What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[The Minsky Moment]

Is it a legal primary source or not Mr. legal documents reader?

It is not a legal primary source.  It is as you say a description of a legal document that a candidate intends to sign if elected. And as described in the press release, that document would have the effect I stated.

[Admiral Yi]

Wouldn't that depend on the court's ruling?  I think your logic is that if the court upheld the executive order they would have to overturn the 14th Amendment and apply it retroactively, regardless of Trump's stated preference to deny it only to future, as yet unborn people.  I'm trying to come up with a relevant example of some law being changed and applied retroactively but I can't.  But maybe citizenship is unique in that it's a status and not an act.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

Your read is how I took Joan's argument.  The Trump EO will claim the 14th doesn't apply to the question of birthright citizenship in the cases Trump and his allies want to eliminate.  If the court agrees (because it will be taken to court), then due to the nature of our legal system it would invalidate every citizenship granted under the interpretation, regardless of what Trump wants or claims to want.

[grumbler]

Aren't there some international laws(?) against making people stateless?

The Trumpeters would argue that it makes no one stateless.  They would be citizens of the country their parents were citizens of.

[The Minsky Moment]

Wouldn't that depend on the court's ruling?

Yes.

And a couple years ago I would have said this thing is political performance art because the legal theory is so absurd the EO would be dead on arrival the second it hit the federal court system. 

But after the crazy last term and the bizarro immunity case ruling, I'm not sure anymore.  There's nothing this Court can do anymore that would surprise me.

[Admiral Yi]

For the record I think the 14th should be overturned.  It's an invitation to game the system.  I don't want some dickhead Chinese millionaire flying to LA two weeks before a baby is due.

[Savonarola]

Personally I think Trump will be an awful president; but I'll admit I was wrong and that he was at least a mediocre president if:

1.)  He isn't impeached.
2.)  No member of his cabinet is charged with a crime.
3.)  The deficit remains under $500,000,000,000 (it's projected level for FY 2017.)
4.)  There isn't a new humanitarian crisis on the scale of Syria anywhere in the world.
5.)  The US doesn't engage in a military intervention that results in a worse crisis than our intervention in Libya did.
6.)  A tariff war does not emerge.

I wrote the preceding eight years ago before Trump was inaugurated as President.  As I've said before this was comically naive, as I had assumed Trump would try to be a (more or less) conventional president.

Today, I don't think there is anything that would make Trump's second term good or even mediocre.  If he's only impeached once and there isn't a riot at the Capitol Building that would be an improvement over his first term.   What standards could you put for such a task?  I'll concede that he wasn't as bad as I feared if:

1.)  Ukraine remains a sovereign nation and not a Russian puppet state.
2.)  We still have fluoride in our water.
3.)  Life expectancy doesn't decrease.
4.)  The bureaucracy isn't so crippled that the Federal Government is unable to respond to emergencies.
5.)  There isn't a war between Israel and Iran.

[Tamas]

It is very easy to interpret Trump the way his voters interpret him: what the individual voter liked to hear, is true and what Trump will do. The rest is just showmanship and acceptable lies to gain power.

[Admiral Yi]

Yes.

Then chipwich is right and you are wrong.

Stripping existing citizens of citizenship is not an inevitable result of Trump's EO, it's a choice made by the court.

[Josquius]

For the record I think the 14th should be overturned.  It's an invitation to game the system.  I don't want some dickhead Chinese millionaire flying to LA two weeks before a baby is due.

In the 21st century it is pretty sensible not to have pure jus soli. There was a court case in Ireland a decade or two ago involving a chinese family who wanted to live in Britain that led to Ireland getting rid of its version.
Though the US is a pretty different place with it being so vast and wealthy and it's history of being built on immigration. And American citizenship not automatically being a good/neutral thing to have unlike the citizenship of most countries.

But the main issue here isn't so much removing the right for the future. That's a valid move around which there's a potential good faith debate on the pros and cons.
The problem is retroactively stripping it from the children of immigrants - no doubt targeted at brown ones -. This is pretty fucked.


Incidentally on us citizenship how come there's just the one basic American citizenship rather than states doing it as in Switzerland?
Seems like the sort of thing that states would be handling on some level.

[The Minsky Moment]

Yes.

Then chipwich is right and you are wrong.

Stripping existing citizens of citizenship is not an inevitable result of Trump's EO, it's a choice made by the court.

An order that if signed with the content described and upheld by the courts would have the effect of stripping a class of existing citizens of their citizenship.

Bolded for emphasis.

If you look back in the thread you will see I repeated that qualification many times.
I also made the point that EOs are made in the expectation - or at least the hope - that the courts will uphold them, not strike them down.

[Admiral Yi]

An order that if signed with the content described and upheld by the courts would have the effect of stripping a class of existing citizens of their citizenship.

Bolded for emphasis.

If you look back in the thread you will see I repeated that qualification many times.
I also made the point that EOs are made in the expectation - or at least the hope - that the courts will uphold them, not strike them down.

This might be a case of insider lawyer jargon I don't get.

If the court reached a ruling, yes, nobody going forward will get citizenship, but existing citizens will not be stripped of theirs, is that not "upheld by the court?"

[Tamas]

I think upheld by the court means the order isn't thrown back by the courts in its entirety not that the courts specify what the president really meant when signing the order.

[DGuller]

My only hope about Trump's second term is that he'll be a lame duck.  It's well-known that his charisma doesn't transfer to elections where he isn't running.  Given that he won't be running in any more elections, some Republicans out of craven sense of self-preservation might not be the rubber stamp that he needs.  Bush claimed that his re-election gave him a mandate, but not a whole lot came out of it.

I know the counter-argument is that Republicans so far have bent to Trump's will again and again, but I'm just looking for ways to not fall deeper into depression here.