The president called me afterward. He enjoys the show, especially when his best rhetorical gladiators go beyond the friendly confines of Fox News and battle the far edges of the Left.
“You’re a wise guy, Gaetz. You’ll always be a wise guy. But you are very sharp. Quick. You are a wise guy and a wise man.”
But you don’t have to be particularly wise to use your eyes. No, we don’t really do the whole moral and cultural relativism thing, the president and I. America is simply the best country. That’s why so many people try to break in.
The Haitians agree and have voted with their feet. There are at least a million Haitians living in America, some legally, some not, most in my beloved state of Florida. The Clinton Foundation robbed them of the full potential of hurricane relief funds so that the State Department’s “Friend of Bill” contacts would be awarded lucrative contracts. The Obama regime gave “temporary”—ha!—protected status to some two hundred thousand Haitians illegally in the U.S. in 2010.
You don’t typically do that when things are going swimmingly in the old country. After all, following Chris Hayes’s horrified gasping during our interview, Haiti descended into violence exacerbated by a corrupt president and horrendous living conditions for its people. Now it’s sheet metal and garbage…and blood.
President Barack Obama took the liberty to quote James Madison, saying, “[T]he most important office in a democracy” is “citizen.” But he did everything in his power to cheapen the meaning of American citizenship. Perhaps that’s because he considered himself a “citizen of the world,” as he put it to a crowd of two hundred thousand adoring fans in Berlin. Schoolchildren may pledge their allegiance to the republic, but the last president didn’t see fit to offer them reciprocal allegiance by protecting their future from the consequences of unchecked illegal immigration. Loyalty is a two-way street.
When I pledge allegiance, I mean it. To my friends, to my family, but most of all, to my country. America First means American Citizens First, not the roaring crowds of European nations growing weaker due to their own flawed immigration choices and cultural decadence. If Europe is a glimpse at the Woketopia, count me out.
American citizenship makes us the “peers of kings,” as Coolidge once said, so why is seemingly everyone trying to give away our birthright? Or dilute the preciousness of Americanism? Many politicians frame the immigration issue in terms of its financial cost or impact on economic growth. But immigration policy in America really isn’t about money. To us, it’s about our cherished American identity. To them, it’s about power.
The real reason Democrats support unlimited illegal immigration is that they see unlimited potential to use illegal immigrants to hold onto power indefinitely. The immigrants first become clients of the administrative state, climbing aboard (and thus straining) social safety nets designed by Americans, paid for by Americans, and meant to help Americans.
Left-wing “grassroots” groups and liberal politicians prioritize connecting illegal immigrants with taxpayer-funded programs, which the Democrats run, ultimately converting the programs’ users into Democrat voters. In two-party democracies, there is always one party that seeks to expand the franchise so as to expand its power. Eventually, the expansion leads to democratic collapse, followed by tyranny. Such efforts necessarily dilute the meaning of citizenship and turn us all into subjects of a failing government.
Today’s elites would rather import a new people than serve the people that they’ve already got—people they have too often failed. Barack Obama wasn’t the first politician to betray the citizenry, nor will he be the last. In the pre-Civil War period, the South imported slaves partly to keep the Congress proslavery. The more slaves you brought in, the more the slave states would keep their power. The North, recognizing this electoral reality, agreed to the Three-Fifths Compromise by which slaves were counted as three-fifths of a free person for voting purposes rather than as full citizens as in the North. The Three-Fifths Clause, long derided by the Left as demeaning to black people, was actually an anti-slavery compromise that limited the power of the slaveholders.
The Southern states wanted to count slaves as free men but not let them live as free men. They were simultaneously political participants and property. The tension between slavery and freedom in a republic whose founding charter states that all are created equal could not be maintained, and a very bloody civil war became the only way out. After that war, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment to make clear that the sons of the Confederacy and former slaves were equal under the law and “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States when they were born.
Now, I’m just a country lawyer, but then again, so was Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Calvin Coolidge, so I had to turn to the original text to see for myself. The best thing about Congress is that you can look to the congressional record and parse what they were thinking at the time. As often is the case, someone else had already done the legwork. The cool thing about being a lawyer is that you get points for unoriginality, which is kind of what originalism really is. Did you do the history reading? No? Better find a nerd who has. And when it comes to birthright citizenship, there are no better nerds than those of the Claremont Institute.
The Claremont fellow and former Trump national security official Michael Anton has beaten me to the birthright citizenship research. Anton notes the role played by Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, who worked with Lincoln to pass the Thirteen Amendment, which outlawed slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which made the newly freed blacks citizens:
[E]very person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born
