No sooner did the Supreme Court strike down President Donald Trump's executive order abolishing birthright citizenship, than MAGA politicians and pundits suddenly developed a fixation with "birth tourism" — the idea, grossly exaggerated, that there are thousands of women coming to America eight or nine months pregnant, intending to give birth and get American citizenship for their child.
But there's a cynical logic at the heart of why they suddenly pivoted to this issue, MS NOW's Chris Hayes pointed out on Wednesday.
"The Supreme Court decided narrowly yesterday, way too narrowly, that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution means what it plainly says: if you're born in this country, you are a citizen of this country, you are American. That's it. No ifs, ands, or buts," said Hayes. In response, he said, there has been a "bizarre, histrionic freakout on the right about the great scourge of — wait for it, wait for it — pregnant women racing to the U.S. to have babies."
Hayes played a number of clips, including acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin discussing the matter, and White House strategist Stephen Miller even entertaining the idea of a ban on foreign pregnant women entering the country on Fox News.
"They have fully invented a moral panic about birth tourism, something that's just not happening in large numbers, especially not in our post-Dobbs maternal mortality rate world that eclipses that of every other peer nation," said Hayes.
Nonetheless, he continued, the reason behind the fixation, and why even Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito harped about it in his "very weird, strange, actually morally repellent dissent yesterday," is that "they can't talk about the broader thing they want to do ... they want to talk about these edge cases."
Their actual goal, as laid out clearly in the overturned executive order, is to "selectively strip American citizenship from literally tens of millions of people in this country, tens of millions," said Hayes. "Your friends and your family members and your neighbors and your doctors and your nurses and the guy that serves you coffee, right? To redefine what it is to be American. That's what they're after."