Where the Party Ends

This is where the party ends.
I can't stand here listening to you
and your racist friend.

- "Your Racist Friend" by They Might Be Giants

This week's featured posts are "Why I'm Voting Straight Democratic", "How the Midterm Elections Look with One Day to Go", and "An hour-by-hour Guide to Election Night 2018".

This week everybody was talking about tomorrow's elections

The featured posts probably already go on at too much length, so I'll not add to them here.

and birthright citizenship

One way Trump interrupts a news cycle that is going badly for him -- like his rhetoric inspiring assassination attempts and an anti-Semitic massacre -- is to make an outrageous proposal. This time the proposal was to undo an important part of the 14th Amendment by executive order. The 14th Amendment says:

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.

The legal reasoning to circumvent this clear statement is pretty much of a sham. Garrett Epps explains:

The citizenship-denial lobby has focused on the words subject to the jurisdiction. Its members argue that citizens of foreign countries, even if they live in the U.S., are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, and thus their children are not covered by the clause. To test this idea, ask yourself: If a foreign citizen rear-ends your car on your drive home today, will you, or the police, allow him to drive away on the grounds that a foreign citizen cannot be arrested, ticketed, or sued?

 

For those scoring at home, the answer is no.

Foreign citizens are “subject to the jurisdiction” of our police and courts when they are in the U.S., whether as tourists, legal residents, or undocumented immigrants. Only one group is not “subject to the jurisdiction”—accredited foreign diplomats and their families, who can be expelled by the federal government but not arrested or tried.That’s who the framers of the clause were discussing in Section 1—along with one other group. In 1866, when the amendment was framed, Indians living under tribal rule were not U.S. citizens.

The idea that the authors of the 14th Amendment meant to exclude children of "illegal immigrants" from citizenship is anachronistic, because the term made no sense in 1866. The federal government wouldn't have any immigration rules to speak of until the Page Act of 1875, which kept Chinese women out of the US.

Coverage of Trump's claim fell into the "both sides" trap.

By reporting that an outlandish legal argument is, in fact, one on which “reasonable minds disagree,” journalists do not simply mislead their readers. They literally can change the outcome of a case raising that outlandish legal argument. They create space for judges who are sympathetic to Trump to reach the decision Trump wants. And they create an aura of legitimacy over such a decision even if it has no basis in law.

and Brazil

The global swing towards fascism continues. A combination of recession, corruption, and high crime led Brazilian voters to elect Jair Bolsonaro to be their president, starting January 1.

The opposition to Bolsonaro has been driven by his numerous discriminatory comments on race, gender and sexual orientation, as well as remarks in favour of torture and Brazil's former military dictatorship, in power from 1964 to 1985, which have angered and alarmed millions of Brazilians.

Bolsonaro has described having a daughter as a "weakness", told a congresswoman she was "too ugly" to be raped, claimed some black people were not "even good for procreation", and said he would rather one of his four sons "die in an accident" than be gay.

and you also might be interested in ...

Chris Hayes' Why Is This Happening? podcast has the kind of depth that his weekend show used to. (Since moving to weeknights, he's had to be more headline-oriented.) The Oct. 30 edition is an interview with Michael Tesler, co-author of Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.

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Iran sanctions are back.

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The emoluments lawsuit reaches the discovery phase. This is important, because it means that the plaintiffs will get to look behind the curtain into some of the Trump Organization's books. Judge's decision.

and let's close with something unusual

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, break dancers perform in medieval armor. I don't know what it means, but it looks cool.