// Poor Ron DeSantis!

The man went to Harvard Law School, founded an LSAT prep company, and now has to pretend to be a blithering idiot who’s never heard of the Bill of Rights (well, 90 percent of it) if he wants to be the MAGA punching bag whose entire future depends on some Democratic prosecutor finally taking out Donald Trump.

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Meanwhile Trump keeps raising the price of admission with ever-loonier pronouncements for Governor DeSantis to match. Here he is today promising to ban birthright citizenship, one-upping DeSantis’s recent feint of amnesia about the Full Faith and Credit Clause when he signed a bill invalidating out-of-state drivers licenses held by undocumented immigrants.

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#AGENDA47: President Trump’s plan to discourage illegal immigration by ENDING automatic citizenship for the children of illegal aliens. pic.twitter.com/3iytgg45st

— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) May 30, 2023

After the mandatory scaremongering about hordes of brown immigrants supposedly being welcomed with open arms by President Biden — “They come from mental institutions, they come from jails, prisons, some of the toughest, meanest people you’ll ever see!” — Trump promised to do away with birthright citizenship entirely.

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“As part of my plan to secure the border, on day one of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic citizenship,” he vowed.

What law?

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He doesn’t say, and it’s a safe bet that most of the MAGA faithful aren’t going to recall the precise wording of the 14th Amendment off the top of their heads, much less the jus soli holding in US v. Wong Kim Ark. But now DeSantis will have to pretend to be even more pig ignorant than his current job as governor of Florida requires.

Or perhaps he can affect to have learned the real truth when he escaped from the “elite” ghetto and developed natural immunity to the “woke mind virus.” It’s just a question of finding an academic willing to say the thing your xenophobic fans want to hear.

“As has been laid out by many scholars, this policy is based on a historical myth, a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates,” Trump droned on.

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Perhaps John Eastman is free to help Rob DeSanctimonious? Sure, Eastman’s got some, um, controversial associations. But Trump is talking about restricting citizenship to children with at least one parent who is a legal resident of the US. And if DeSantis is going to top that, he’ll have to find a “scholar” willing to say that even children of legal residents aren’t automatically granted citizenship. Luckily Eastman already committed to the position in a 2020 editorial in Newsweek opining that Vice President Harris was unqualified for office.

It takes a lot to out-crazy a septuagenarian megalomaniac who promises with a straight face, “Our country will be great again, our country will have borders.” But if DeSantis can buckle down and forget another 20-odd Amendments, he’ll be halfway there.

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

Constitutional Law, Donald Trump, Government, Ron DeSantis