| If I understand things correctly, this guy wants to continue the fine Republican tradition of ripping up everything that's happened the last 150 years and go back to America as an agrarian Republic in which only the wealthy and landowners possessed voting rights. There's talk in Republican circles about changing the rules of citizenship. The 14th Amendment says people born here are citizens, even if their parents are here illegally. It's called birthright citizenship, and it's how we've done it since 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified, mostly to make sure ex-slaves and their children weren't denied citizenship. But as the rhetoric on the melting pot moves toward a rolling boil, efforts have sprung up to end birthright citizenship. A platform declaring that children born of parents here illegally should not be citizens found its way into the 1996 Republican Party platform, but presidential candidate Bob Dole and vice presidential nominee Jack Kemp, those old softies, repudiated the concept.
...snip... But if we do change the rules of citizenship, I'd prefer we bounce folks on their merits rather than the pedigree of their folks. Isn't that the real American way?
Yes, a meritocracy is indeed part of the American fabric. You aren't who your parents were, but who you are. Or, so goes the idea. In practice, however, the same Republicans who want to end birthright citizenship (something anyone who has actually read the Constitution notes is in the original and not the product of an amendment) are using logic that demands that everyone's full estates and inheritances (minus presumably family heirlooms) be confiscated by the state for redistribution not to the sons and daughters of the wealthy but to those persons who have demonstrated skill and aptitude in the use of capital to achieve things. The route they've put us on, the same route that gave former slaves the right to vote, would require by matter of rhetoric and logic, to make their current presidential candidate give back the leg-up he was given at birth and earn everything all over again. |
