Yes and No

Meadows, Tlaib Cool Down After Fiery Exchange Over Racism At Cohen Hearing

During the House Oversight Committee's hearing to take testimony from President Trump's former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, Meadows brought Lynne Patton, an African-American woman who works in the Trump administration at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to refute Cohen's allegations of Trump's racist behavior.

Tlaib, a freshman, was one of the last lawmakers to question Cohen and used part of her time to admonish Meadows for doing so. 

"Just because someone has a person of color — a black person working for them does not mean they aren't racist," she said Wednesday. 

Quite so.

"And it is insensitive that some would even say — the fact that someone would actually use a prop — a black woman — in this chamber, in this committee is alone, racist in itself."

Both charges are wrong.

Meadows subsequently absurdly cited his colored nieces (?) as proof he is not himself a racist.

And Tlaib insisted she had not called him a racist, giving two reasons in this order, that she had called the act racist and that she had said "someone" and not used his name.

That second reason is absurd and undermines the first, that she had called the act, not its perpetrator, racist.

It seems at least she understood herself to call "someone" a racist.

And just who might that have been?

BTW, though everyone who used it was pretty clearly a racist, the ludicrous birther bullshit that O was not, or was probably not, or was possibly not a natural born American citizen eligible for the office was not racist in itself.

It just wasn't.

But "racist" is so ugly a word and so damaging a charge, some people love to use it as a club.

No charity for Bozo

The default rule of interpretation - the rule of charity - says that of the remark of another one should suppose until it is proved otherwise that it makes sense, is not stupid, and is believed to be true by the person offering it.

Bozo, however, has shown since his birther years that in his case it is only prudent to suppose the exact opposite, the contradictory, the negation of the rule of charity.

Any remark of Bozo's should be greeted with the supposition that it is senseless, stupid, or a lie.

The burden of proof is entirely on him.

Senate Intelligence Leaders Offer Broad Pushback On Trump Surveillance Claims

Trump lies about his lies

Your daily Bozo

Trump says Obamacare was timed to blow up in 2017.

Immediately after O left office.

Good thing he and the Republicans are in power to save us.

And he and the Republican liars club are still droning on about O wiretapping Trump Tower.

Once a birther, always a birther.

Liars everywhere

People who support Trump support rather than oppose entitlements and Big Government and don't care at all about much of anything in the right wing agenda except closing the borders, deporting illegals, and reversing free trade.

All of that is anathema to Wall Street conservatives like George Will, Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and Mitch McConnell.

It squares only with some parts of the agenda of the paleocons - the neo-Confederate, birther, and racist wing of the party.

Don't listen to the lie that Trump supporters are regulation conservatives throwing a tantrum, angry at "establishment" Republicans for not actually repealing Obamacare - and CHIPS, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, for not abolishing the IRS, for not abolishing deficit spending and the national debt, and so on.

All of that is bluff and ballocks.

Donald Trump is an unscrupulous, megalomaniacal demagogue who saw that the biggest and angriest and most totally neglected faction of the Republican Party was white working class people driven into the fold by the anti-white outlook so strong on the left and seduced by the dog-whistling Buchananism of the right.

And he has taken over the party and pushed conservatism aside by promising to at last give those folks their way.

The president's nominee

Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Sensible Supreme Court Choice

A youngish white guy said to be respected by both Democrats and Republicans, but not the radical sisterhood that is already complaining O should have picked a black woman.

Orrin Hatch likes him, for cryin' out loud.

Or did a few years back.

Mitch McConnell is now telling the senate why the Republicans won't even privately meet with the guy, much less hold hearings.

(Trump is supporting the Republican refusal and Hillary is supporting Obama's calls for the process to go forward.)

It's all the usual bullshit.

Thing is, how confident are they Trump is a winner?

Or any Republican a runaway convention in Cleveland might put up?

And doesn't everyone expect that Hillary will fill all available vacancies with people more satisfactory to the party's left wing, identity-politics constituencies?

This could be the best offer, from a conservative and white-male-nationalist point of view, that they're going to get for the next eight years.

But they're not going to go for it.

Right now, the Trumpista wing of the party, the Reagan Democrats, the children and grandchildren of the Southern Strategy for whom the birther and ethnic cleanser, soft on the KKK and totally contemptuous of the real political process, is a hero, is certain he will win.

They are as certain he will be able to fill the court with his guys - reportedly, Mitch McConnell's guys - as they are certain he can and will bring back all those jobs lost to overseas competition in the last thirty or forty years, and as they are certain he will build that Wall, Mexico will pay for it, and he will round up and deport eleven million people living among us.

They have the bit between their teeth and they are running.

Birther controversies

Section 1 of Article Two of the United States Constitution sets forth the eligibility requirements for serving as president of the United States:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Some light is thrown on the meaning of "natural born Citizen" by the citizenship clause of section 1 of the 14th Amendment of nearly a century later.

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.

It certainly appears to be the former class who are "natural born" citizens, and not the latter.

But the text does not say "all and only . . . ", and so the possibility exists there are others, neither born nor naturalized in the US, who are citizens.

Who might they be?

And though not born here are any persons - perhaps some or all of those born outside the US but to US citizens - also natural born citizens?

Ted Cruz, for example?

Ted Cruz was born in Canada, though to an American mother.

And a propos of him I was at first inclined to agree with this view cited in the Guardian.

Most legal experts have interpreted that [a natural born citizen] to be anyone who is a citizen at birth and who did not need to undergo a naturalization process to obtain citizenship – a definition under which Cruz would qualify.

In a Harvard Law Review article, two former solicitor generals, Neal Katyal and Paul Clement, wrote: “Despite the happenstance of a birth across the border, there is no question that Senator Cruz has been a citizen from birth and is thus a ‘natural born Citizen’ within the meaning of the Constitution.”

But then I recalled the birther controversies reaching at least as far back as the campaign of 2008 in which it appears people generally supposed that actual birth in the US is necessary for being a natural born citizen.

Neither Obama's nor McCain's defenders contented themselves, seeking to establish their man's eligibility for office as a natural born citizen, with merely pointing out his American parentage that no one questioned in any case.

Recall the claim that, though born to an American mother, Barack Obama was not a natural born American because he was born in Kenya - a claim refuted by the candidate and his supporters by appeal to his Hawaiian birth certificate.

And recall that people defended the eligibility of John McCain for the presidency by insisting that he was born in the United States in the relevant sense because he was born in the Canal Zone, and so is a natural born US citizen within the meaning of the constitution.

Of course pettifogging lawyers can make anything a mare's nest, but in the present case the mess began with the constitution itself not containing or implying satisfactory clarity or detail.

Mitch McConnell: Ted Cruz is on his own on the whole birther issue

Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories

On the other hand, no doubt much of the muddle is due to our widespread, egregious, and routine dishonesty about the constitution, and in the present case such dishonesty is compounded among people who reject this qualification for the presidency, anyway.

All the same, it's hardly as though anyone was trying to deny any real meaning at all to the expression "natural born citizen," so that just anybody could claim to be that.

Arnie, for example.