunchly refusing to have an opinion on Israel/Palestine and perhaps also every other important geopolitical issue where the US may switch sides in the future, or perhaps at most enthusiastically participating in the current Two Minutes of Hate whatever the target?
(And then, what classes of enmity are we considering? For smaller-scope questions than foreign alliances, the government position may flip every four years. Can Democrats denaturalize "Latinos for Trump"?)
This is not an uncommon position, but it is clearly incorrect. At the very least, someone who makes this line of argumentation needs to give a disclaimer to avoid being correctly called a liar. That disclaimer would be something along the lines of, "because of Hamas' strategic and military incompetence, and the vast distance between us and them I don't consider them a threat."
I don't find these arguments FOR incompetence compelling, but if you are adopting them you should be clear about it. Because I know in my heart that if Hamas had our army and we had Hamas's militias, they'd simply kill us all with nukes and laugh while doing it.
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Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization. If that isn't sufficient to meet the definition, then I'm not sure what is.
The IRA is listed there too, but they were not enemies of America and indeed were partly funded by American groups.
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I think refusing to have an opinion is fine, but it seems reasonable enough for any nation to declare that 'death to {nation}" is beyond the pale.
Well, the Ukrainians get pretty close to that wrt Russia ("Muscovites onto the gallows" was a popular slogan even before the war). Does that mean that if Trump goes full rapprochement with Putin, pro-Ukrainians would be up for denaturalization?
Given the two attempts at invasion/annexation in 10 years (one of them ongoing) it seems reasonable that the Ukrainians would not want ZZ-niks working in thier country, voting in thier elections, etc.
Remember that we are talking about naturalization here IE whether or not we let a person in, and once in, how much of an obligation is there to let them stay.
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Because CNN does not, as far as I know, object to the ‘tyranny’. They object to Trump. Liberty-as-in-freedom to live your life is not something these people particularly value and they don’t really claim to either.
It is probably true that the Trump coalition is being a bit hypocritical when they back Trumpian caudillismo, but I don’t think the anti-Trump coalition(to the extent that it can meaningfully be called a ‘coalition’ at this point) is hypocritical for backing Biden’s use of federal power to punish his enemies while bemoaning Trump’s- they really do think that the untrammeled rule of the expert scholar-bureaucrats is most important and don't value freedom at all.
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I’m not exactly surprised by this. As much as people like to pretend to be in favor of the rule of law, as point of fact, nobody, especially those in power, are principled enough to support applying a law fairly. I’m not even sure it’s possible to do so, as the tribal instinct is simply too strong to be easily overcome by mere principles.
Power doesn’t care and cannot care. I’m convinced as I read more of history that our era isn’t really much different from any other. Sure the aesthetics have changed, the means of control have changed, but power is still held and wielded in ways that the old monarchs and emperors would have found fairly familiar. The constitution was never a particularly live letter. It’s not a letter, it’s a legitimacy producing document. It’s marketing. You want to live here because we have rights. Except that when the government really, really wants to do so it can easily get it done despite anything the constitution actually says about your rights. There’s no way that any fair reading of the constitution would allow the full faith and credit clause or the interstate commerce clause to be used to override state laws. It happens all the time. It’s happened often enough that the states have become mere appendages of the federal government. Free speech is mostly limited to approved speech that the mainstream likes. If you get much outside of those lines, then you get punished by the unofficial powers often acting in ways that the government insists they do. Your boss will get sued if he doesn’t fire you for racism or sexism. Social media for a time feared regulation if it didnT curb crime-think on its platform. That’s censorship, but because the people doing it are private individuals or companies doing so at the behest of the government, it’s fine. Free assembly is only free as long as it’s not racist or sexist.
Of course it's possible. I support principled application of laws (and general principles) all the time. Just because lots of people are hypocrites doesn't mean that it's impossible to escape that, it means that they are choosing to be hypocrites.
For individuals, yes, but I think on the national, let alone international level your representatives and elected government act a lot more like medieval potentates protecting and trying to expand their power and fiefdoms. To give a fairly recent example, the government is supporting Israel (I personally agree with them, but whatever). This is despite a large, fairly active movement that might have tipped the election to Trump and is unpopular with democrats and is strongest in supposed must-win states. By Democratic logic, it should be a slam dunk to support Palestine and go with the thing the public seems to want. Or the BBB which is unpopular and passed anyway. The government barely cares what people actually want, they care for their fiefdoms and maintaining power. If they can do so, they do so by rigging the districts so they aren’t competitive.
If forcing dissidents whether liberal or conservative to shut up allows them to win power games, they’re perfectly fine doing so. It will be hate speech or misinformation or state secrets.
Sure, I would agree that the government has come largely (some would argue entirely) unmoored from the will of the people. And I certainly agree that politicians continually act in unprincipled ways. Perhaps I misunderstood you as referring to all people rather than just politics.
I’m not convinced that anything has changed, that’s my point. The way politics has always worked is based on power, and whatever the window-dressing might be, and if the actual power elites don’t want a thing to happen, it will not happen. If those same elites want something to happen it will absolutely happen. It’s been that way since the first brick was laid at the foundation of the first city. Nobody with power has ever cared about what the public wants, nor do they care about the peasant population of their country. As long as the little people shut up and obey (or at least not interfere too much in the affairs of their betters), the powerful do not care.
The control mechanism of democracy is basically mass gaslighting. First convince everyone that whatever “the public” wants is what the government should do. Then propagandize the population to believe whatever the elites want to have happen. In the meantime you rig the districts such that those who the elites support have an easier time winning. Once this is done, most people will vote as instructed, and most of the rest will go along because they’ve been taught from birth that the results of the election represent the “will of the people” and thus cannot be questioned. So when the government serving the elites does something wrong, stupid, or evil, it’s your fault. The people in charge, running the show were just doing whatever they were told to do by you. So you vote as instructed and wonder why things don’t improve.
I’m fine with any sort of government that mostly works for most people without being too harsh on the average citizen. The form of government isn’t important, customer service is. By which I mean management should provide the vast majority a fairly comfortable lifestyle, they should build and keep up good infrastructure, to live in a stable and secure society, and to not have foreign governments attacking us, our trade routes, and so on.
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