‘The White House seeks to punish Ilhan Omar for exercising her right to free speech. It seeks to curtail Representative Omar’s privileges and immunities under the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause, which holds that “for any Speech or Debate in either House,” both senators and representatives “shall not be questioned in any other Place.” It also hopes to arrogate the Constitution’s declaration that “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members” so that it can shape the composition of Congress itself.
One striking aspect of the second Trump administration worth noting is the extent to which the president keeps reinventing Stuart absolutism from first principles. Here, the president is all but re-enacting Charles I’s attempt to arrest his five most vocal opponents in the House of Commons in order to force the body into submission.
It should be said that the drive to denaturalize Omar is, by itself, a startling attack on the liberty of all Americans. It’s a move that harks back to the worst of the nation’s past — those moments when the government sought to shape, define and ultimately choose who would be “the people” of the United States.
“The United States has regularly revoked the citizenship of native-born and naturalized citizens alike,” the legal historian Amanda Frost observes in “You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.” At its core, she continues, “citizenship stripping embodies the view that society can cast out its unwanted and use that process to redefine itself and all those allowed to remain.”
Over the course of our history, countless Black Americans, Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans — not to mention women married to foreign nationals — have been stripped of citizenship in this nation’s repeated efforts to define full political and legal status by race and nationality.’ (from the New York Times)
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