Fraser Sherman's Blog

As y’all have doubtless heard, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 last week to preserve birthright citizenship. Which is a good thing, whether you’re a citizen or not. Though the vote not being 9-0 is alarming; Gorsuch, Thomas and Alito wanted it done, Kavanaugh does too but thinks it’s a job for Congress.

This has not gone over well with Republican pundits who are horrified that a child born to an illegal Haitian immigrant is as American as they are (the Heritage Foundation too, unsurprisingly).

Justice Alito (Injustice Alito?) complains that if he has to share the country with birthright citizens, it degrades his citizenship. Theocratic misogynyist Matt Walsh isn’t much happier.

Spoiler, when he talks about a country like the one our ancestors had, he means white. Not that it was ever all white but at least the white man was securely dominant. As Paul Campos says, when the Toddler rants about “communists” he means immigrants and Jews.

As far as Walsh’s nostalgia for the past, I get that. I’d love to live in a country where Republicans couldn’t just shrug and declare nothing can be done when they see a school shooting. Where a man who tried to overthrow the government on 1/6 and is currently the most corrupt president of all time faces Republican rage the way Nixon did.

Some on the right are even more blatant about saying the quiet parts out loud. One poster on FB declared this country has to stay at least 90 percent white and that freed slaves should not have been allowed to become citizens. Someone else claimed that foreign agents sneak into this country so their babies are born American, then go home and bring them up in Communist China or wherever, train them as spies, then send them over as sleeper agents. Camestros Felapton spots another right-winger making the same arguments.

Others just lie. NC State Rep. Reece Pyrtle claims a recently passed bill which dumps on DEI and pressures local governments to cooperate more with ICE is just to “protect our citizens.” When ICE routinely detains citizens with no consequence, not to mention shooting and killing them, it’s not about protecting them. It’s about keeping America white.

Even more common are right-wingers treating this as some radical new interpretation of the law SCOTUS just made up. As witness Steven Crowder above saying the court “just decided” that a baby born to immigrants is as American as Crowder’s kids. Outgoing Rep. Chip Roy lies the court “manufactured out of thin air” the concept of birthright citizenship. His solution: end all immigration. Other Republicans have a less drastic proposal: ban pregnant women from entering America! Rep. Troy Nehls suggests a 10 year ban and putting a sheet over the Statue of Liberty because of all that pro-immigration stuff written on her.

As I said Saturday, I’d prefer legal immigration; however my solution is to expand the legal limit so everyone now sneaking over the border can come legitimately. For Republicans legal immigration by people of color is just as disgusting, as Fox’ Laura Ingraham once made clear. Or the business owner who responded to the accidental drowning death of an an autistic Muslim child by posting on their company website to demand all Muslims leave America. Or Kremlin Benny Johnson who “jokes” that the only connection between black women and American independence was that Thomas Jefferson raped some black women.

Me, I’m with Cheryl Rofer: immigration is a good thing. And anyone who thinks this will only affect illegal aliens, consider that if your birth certificate doesn’t prove you’re American, almost nothing will.

It’s a rare win for justice at SCOTUS though all it would take is one new right-wing justice to tilt the balance. Then there’sthe other horrible decision allowing the Toddler to fire heads of nominally independent agencies except the Federal Reserve. As often happens with this court, there’s no logic other than “The Toddler always wins — unless it would affect my finances or the finances of the rich people who give me little presents.” And supporting bans on trans women in athletics. And gutting campaign finance restrictions which this year will be big help to Republicans.

They have a lot of power. There are more of us than them. How that will play out — well, let’s do our best to make it play out the right way.

(No movie reviews today. Independence Day column instead!)

In his book Invisible Bridge, Ron Perlstein has a bemused sneer about the Bicentennial celebration. He sounds astonished that even with America collapsing around us, Americans could sort of agree to celebrate. It reflects the general tone of the book that the 1970s sucked and we all knew it (at the link, author Thomas Hine expresses an alternative view).

The Bicentennial did indeed feel like a big deal in 1976. And for a couple of years before. Comic books tied in to it. Products of all sorts flaunted their Americanness. And for all the problems Perlstein talks about, there was a lot of optimism. The Vietnam War had ended, the US and the USSR had thawed the Cold War somewhat, women’s rights and black rights had advanced massively from a decade earlier. 18 year olds had the right to vote. The pill and Roe v Wade meant women could be sexually active without having to bear a child. Nixon had been driven from office after Watergate revealed his unfitness for office. That (and related revelations about the CIA and the FBI) was shocking but it was proof we could solve our problems and do better. We would do better. And the president at the time, Gerald Ford, realized the Bicentennial was not about him.

Recently JD Vance declared that by modern standards, Nixon’s crimes were trivial. He meant it as a defense — the deep state destroyed Nixon, like they’re trying to destroy the Toddler! — but it’s more like an indictment of how far we’ve fallen. The Toddler commits about one Watergate class crime a week, like using taxpayer money to build his stupid ballroom, then lying about it.. Nixon had a secret list of enemies he wanted to punish; the Toddler blatantly targets the media for not kissing his ass and someone was just indicted for supposedly sabotaging Widdle Donny’s precious reflecting pool. That’s horrifying and I’m sure the evidence is as flimsy as all the other pool-related charges. And as unjust as sentencing protesters as anti-ICE terrorists.

Small wonder nobody’s showing up for his 250th anniversary events. It seems to be a mix of lack of interest, heat and incompetent organizing. As John Scalzi puts it, “a malignant narcissist decided to make a national celebration mostly about himself, and that malignant narcissist is also an actual fascist, so that kind of sucked all the fun out of it this year.”

Like Scalzi, I believe justice will prevail. It may take long enough that we will not live to see its end; many of those who labored against slavery and segregation did not. As historian Kevin Leman says, “For most of its American existence, slavery was not contested. It was not being loudly defended because it was not being loudly challenged. It was simply the air that colonial economies breathed. The Germantown Quakers may have protested it in 1688, but their petition was quietly tabled and largely forgotten.” It was a long fight to discredit it, and too many people today are still nostalgic for it.

But as the radical priest Daniel Berrigan once put it, we do the right thing and fight the good fight because they’re right and good, not because we’re guaranteed victory. As a Christian, I believe that’s what god wants from us. As a human being, I agree with blogger Fred Clark that we should do the right thing because the alternative is becoming a ginormous jackhole. Seriously, who would you rather be, Martin Luther King or JD Vance?

As I’ve said before, I’m not sure what policies we should embrace going forward. As a number of liberals are saying, we need change. Definitely structural government reforms to undo some of the damage (packing the court, for instance, to neutralize the Sinister Six). Practical stuff, the little helpful things Mayor Mamdani is doing in NYC. Speak out against Republican fascism, and the little stupid things, like the way the Toddler’s wasting our tax dollars on monuments to himself. And a vision: equality for all, end rape over the next 20 years, universal literacy. Change the immigration laws so everyone currently entering illegal can enter legally. Do not throw anyone under the bus. Remind everyone that we are patriots and some of us are Christians — Republicans don’t get to define those terms and claim them as their own.

Any one of those will be difficult, and face lots of opposition. As I’ve said previously, even defining what “equality for all” means and how we get there is hard work. But we might as well shoot big.

And we should remember that if a former slave like Frederick Douglass could press on against the odds so can we: “Douglass did not end in despair and neither should we. His closing lines are not triumphalist, but they are resolute. Even with freedom of speech and the ballot “fallen before the shot-guns of the South,” he urged that we “bate no jot of heart or hope.” The heart of the nation, he maintained, was “still sound and strong.””