Douglass, Frederick

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    Civil Liberties Make for Strange Bedfellows

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    Last Thursday, Sonia Sotomayor helped protect the country from Donald Trump, and she did it in an unexpected way — by defending the National Rifle Association.Let me explain.Attempts to target the free speech of political opponents are often the first sign of a decline into authoritarianism. As Frederick Douglass wrote in 1860, after an angry mob shut down an abolitionist event in Boston, “No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech.”“Liberty,” he went on, “is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”That’s exactly right, and that’s why Sonia Sotomayor’s opinion for a unanimous Supreme Court upholding the free speech rights of the N.R.A. against a hostile attack from a Democratic official in New York has ramifications well beyond New York politics and well beyond the battle over gun rights. By upholding the free speech rights of the N.R.A., the Supreme Court reinforced the constitutional wall of protection against vengeful government leaders, including Trump.Here’s what happened. In 2017, Maria Vullo, who was then the superintendent of the New York State Department of Financial Services, began investigating the N.R.A. Carry Guard insurance program. As the court’s opinion explains, Carry Guard was an insurance affinity program in which the N.R.A. offered insurance that “covered personal-injury and criminal-defense costs related to licensed firearm use” and even “insured New York residents for intentional, reckless and criminally negligent acts with a firearm that injured or killed another person.”Under the affinity program, the N.R.A. would offer the insurance as a member benefit and various insurance companies, including Chubb Limited and Lloyd’s of London, would underwrite the insurance and the N.R.A. would take a cut of the premium payments.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Frederick Douglass Knew That Trump and DeSantis Don’t

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      There was a moment during the Trump administration when the president and his most ideologically committed advisers searched for a way to end birthright citizenship.Enshrined in the first sentence of the first section of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, birthright citizenship means that anyone and everyone born on American soil is an American citizen. Written to secure the social transformations wrought by the Civil War, it is a cornerstone of the United States as a multiracial democracy.President Donald Trump would end it, he decided, by executive order. “It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” he said when announcing the effort in 2018, falsely asserting, “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States — with all of those benefits. It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”Fortunately, Trump was wrong. There is no way, short of a constitutional amendment, to nullify the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. Nor was there any question of its meaning and intent. After fierce pushback from legal scholars on both the left and the right, Trump dropped the issue.But he didn’t forget about it. Earlier this year, Trump announced that if he were elected president again, he would ban birthright citizenship through executive order. Not to be outdone in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, said that he, too, would end birthright citizenship if elected president.“Stop the invasion,” said DeSantis’s blueprint for immigration policy. “No excuses.” He is pledging to “take action to end the idea that the children of illegal aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship if they are born in the United States.” He also contends, “Dangling the prize of citizenship to the future offspring of illegal immigrants is a major driver of illegal migration,” adding that “it is also inconsistent with the original understanding of the 14th Amendment.”The main reason DeSantis has followed Trump down this path is that he appears to be running to be the understudy to the former president. If Trump is forced out of the race because his legal troubles push him out of presidential politics, then DeSantis will take the standard for the MAGA faithful. Or so he hopes.At the same time, it’s clear that DeSantis’s position is as much about ideology as it is about opportunism. His attack on birthright citizenship is consistent with his crusade to purge “wokeness” from schools and classrooms in the state of Florida, where officials have banned books and suppressed instruction on, among other subjects, the history of American racism.The attack on birthright citizenship is an attempt to stigmatize and remove from society an entire class of people. And the attack on so-called wokeness is an attempt to delegitimize and remove from society an entire way of understanding the world. Together, the attacks form an assault on two of the pillars of the egalitarian ideal.Here, it is worth taking a brief tour of the history of birthright citizenship in the United States. Before the 14th Amendment, the boundaries around citizenship were ill defined. Although the idea of birthright citizenship was present in English common law at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the Constitution as ratified said nothing about acquiring citizenship by either birth or naturalization.In 1790, Congress limited citizenship by naturalization to “free White persons … of good character,” but was silent on the question of citizenship by birth. As the 18th century came to a close and the 19th century progressed, one prominent view was that there was no citizenship in the United States as such; there was only citizenship in a state, which conferred national citizenship by virtue of the state’s place in the Union. To the extent that citizenship came with rights, the scope of those rights was a question of state laws and state constitutions.But there were always proponents of a broader, more expansive and rights-bearing birthright citizenship. They were free Black Americans, who needed to anchor themselves in a world where their freedom was tenuous and uncertain.“We are Americans, having a birthright citizenship,” wrote Martin Delany, the free Black journalist and antislavery orator, in his 1852 pamphlet “The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States.” Delany, as the historian Martha S. Jones noted in “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America,” called on Black Americans to leave the United States. And yet, he still claimed the country as his own.“Our common country is the United States,” Delany wrote. “Here were we born, here raised and educated; here are the scenes of childhood; the pleasant associations of our school going days; the loved enjoyments of our domestic and fireside relations, and the sacred graves of our departed fathers and mothers, and from here will we not be driven by any policy that may be schemed against us.”Against legislative efforts to make their lives in America impossible to live, free Blacks asserted that, in Delany’s words, “the rights of the colored man in this country to citizenship are fixed,” attached not just to the states, but to the United States.Jones noted that even those opposed to emigration, like the men of the 1853 Colored National Convention in Rochester, N.Y., mirrored Delany’s thinking. “We are Americans, and as Americans, we would speak to Americans,” declared the group. “We address you not as aliens nor as exiles, humbly asking to be permitted to dwell among you in peace; but we address you as American citizens asserting their rights on their own native soil.”With his 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, however, Chief Justice Roger Taney foreclosed the constitutional recognition of Black citizenship and defined the United States, in true Jacksonian form, as a white man’s country. Black people, he wrote, “were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” They had no rights, he added, “which the white man was bound to respect.”The birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, based on similar language found in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, was a direct response to and a rebuke of Taney’s reasoning. Having won the argument on the battlefield, the United States would amend its Constitution to establish an inclusive and, in theory, egalitarian national citizenship.The authors of the 14th Amendment knew exactly what they were doing. In a country that had already seen successive waves of mass immigration, they knew that birthright citizenship would extend beyond Black and white Americans to people of other hues and backgrounds. That was the point.Asked by an opponent if the clause would “have the effect of naturalizing the children of Chinese and Gypsies born in this country,” Senator Lyman Trumbull, who helped draft the language of birthright citizenship in the Civil Rights Act, replied “Undoubtedly.” Senator John Conness of California said outright that he was “ready to accept the provision proposed in this constitutional amendment, that the children born here of Mongolian parents shall be declared by the Constitution of the United States to be entitled to civil rights and to equal protection before the law with others.”In 1867, around the time Congress was debating and formulating the 14th Amendment, Frederick Douglass delivered a speech in Boston where he outlined his vision of a “composite nationality,” an America that stood as a beacon for all peoples, built on the foundation of an egalitarian republic. “I want a home here not only for the Negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours,” Douglass said. “The outspread wings of the American Eagle are broad enough to shelter all who are likely to come.”If birthright citizenship is the constitutional provision that makes a multiracial democracy of equals possible, then it is no wonder that it now lies in the cross hairs of men who lead a movement devoted to unraveling that particular vision of the American republic.Embedded in birthright citizenship, in other words, is the potential for a freer, more equal America. For Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, that appears to be the problem.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      The Relentless Attack on Trans People Is an Attack on All of Us

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      Over the past year, we have seen a sweeping and ferocious attack on the rights and dignity of transgender people across the country.In states led by Republicans, conservative lawmakers have introduced or passed dozens of laws that would give religious exemptions for discrimination against transgender people, prohibit the use of bathrooms consistent with their gender identity and limit access to gender-affirming care.In lashing out against L.G.B.T.Q. people, lawmakers in at least eight states have even gone as far as to introduce bans on “drag” performance that are so broad as to threaten the ability of gender nonconforming people simply to exist in public.Some of the most powerful Republicans in the country want to go even further. Donald Trump has promised to radically limit transgender rights if he is returned to the White House in 2024. In a special video address to supporters, he said he would push Congress to pass a national ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth and restrict Medicare and Medicaid funding for hospitals and medical professionals providing that care.He wants to target transgender adults as well. “I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age,” Trump said. “I will ask Congress to pass a bill establishing that the only genders recognized by the United States government are male and female, and they are assigned at birth.”There is plenty to say about the reasoning and motivation for this attack — whether it comes from Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida or Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas — but the important thing to note, for now, is that it is a direct threat to the lives and livelihoods of transgender people. It’s the same for other L.G.B.T.Q. Americans, who once again find themselves in the cross-hairs of an aggressive movement of social conservatives who have become all the more emboldened in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.This is no accident. The attacks on transgender people and L.G.B.T.Q. rights are of a piece with the attack on abortion and reproductive rights. It is a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender.Politicians and those of us in the media alike tend to frame these conflicts as part of a “culture war,” which downplays their significance to our lives — not just as people living in the world, but as presumably equal citizens in a democracy.Democracy, remember, is not just a set of rules and institutions, but a way of life. In the democratic ideal, we meet each other in the public sphere as political and social equals, imbued with dignity and entitled to the same rights and privileges.I have referred to dignity twice now. That is intentional. Outside of certain select phrases (“the dignity of labor”), we don’t talk much about dignity in American politics, despite the fact that the demands of many different groups for dignity and respect in public life has been a driving force in American history since the beginning. To that point, one of the great theorists of dignity and democracy in the United States was none other than Frederick Douglass, whose experience in bondage gave him a lifelong preoccupation with the ways that dignity is either cultivated or denied.“Douglass observed,” the historian Nicholas Knowles Bromell writes in “The Powers of Dignity: The Black Political Philosophy of Frederick Douglass,” “that although dignity seems to be woven into human nature, it is also something one possesses to the degree that one is conscious of having it; and one’s own consciousness of having it depends in part on making others conscious of it. Others’ recognition of it then flows back and confirms one’s belief in having it, but conversely their refusal to recognize it has the opposite effect of weakening one’s confidence in one’s own dignity.”It is easy to see how this relates to chattel slavery, a totalizing system in which enslaved Black Americans struggled to assert their dignity and self-respect in the face of a political, social and economic order that sought to rob them of both. But Douglass explored this idea in other contexts as well.Writing after the Civil War on women’s suffrage, Douglass asked his readers to see the “plain” fact that “women themselves are divested of a large measure of their natural dignity by their exclusion from and participation in Government.” To “deny women her vote,” Douglass continued, “is to abridge her natural and social power, and to deprive her of a certain measure of respect.” A woman, he concluded, “loses in her own estimation by her enforced exclusion from the elective franchise just as slaves doubted their own fitness for freedom, from the fact of being looked down upon as fit only for slaves.”Similarly, in her analysis of Douglass’s political thought — published in the volume “African-American Political Thought: A Collected History” — the political theorist Sharon R. Krause shows how Douglass “clearly believed that slavery and prejudice can degrade an individual against his will” and generate, in his words, “poverty, ignorance and degradation.”Although Douglass never wrote a systematic account of his vision of democracy, Bromell contends that we can extrapolate such an account from the totality of his writing and activism. “A democracy,” Douglass’s work suggests, “is a polity that prizes human dignity,” Bromell writes. “It comes into existence when a group of persons agrees to acknowledge each other’s dignity, both informally, through mutually respectful comportment, and formally, through the establishment of political rights.” All of our freedoms, in Bromell’s account of Douglass, “are means toward the end of maintaining a political community in which all persons collaboratively produce their dignity.”The denial of dignity to one segment of the political community, then, threatens the dignity of all. This was true for Douglass and his time — it inspired his support for women’s suffrage and his opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Act — and it is true for us and ours as well. To deny equal respect and dignity to any part of the citizenry is to place the entire country on the road to tiered citizenship and limited rights, to liberty for some and hierarchy for the rest.Put plainly, the attack on the dignity of transgender Americans is an attack on the dignity of all Americans. And like the battles for abortion rights and bodily autonomy, the stakes of the fight for the rights and dignity of transgender people are high for all of us. There is no world in which their freedom is suppressed and yours is sustained.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More