Sidney Blumenthal writes:

Neither of the supreme court majority opinions in Trump v Barbara, the 5-4 decision upholding the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, mention the true architect of the case. Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14160, which would deny citizenship to children born on American soil if their parents are undocumented immigrants or on temporary visas, is extensively noted, but not the man responsible for it. The omission of Stephen Miller is like Dracula without Dracula.

The vampire identified is chief justice Roger B Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision of 1857, though his notorious statement at the heart of his ruling went uncited: that the framers believed that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”, that they were excluded from the Declaration of Independence’s principle that “all men are created equal” because of racial inferiority “too clear for dispute,” and that rendered them no different from “an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic.”

Roberts refers to Taney’s opinion as “odious,” making citizenship an exclusionary question of race and blood, even for emancipated Black people then. “For them, blood, not soil, was made the rule,” writes Roberts.

In her opinion, Jackson underscores that the Trump administration and its apologists – justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – seek to reinstate the Taney notion of “blood” as the basis of citizenship. “Of course,” she writes, “the ultimate irony is that for all the talk about the detestable Dred Scott decision, the Government and the principal dissent propose a return to its core tenet … It is that odious conclusion that the Citizenship Clause plainly rejects, as the Court explains. I add only that the Fourteenth Amendment’s universalist aims should forever be the death knell for this kind of claim–one that seeks to make bloodline the marker of birthright. The America that was reborn from the rubble of the Civil War simply does not countenance that inequitable result.”

Stephen Miller was aroused to a fury at the court’s rebuke of the order. He posted on X: “One of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court. American citizenship is not the birthright of the world. It belongs only and solely to Americans. No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration.”

Trump’s deputy chief of staff has been the chief proponent and enforcer of Trump’s worldview on immigration. Trump has repeatedly stated about immigrants that they are “poisoning the blood of our country”. Miller has elevated this principle of “blood” as the great replacement theory of inferior peoples overwhelming “civilization”. “If you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” he has said frequently. The concept is precisely the pseudo-scientific premise of “blood poisoning” (Blutvergiftung) at the core of Hitler’s race theory in Mein Kampf: “All the great civilizations of the past decayed because the originally creative race died out, as a result of poisoning of the blood.”

Miller has sought to shift American national identity from a constitutional matter rooted in law to one based on genetic inheritance. [Continue reading…]