"This is the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress,” said Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT). “[W]e're debating a bill that’s going to cut healthcare for 16 million people. It's going to give a tax break to…massively wealthy people who don't need any more money. There are going to be kids who go hungry because of this bill. This is the biggest reduction in…nutrition benefits for kids in the history of the country.” Murphy continued: “We're obviously gonna continue to offer these amendments to try to make it better. So far not a single one of our amendments…has passed, but we'll be here all day, probably all night, giving Republicans the chance over and over and over again to slim down the tax cuts for the corporations or to make life a little bit…less miserable for hungry kids or maybe don't throw as many people off of healthcare. Maybe don't close so many rural hospitals. It's gonna be a long day and a long night.” “This bill is a farce,” said Senator Angus King (I-ME). “Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table, saying, ‘I've got a great idea. Let's give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire and we’ll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower-income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps, we cut SNAP, we cut food aid to people?’... I've been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.” “When I worked here in the 70's,” King said, “I had insurance as a…junior staff member in this body 50 years ago. Because I had that insurance that covered a free checkup, I went in and had my first physical in eight years…and the doctors found a little mole on my back. And they took it out. And I didn't think much of it. And I went in a week later and the doctor said, ‘You better sit down, Angus. That was malignant melanoma. You're going to have to have serious surgery.’… And I had the surgery and here I am. If I hadn’t had insurance, I wouldn’t be here. And it’s always haunted me that some young man in America that same year had malignant melanoma, he didn’t have insurance, he didn’t get that checkup, and he died. That’s wrong. It’s immoral.” Senator King continued: “I don’t understand the obsession and I never have…with taking health insurance away from people. I don’t get it. Trying to take away the Affordable Care Act in 2017 or 2018 and now this. What’s driving this? What’s the cruelty to do this, to take health insurance away from people knowing that it’s going to cost them…up to and including…their lives.” In fact, the drive to slash health insurance is part of the Republicans’ determination to destroy the modern government. Grover Norquist, a lawyer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and one of the key architects of the Republican argument that the solution to societal ills is tax cuts, in 2010 described to Rebecca Elliott of the Harvard Crimson how he sees the role of government. “Government should enforce [the] rule of law,” he said. “It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.” Norquist vehemently opposed taxation, saying that “it’s not any of the government’s business who earns what, as long as they earn it legitimately,” and proposed cutting government spending down to 8% of gross domestic product, or GDP, the value of the final goods and services produced in the United States. The last time the level of government spending was at that 8% of GDP was 1933, before the New Deal. In that year, after years of extraordinary corporate profits, the banking system had collapsed, the unemployment rate was nearly 25%, prices and productivity were plummeting, wages were cratering, factories had shut down, farmers were losing their land to foreclosure. Children worked in the fields and factories, elderly and disabled people ate from garbage cans, unregulated banks gambled away people’s money, and business owners treated their workers as they wished. Within a year the Great Plains would be blowing away as extensive deep plowing had damaged the land, making it vulnerable to drought. Republican leaders insisted the primary solution to the crisis was individual enterprise and private charity. When he accepted the Democratic nomination for president in July 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt vowed to steer between the radical extremes of fascism and communism to deliver a “New Deal” to the American people. The so-called alphabet soup of the New Deal gave us the regulation of banks and businesses, protections for workers, an end to child labor in factories, repair of the damage to the Great Plains, new municipal buildings and roads and airports, rural electrification, investment in artists and writers, and Social Security for workers who were injured or unemployed. Government outlays as a percentage of GDP began to rise. World War II shot them off the charts, to more than 40% of GDP, as the United States helped the world fight fascism. That number dropped again after the war, and in 1975, federal expenditures settled in at about 20% of GDP. Except for short-term spikes after financial crises (spending shot up to 24% after the 2008 crash, for example, and to 31% during the 2020 pandemic), the spending-to-GDP ratio has remained at about that set point. The national debt is growing because tax revenues have plummeted. Tax cuts under the George W. Bush and Trump administrations are responsible for 57% of the increase in the ratio of the debt to the economy, 90% if you exclude the emergency expenditures of the pandemic, and have left the United States with a tax burden nowhere close to the average of the 38 other nations in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), all of which are market-oriented democracies. And those cuts have gone primarily to the wealthy and corporations. Republicans who backed those tax cuts now want more. They are trying to force through a measure that will dramatically cut the nation’s social safety net while at the same time increasing the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years. “There are two ways of viewing the government's duty in matters affecting economic and social life,” FDR said in his speech accepting the 1932 Democratic nomination for president. “The first sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man.” The other “is based upon the simple moral principle: the welfare and the soundness of a Nation depend first upon what the great mass of the people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it.” The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill takes wealth from the American people to give it to the very wealthy and corporations, and Democrats are calling their colleagues out. “This place feels to me, today, like a crime scene,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) said on the floor of the Senate. “Get some of that yellow tape and put it around this chamber. This piece of legislation is corrupt. This piece of legislation is crooked. This piece of legislation is a rotten racket. This bill cooked up in back rooms, dropped at midnight, cloaked in fake numbers with huge handouts to big Republican donors. It loots our country for some of the least deserving people you could imagine. When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.” — Notes: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/11/18/nbsp-government-percent-fm/ https://www.fdrlibrary.org/great-depression-facts https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/ Bluesky: You’re currently a free subscriber to Letters from an American. If you need help receiving Letters, changing your email address, or unsubscribing, please visit our Support FAQ. You can also submit a help request directly. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Monday, June 30, 2025
June 30, 2025
Taking away your citizenship
Here it is, right on schedule. We’ve moved onto the next phase of the plan, where the Civil Rights Division, the once proud crown jewel of the Justice Department, will participate in stripping naturalized American citizens of their citizenship. A June 11 memo, issued by the head of the DOJ’s Civil Division, Brett Shumate, explains the plan. He comes straight out of the chute, explaining in the opening sentences of the memo where the new direction comes from, “President Trump and Attorney General Bondi have directed the Civil Division to use its enforcement authorities to advance the Administration’s policy objectives. This memorandum describes those policy objectives and directs Civil Division attorneys to prioritize investigations and enforcement actions advancing these priorities.” Denaturalization doesn’t show up until page three of the four page memo, but what comes beforehand is enlightening. It starts off with Trump’s decision to use “our longstanding civil-rights laws…to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.” This is Trump’s perverse effort to use our civil rights laws to go after people, businesses, universities, and so on who have fought to make this country more diverse and inclusive. It is the culture wars brought to life in the bureaucratize of a memo titled, “Civil Division Enforcement Priorities.” And for good measure, Shumate adds that Attorney General Bondi wants to “align” the Department’s priorities with Trump’s, before informing his employees that “the Civil Division will use all available resources to pursue affirmative litigation combatting unlawful discriminatory practices in the private sector.” How does the Civil Division plan to do that? Shumate lists three priorities before he gets to denaturalization, and a quick review of them gives you an idea of the tone of the memo. He starts with something seemingly benign, the use of one of the Civil Division’s longstanding primary authorities, the False Claims Act (FCA). But this is a new twist, because now, instead of targeting fraudsters who steal taxpayer money, the focus will be on people who violate this administration’s efforts to return our culture to one dominated by white cisgender straight males. The FCA makes anyone who knowingly submits false claims to the government liable for three times the amount of damage they cause to the government. It’s an important tool in the arsenal of civil divisions in U.S. Attorney’s offices across the country, with cases often starting as qui tams, where private citizens come forward as whistleblowers in exchange for a share in the damages. Shumate notes that those who can be pursued under the FCA include “entities that receive federal funds but knowingly violate civil rights laws.” Schools, cities, nonprofits—the list of potential targets is endless and treble damages would put a lot of them out of business. This is more of the same, an effort to force people who would oppose the administration into voluntary compliance with its hateful policies, in hopes that they can live to fight another day. Shumate also nods at other important new policies, like the one using antisemitism as an excuse to interfere with the independence of our nation’s universities and one about protecting women and children, which turns out to be an attack on transgender people. He directs his lawyers that one of their priorities is “ending sanctuary jurisdictions.” Finally, we get to denaturalization. The memo calls for DOJ to prioritize denaturalization for people who became naturalized citizens through fraud, lying about, or concealing facts related to their eligibility. There is nothing new about this in principle, 8 U.S.C. § 1451(a), provides for citizenship to be revoked in these circumstances. The law has been around in more or less this form since the early 1950s. But denaturalization has been used judiciously across Republican and Democratic administrations. Denaturalization was used against alleged “communists” during the McCarthy era in the late 1940s and early 1950s, but from 1990 to 2017, DOJ filed only about 11 denaturalization cases per year. All American citizens, denaturalized or born here, are subject to the penalties of criminal law if they commit crimes. Ripping someone away from their family and their established life has been too harsh for anything other than the most heinous crimes. For instance, Nazis who lied about their role in the Holocaust, were stripped of citizenship if discovered, and deported.
The memo directs the Civil Division to prioritize denaturalization proceedings and sets ten “categories of priorities for denaturalization cases,” including people who commit serious violent crimes like terrorism and war crimes, transnational gang-related crimes, felonies that weren’t disclosed during naturalization, human trafficking, and also white collar crimes, like financial fraud against the U.S. They are all serious crimes that carry lengthy prison sentences in the U.S., and some might argue that’s better than returning them to their home countries, where might receive far more lenient treatment and even be able to return to this country to commit more crimes. But most people would agree that there are at least some cases in these categories where denaturalization might be appropriate. Then we get to category 10: “Any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue. These categories are intended to guide the Civil Division in prioritizing which cases to pursue; however, these categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case, nor are they listed in a particular order of importance. Further, the Civil Division retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate. The assignment of denaturalization cases may be made across sections or units based on experience, subject-matter expertise, and the overall needs of the Civil Division.” I don’t know what that means, and that’s exactly the problem. “Any other cases…that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.” The provision is so vague that it would permit the Division to denaturalize for just about anything. It could be something prior to or following naturalization. Given the other priorities discussed in the memo, it could be exercising First Amendment rights or encouraging diversity in hiring, now recast as fraud against the United States. Troublesome journalists who are naturalized citizens? Students? University professors? Infectious disease doctors who try to reveal the truth about epidemics? Lawyers? All are now vulnerable to the vagaries of an administration that has shown a preference for deporting people without due process and dealing with questions that come up after the fact and with a dismissive tone. “Oopsie,” and there’s nothing we can do to get them back. The way the memo is written, there is no guarantee DOJ will pursue cases against violent criminals—they could just do easy cases to ratchet up numbers like we’re seeing with deportation. Or they could target people who, they view as troublemakers. Prior to 1933, Jews in Germany were full citizens, protected by the Constitution of 1919. That changed after Hitler came to power. A law passed in 1933 authorized the denaturalization of East European Jews who had become German citizens since World War I and Jews who had already fled from Germany. The laws were vague. Instead of naming Jews, they permitted denaturalization of people who were "undesirable," or were outside of Germany if their "conduct violated the duty of loyalty toward Germany or harmed German interests." The Nazis seized assets from people they denaturalized. Their spouses and children could be included. There was no due process, no judicial or administrative proceedings of any kind available to challenge actions taken against these people. The Library of Congress and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum maintain documentary evidence of what happened. In 2023, there were approximately 25 million immigrants in this country who had become naturalized American citizens. Today, their lives have become a little less certain. The question we have to learn to ask about this administration is not where it starts, but where it ends. We’re in this together, Joyce You're currently a free subscriber to Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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