Birthright citizenship, white supremacy, and Stephen Miller’s herrenvolk America

What Ozzie wanted to know was always different. The first time he had wanted to know how Rabbi Binder could call the Jews “The Chosen People” if the Declaration of Independence claimed all men to be created equal. Rabbi Binder tried to distinguish for him between political equality and spiritual legitimacy, but what Ozzie wanted to know, he insisted vehemently, was different. That was the first time his mother had to come.

Then there was the plane crash. Fifty-eight people had been killed in a plane crash at La Guardia. In studying a casualty list in the newspaper his mother had discovered among the list of those dead eight Jewish names (his grandmother had nine but she counted Miller as a Jewish name); because of the eight she said the plane crash was “a tragedy,” During free-discussion time on Wednesday Ozzie had brought to Rabbi Binder’s attention this matter of “some of his relations” always picking out the Jewish names. Rabbi Binder had begun to explain cultural unity and some other things when Ozzie stood up at his seat and said that what he wanted to know was different. Rabbi Binder insisted that he sit down and it was then that Ozzie shouted that he wished all fifty-eight were Jews. That was the second time his mother came.

Philip Roth, “The Conversion of the Jews”

I wish Philip Roth was still around to write a story called “The Jew Miller,” about Stephen Miller’s somewhat ironic role in the legal shenanigans that have resulted in a case before the Supreme Court of the United States, regarding the suddenly very serious and complicated and difficult question of whether I’m actually an American citizen.

The court will hear arguments tomorrow morning in Trump v. Barbara, which is about the executive order authored by Miller, and signed by Donald Trump on his first day back in office, seeking to end birthright citizenship for many millions of heretofore unproblematically American people, including me. I was born in Colorado sixty-six years ago, and I’ve spent a total of maybe six months outside the United States in the intervening decades, but Stephen Miller doesn’t think I’m an American citizen. That’s because my parents were both aliens at the time I was born, and were legally present in the United States on an only temporary basis — they had work and student visas respectively — and, per Trump’s executive order, that means I wasn’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the federal government at the time my mother gave birth to me here.

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

Good question.

The right wing revisionist legal scholarship factory, featuring such luminaries as John Eastman, has been busy cranking out arguments that, if you squint just right, the first sentence of the 14th amendment wasn’t intended to mean what it appears to the unenlightened to mean, which is that if you’re born in the USA, you’re a citizen. These arguments are wrong as a matter of history, and even if by some chance they weren’t, the whole idea that the citizenship of millions upon millions of Americans like me should be retroactively eradicated because of an esoteric reading of a constitutional clause that hasn’t been read that way by anybody for at least the last 130 years is . . . questionable at best.

What these arguments are actually asserting is that every bit of the United States constitution should be interpreted as a fundamentally white supremacist document, even the parts of it, like the first sentence of the 14th amendment, that were adopted as part of the apparently never-ending battle to make it something else.

Yakov Blotnik’s old mind hobbled slowly, as if on crutches, and though he couldn’t decide precisely what the boy was doing on the roof, he knew it wasn’t good-that is, it wasn’t-good-for-the-Jews. For Yakov Blotnik life had
fractionated itself simply: things were either good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews.

The continuing relevance of that question seems to have evaded Stephen Miller.