A Rhetorical Battle Democrats Might Actually Win

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I’m joking, of course, because Democrats are like the Washington Generals of rhetorical battles, but the conservative push to revise the 14th Amendment has taken on a new and, some might say, terrible messaging push.

“Some” means me. Because it’s fucking terrible.

The 14th Amendment, you see, is the “anchor baby” amendment. I swear to God.

For those of you not familiar with the 14th Amendment, it’s sort of like the catch-all Amendment for all the things we really enjoy, like Due Process and voting and shit like that. It’s the reason that states can’t discriminate between races, that gender protections exist in the Constitution, that a number of fundamental voting rights exist, that you can’t be imprisoned for have sex with someone of the same gender, and so on. To reduce the 14th Amendment to the “anchor baby” amendment is tantamount to a full-on denigration of women, every minority group and, well, fuck it: America itself.

Not even going into whether or not the “anchor baby” controversy is real (there are no reliable statistics on how many people actually do this, and all signs point to this number being vanishingly small), it just seems weird that the GOP, so proud of the 14th Amendment otherwise, is now going all in on portraying one of its sterling achievements as nothing more than a misbegotten provision being taken advantage of by dirty Mexicans. Although they did also have the nation’s first Hispanic governor, who would presumably be recast as the nation’s first potential deportation of a Mexican illegal.