Monday, June 14, 2010

Bring Back Reconstruction in Texas

Well that’s it. It’s now clear that the Texas GOP, curiously the Party of Lincoln, remains “unreconstructed.” That is, the same issues that caused Texas to join in the War of Northern Aggression on the side of The South continue to haunt the majority party in Texas.

Evidence? What about the recently passed 2010 Republican Party of Texas platform and its anti-immigrant frenzy? A frenzy that even goes so far as to challenge the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution as well as the 14th Amendment.

Not only does the language of the anti-immigrant platform take the same form as the recently passed Arizona “Papers, Please” Senate Bill 1070, it goes further.

Much further.

Not only do they demand that it be a Class A misdemeanor for an alien to be “intentionally or knowingly” in Texas without proper immigration documentation, they demand that the state “also seek an end to birthright citizenship – the policy that someone born in the U.S. is a citizen even if his parents are not – and asked the federal government to clarify laws on the issue.”

That is, if your parents are not citizens of the US when you are born within US borders, you are not automatically a US citizen. They want the federal government to “clarify” that point of settled law. A law, actually a part of the US Constitution, that was passed to prevent former slave states from not granting former slaves citizenship.

The pertinent words from the 14th Amendment:

“Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Seems pretty clear to me.

The Supremacy Clause pretty much nails it. States cannot pass laws that contravene the US Constitution.

Bringing me back around full circle. Texas Republicans, as evidenced by the platform that they just passed, are unrepentant members of the Confederacy. Obviously then, there is a question here over whether some people in Texas are actually citizens of the United States of America.

The thing is, I think there is a cloud over which group we are talking about here: the sons and daughters of illegal aliens born in Texas or Confederate Rebels.

No comments: