Posted by CODEPINK Staff
America is vulnerable and under attack. As a response to the attempted Times Square bombing, allegedly by a Pakistani-born naturalized American citizen (Read: brown-skinned person), Senator Joe Lieberman has introduced a bill to hack away at the United States Constitution by stripping naturalized Americans of their citizenship if they are affiliated with a foreign terrorist organization.
Domestic terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan and people who bomb abortion clinics can keep their citizenship.
What is Lieberman drinking nowadays? Why, some TEA of course, since the bill is informally called the “Terrorist Expatriation Act.” This is why Joe Lieberman is a joker on our war criminal cards. And Senator Brown is a joint co-sponsor of the bill. Isn’t he one of the GOP hopefuls that President Obama is calling on for support on a comprehensive immigration reform bill? Yes, consider that part of history now.
The TEA Act, hereon referred to as the “Brown Citizen Terror Act,” is clear unconstitutional given the Fourteenth Amendment says “all persons born or naturalized in the United States…” without exceptions. Even the Supreme Court has ruled that “Congress has no power under the Constitution to divest a person of his United States citizenship absent his voluntary renunciation thereof.”
However, the jaw-dropping statements don’t come from Joe “We Must Go to War” Lieberman. Secretary of State Clinton says citizenship is a privilege, not a right and the State Department already has expatriation authority within U.S. law to strip naturalized citizens of their rights “if someone shows some kind of allegiance to a foreign state.” Some kind of allegiance?!
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said that she liked the spirit of it but stopped short of endorsing the bill. Dear Ms. Pelosi, you like the spirit of stripping away our constitutional rights?!
Where do these histrionics go when white male citizens like Timothy McVeigh and Joseph Stack actually do succeed in killing people and destroying buildings?
Meanwhile, President Obama is gung-ho about killing a United States citizen with suspected ties to Al-Qaeda and making jokes about predator drones so there isn’t much hope or change there.
9 years of fear-mongering has reduced this country to a bunch of cowards who would rather attack the fabric of the American Constitution–our civil rights and liberties–than actually take good measure to protect this country. Stripping people of their naturalized citizenship does nothing to prevent future attacks. Abandoning civil rights and liberties as a reaction to an attempted attack is an act of surrender and defeat.
We’ve certainly made progress for racial relations in America. Nowadays, it only takes an attempted bombing from a person of color to bring America crashing down.
