The Republican Party in the state of Iowa has placed on its platform a peculiar proposal: reintroduce the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution as introduced to the states around the year 1812.
Of course, the current Thirteenth Amendment outlaws slavery. But an amendment proposed more than 50 years before – an amendment that would have been the Thirteenth had just one more state at the time voted to affirm it – would have banned any citizen of the United States from receiving “any present, pension, office, or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince, or foreign power.”
The punishment proscribed by Congress for doing so without its consent? The stripping of one’s citizenship.
The point to all of this is that Barack Obama this year accepted a Nobel Peace Prize, an award bestowed to recipients by the King of Norway. The thinking here must be that, if it can’t be proven that Obama isn’t a citizen, then heck, let’s just find a way to STRIP him of his citizenship!
Aside from the legal hurdle of prosecuting the president using ex post facto laws, the amendment itself would be a foolish one to pass. It would basically restrict all U.S. citizens from accepting gifts from any foreign powers of any kind. People in the private sector couldn’t even accept a gift from said powers, greatly limiting gifts from foreign dignitaries to private entrepreneurs. And that, my friends, is a stifling of the free market – something a conservative organization like the Iowa Republican Party would NEVER advocate!
Obviously the Iowa GOP would love to strip Obama of his citizenship, alongside Jimmy Carter and Al Gore, also Nobel Prize recipients. But what about participants of Doctors without Borders (Nobel Peace Prize winners in 1999)? Should we strip the citizenship of all Americans who participated in the organization?
How about removing Henry Kissinger’s citizenship rights (Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1973)?
What’s the Iowa GOP’s stance on stripping Martin Luther King Jr.’s citizenship (Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1964)?
What’s their stance on removing citizenship rights of every Quaker in the country (Nobel Peace Prize recipients in 1947)?
Or how about we just go ahead and say that Republican President Teddy Roosevelt, a well-known traitor to his country (please note the sarcasm), should be stripped of his citizenship rights as well (Nobel Peace Prize winner in1906)?
What about the countless gifts that presidents – both Democratic and Republican alike – have received from foreign dignitaries over the history of our nation? Is this proposal by the Iowa GOP really going to enforce anything against them? Or is it more likely that this proposal is a direct attack at the current president himself?
What this proposal really amounts to is another attempt by a state Republican Party trying to appease its growing number of radicals within its base. By doing so, the GOP is showing us that it’s not a party of ideas, that it doesn’t have anything to offer voters besides blind hatred against a president whom they desperately want out of office, by whatever means necessary. The party of ‘no’ is a party of ‘no respect,’ a party that has ‘no real American values.’
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