The GOP’s lunatic center

The Republican Party doesn’t have a lunatic fringe. It has a lunatic center: a core bloc of white voters and officeholders whose extreme conservatism leads them to repeatedly indulge in outlandish conspiracy theories and, more seriously, propose and enact legislation of disgraceful callousness.

One striking example of this involves the American military’s three-month-long Jade Helm 15 combat-training exercises that will get underway in July and spread over various sparsely populated parts of the Southwest and West from Texas to California. The military periodically engages in such exercises, and officials said they’ve chosen these states because their terrain most closely matches the terrain where combat troops and Special Forces units have recently seen and are likely to see action.

But to the conservative conspiracy bloc, Jade Helm 15 is, as one conspiracy-monger posted, part of President Obama’s plan to provoke civil unrest, enact martial law, suspend the Constitution, suspend next year’s national elections, and extend his term of office indefinitely.

A poll released last week by Public Policy Polling found that 60 percent of those likely to vote in the Republican primaries believe that Jade Helm 15 could be a federal government attempt to take over Texas.

Pentagon officials have tried to calm the fears. And Arizona Sen. John McCain, among a few other Republicans, derided the claims as “bizarre.”

But Texas Republicans by and large have held a firm line on pandering to the extremists. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the state national guard to “monitor” the military’s activities once the exercises start. And Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Louie Gohmert characterized the conspiracy concerns as understandable because, as Cruz said, the Obama administration “has not demonstrated itself to be trustworthy.”

New York Times columnist Gail Collins had the right take on this. Noting that while the state is a hotbed of anti-Washington sentiment, more than a quarter of the committee chairmen in the House of Representatives are Texas Republicans (and two of the last four presidents have been Texas Republicans), Collins wrote, “Texas is getting more diverse by the hour, so maybe that’s it.”

That population diversity — the substantial growth over the last two decades of the nation’s Hispanic citizens (54 million) with a significant number in Texas as well as the sizable bloc of undocumented Hispanic immigrants (about 11 million) — is indeed what’s behind conservatives’ disparaging the clause of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment that automatically grants U.S. citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.”

Of course, the “birthright citizenship” clause was specifically enacted to ensure that all black Americans had full citizenship rights. But by the end of the 19th century, the Courts had ruled that the “all” in its language did indeed also apply to all other peoples born or naturalized in the U.S. as well.

Now, some conservatives want to narrow sharply that bedrock concept of the American nation (the principle is actually older than the 14th Amendment clause). In the Senate, Louisiana’s David Vitter has been introducing since 2011 a bill to narrow the clause; and in late April the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security (Republican-chaired, of course) held a hearing on birthright citizenship, at which two of the three witnesses argued the issue deserves a “national debate.”

In fact, the extraordinary high bar for revising or excising a constitutional amendment ensures the safety of the birthright citizenship clause as is.

But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the true purpose of this gambit. Conservatives aren’t primarily concerned about the children of undocumented immigrants being born here now. Given the GOP’s hostility to immigration reform, they worried that when they reach voting age the children of today’s undocumented immigrants will be adding to the substantial majority of Hispanic-Americans, and other Americans of color, who have multiple reasons not to vote Republican.

So, in that regard, conservatives’ current Jade Helm 15 lunacy and their attack on the principle of birthright citizenship offer further evidence of how driven the conservative movement is by a view of American society that demands they dominate other Americans—especially the ones who are “colored.”

Lee A. Daniels is a columnist for the National Newspaper Publishers Association. His essay, “Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Great Provocateur,” appears in Africa’s Peacemakers: Nobel Peace Laureates of African Descent (2014), published by Zed Books. His new collection of columns, Race Forward: Facing America’s Racial Divide in 2014, is available at www.amazon.com