Author Archives: eehines

Bogus

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A Wall Street Journal article on the requirements to vote under the SAVE Act had this bit of nonsense:

What happens if someone doesn’t have a passport or birth certificate?
The University of Maryland estimated in 2023 that more than 21 million American citizens don’t have ready access to a passport or other documentary evidence of citizenship. ….

Birth certificates are, most definitely, readily available, even if they’re not already in the prospective voter’s immediate possession. It’s straightforward to write to the hospital in which he was born, or the county, if the hospital is no longer operational. Even adoptees, in almost all cases, can determine their birthplace; it’s in their adoption records. It’s a bit more cumbersome when the adoption records have been sealed, but many of those can be opened by a court and the birthplace revealed. The few cases where that’s still not possible are very few, indeed, and present no excuse at all for blocking securing our elections against voter fraud. The fee for birth certificate copies is nominal.

Passports also are readily available; although the timeline for getting one is longer, and the fee is larger.

And this:

What about people who change their name when they get married or due to other circumstances?
The legislation doesn’t explicitly mention married voters or name changes, but does account for situations where a voter’s documents might not perfectly align by addressing “discrepancies in documentation.” Under the bill, an applicant would need to provide additional documentation to election officials to prove their citizenship.

In the particular case of married voters—the vast majority of whom are women—the changed name is an easily solved non-issue. It’s straightforward here, as with birth certificates, to write to the county where the marriage license/certificate was issued. Again, the fee is nominal. Most women in common law marriages haven’t changed their names. Those few occasions where they did and cannot provide documentation can follow the alternative procedures; in any event, these cases also present no excuse for holding up securing our elections.

Those who’ve changed their names “due to other circumstances” can write to the court in which they changed their name and get a copy of the documents recording the change. Here, too, the fee is nominal. The timeline for getting the copies might vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

The plaint that evidence of voter fraud being scant is a red herring. It exists; this is an easy way to reduce it further. The thousands of “voters” illegally present in States’ voter rolls presents far too exploitable an opening for fraud. The fact that someone never locks his house door and hasn’t been robbed presents no rationale for continuing the foolishness.

This sort of misinformation, more likely borne of lazily repeating other news writers’ claims rather than doing actual original reporting, is yet another reason why it’s increasingly difficult to take a new writer’s natter seriously.

Not Just Vetting

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The headline and subheadline laid out the problem; the article expands on it.

Naturalized but radicalized: Recent terror attacks expose glaring problems with citizenship vetting
After four attacks on the U.S. with one common thread—immigration—the time may have come to make transformative changes to the system that decides who comes in.

That’s a mostly accurate description, but only that; Congresswoman Harriet Hageman (R, WY) identified the other critical dimension of the problem.

Throughout history, we have expected people who immigrated here to become assimilated to the American culture. And I think over the last 30 years or so, there’s been this idea that we no longer need to do that, and this is an example of the consequences of those kinds of bad policies[.]

Our vetting does nothing to assess a potential immigrant’s interest in or willingness to assimilate into American culture, a culture that prizes individual initiative, individual responsibility, and acceptance of, or at least willingness to, live under American values of free speech and religion, keeping and bearing arms, and the rest as illustrated in our Bill of Rights.

Once in the US—legally, mind you—and on what amounts to probation, remaining here on a green card or while on the green card working toward citizenship, potential immigrants are not pushed to learn American English (or even British English) beyond taking a few simplified English as a Second Language courses, nor are they required to learn about American culture and values beyond what it takes to pass a dumb-downed citizenship test.

English needs to be specified as our official language, and government officials at all levels of our hierarchy need to interact with citizens and immigrants in English. Beyond that, their children need to be taught in American English in school, not in their native language, and that schooling needs to include more American history and civics (as it must for the children of us citizens, come to that).

With no incentive to assimilate anywhere along the way, potential immigrants, staying separate from us, gain a sense of isolation even in their enclaves. Of course they’re easily radicalized.

This is Idiotic

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Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R, SD) is putting the SAVE Act up for a vote this week, but he opposes using a talking filibuster to get it passed. Aside from not having the Republican votes and support for that—he’s right on that score; there are far too many timid Reluctant Republicans presently in the Senate—his rationale includes this bit:

In the end, you’re family and this is a team and we need the team to succeed, and you have differences of opinion along the way, and you know, you don’t always get 100% of what you want[.]

This is the idiotic part. The Progressive-Democratic Party Senators don’t agree that they’re part of any Senatorial family, nor are they members of any team but their own. They’re holding themselves apart, attempting to dictate to the Senate and impose their demands, regardless of what any other Senator—or us average Americans—might think. It’s only necessary to see their behavior vis-à-vis their shutdown of DHS over their personal demands regarding ICE to understand this.

When half the Senate believes itself not part of any family, when that half holds itself out as their own team, it’s idiotic for the other half to act like the whole is a family or that there’s some sort of teamwork available.

Lowered Going Away Fees

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The State Department has greatly reduced the cost to an American citizen of renouncing his citizenship.

The US State Department has cut the fee all the way down to $450 from $2,350.

Even though this just restored the I Quit Fee to its 2010 level, it’s still a big deal.

It’s also not all bad. The quitters shouldn’t let the door hit them in the fanny on the way out. We won’t miss them.

Even better: our nation will get a little bit more conservative and a little bit less Precious- and Progressive-infested with each departure, since those who love our nation, Left or Right, will be staying and continuing to work to improve it.

A Small Separate Matter

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A US Federal Circuit Court judge has been suspended from hearing additional cases, and she’s suing and looking to get the Supreme Court to hear the matter. Her suspension is unconstitutional, she argues.

She’s right, but my concern concerns this claim, which Just the News included at the end of its article. The claim is from the DC Circuit, which heard the judge’s initial appeal of her suspension:

The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit last summer found its binding precedent barred review of her claims.

This is, to use a term of the art, idiotic. No precedent is completely binding, to the point of preventing and other outcome, on the court that issued the precedent. Every court that issues a precedential ruling is fully capable of modifying, overruling, or rescinding its own precedent. Even the judges of this famously liberal circuit court understand this.