Today’s ongoing fun times: Trump intends to end birthright citizenship. Media neglects to inform the public that the text is, especially by USC standards, pretty fucking clear:
All people born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and the state they reside in.…
No way they can get enough States on board to overthrow this (or any) amendment, and given all the other protections in there (e.g. Due Process), it would be unpopular even if they could. Even the damned Jesuits are against a repeal, FFS.
Yet again, part of me is morbidly curious as to how one crafts a “legal workaround” for such a plain, simple, English statement that a five year old would understand & accept. An executive that refuses to execute (by refusing to issue Social Security cards, Passports, etc) wouldn’t be new (ask Andrew Jackson about that one), but it would be new for modern times. And it kind of obviates that whole “Three Branches of Government’ thing.
Honestly, though, if they can turn that into a game Legal Calvinball, then the entire USC isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. (And, by inference, USG becomes “culturally invalid”– won’t that be interesting?). Any legitimacy to existing authority? Gone. (And that includes SCOTUS). Protection of private property by the State? Gone. Solid contract law? Gone.
Without the current American State, you don’t get Billionaires. Billionaires are a thing that cannot exist, unprotected out in the wild, as recent events have shown. They either need to be head of a State (like Putin/Trump), or to command a vast fortune so the State will deem them worthy of protection.
Older societies had certain “mechanisms” in place to deal with Resource Hoarders (it often involved a rock to the back of the head). So the Billionaires’ eagerness to destroy the very complex structures that keep them awash in imaginary ‘Equity’ (the true source of their power) and their lives Guillotine-Free is… puzzling.
Imagine a school of highly exotic, useless fish in an aquarium, frantically trying to figure out the best way of drilling through the tank glass.
That’s how I see them. Problem is, we’re all stuck in the same tank, with them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
no peanuts in church... 
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