(quietly) the whole point is to make the concept of citizenship and the rights it confers ever more contested and precarious while also mobilizing ever greater animus and institutional brutality against ever expanding categories of dehumanized rightsless nonpersons
it amazes me how easily people lose sight of this basic and urgent threat in favor of dithering over, say, whether the latest, corrosive assault on the idea of people having basic rights is "serious" or just a "distraction"
in a way that was not the case literally days ago, the prospect of stripping born citizens of rights is now authorized as a speakable and worthy-of-consideration topic in US public life. the question of whether or not the POTUS can constitutionally effect this misses the point
to be clear: the US strips ppl of rights all the time, citizens too, the concept of citizenship itself is problematic, etc, etc, but stipulating all that is not incompatible with noting that efforts to undermine legal rights are bad and do not have to be "practicable" to work!
"Yes your claim to the most basic grounds for social protections has been thrown into question by powerful people with no respect for the rule of law, and is now an open topic of debate for 'respectable' consideration, but don't worry, it's hard to amend the Constitution."
