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Comment count is 10
Tuan Jim - 2010-08-14

Professor Akhil Amar is adorable and awesome.

Also, yay 14th amendment. How insane can the republicans be? This is about the most crazypants stupid thing ever they're doing.


Bort - 2010-08-14

It achieves the goal of getting people worked up about something other than the Republicans' inability to deliver anything worthwhile. As a giant distraction, it's doing just fine.

The point I've heard Beck and others make is that the 14th Amendment was written for slaves. But the 14th amendment doesn't mention slaves specifically, not in the part about being born in the USA, nor in the part about equal protection. I suspect the people writing this amendment realized that they needed to look larger than the issue of ex-slaves, and had to make sure that there could not be any underclasses of citizens of any kind. With regard to citizenship, I imagine they thought about the problems if immigrants from, say, Korea came to this country, and as the Korean population expanded generation after generation, you'd have this self-perpetuating Korean population without the rights of citizens. They would constitute an exploitable and unprotected group, generation after generation, and the easiest way to prevent that from happening would be to grant citizenship to the generations born here.

Of course we did end up with Jim Crow laws that resulted in the sort of conditions the 14th amendment was trying to prevent, but just imagine if Jim Crow were the standard applied to all minority groups all across the country.


kingarthur - 2010-08-14

I'm kind of half in half out of the "it's a distraction" camp. Yeah, it's definitely a scheme, but at the same time I'm not laughing as much at the people who compare America to 1930 Germany.


dek863 - 2010-08-14

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/343698/augu st-10-2010/citizenship-down---akhil-amar


Explodotron - 2010-08-14

Thank you, kind sir.


mashedtater - 2010-08-14

Professor Amar did his best, but going toe to toe with stephen is hard work.


Johnny Madhouse - 2010-08-14

I do wish his interviewees could have more time to respond.


memedumpster - 2010-08-14

"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

So Prop 8 and the Arizona Seditious Police State are dependent on this thing going away?


pastorofmuppets - 2010-08-14

They might be onto something, though. Like, put everyone on a green card until their 16th birthday, at which point you have to pass the citizenship test. You can take it in whatever language, and the mentally handicapped are exempt. So basically anyone who is willfully ignorant of American history just gets sent out into space or something.


pastorofmuppets - 2010-08-14

Also, Colbert is consistently good but this was awesome.


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