After years of being in the Treason Lobby's pocket, Lindsey Graham has amazingly come out against birthright citizenship, saying "People come here to have babies.They come here to drop a child. It's called "drop and leave." Lindsey Graham has either seen the light, or felt the heat, and Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson is furious about it.

"After years of being a lonely voice of Republican sanity on immigration, Graham has decided to embrace the supreme symbol of nativism — changing the Fourteenth Amendment to restrict American citizenship. He has either taken leave of his senses or of his principles. Neither is unknown in Washington. Politicians sometimes come here to drop their deepest convictions. It’s called self-serving cynicism.

The authors of the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizenship to all people “born or naturalized in the United States” for a reason. They wished to directly repudiate the Dred Scott decision, which said that citizenship could be granted or denied by political caprice. They purposely chose an objective standard of citizenship — birth — that was not subject to politics. Reconstruction leaders established a firm, sound principle: To be an American citizen, you don’t have to please a majority, you just have to be born here.

Abandoning this principle would be particularly cruel when it comes to the children of illegal immigrants." [On immigration, Lindsey Graham abandons principle, Washington Post Blog,July 30, 2010 ]

There are a number of things wrong with this, the first of which is, of course, how does Gerson know that Lindsey Graham was acting on principle before? It might have been the influence of many, many, cheap labor donors that made him so enthusiastic about immigration.

Maybe it's now that he's acting on principle, that of loyalty to his country. Or loyalty to his party—the part about being a "lone voice" of immigration "sanity" means that, like McCain, he was going against the wishes of most Republicans, and most of the people who voted for him.

The part about the "supreme symbol of nativism" is interesting—perhaps the stolen citizenship that illegals achieve for their children could be the supreme symbol of "alienism." We've seen how outraged John Podhoretz became at the mere thought that some alien somewhere would fail to steal citizenship for his children.

Anyhow, Gerson says that it's wrong for Graham to complain of this constant affront to the American nation, because

"Does he actually think that Congress and three-fifths of state legislatures will undertake a multi-year effort to feed racial conflict in America?"

Once again, that's the opposite of a principle—letting people get away with the theft of American citizenship to avoid resentment from Hispanics. But if you want to know what will feed racial conflict in America, it's allowing twenty million illegals to invade America, and hating people like Gerson telling Americans not to fight back.