Stephen Miller pushing Southern lawmakers behind closed doors: report

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says White House advisor Stephen Miller is cruising to create “subordinate class” by ending public education funding for undocumented children in red states. But this is about more than keeping some kids less learned than others.

Miller spirited Texas lawmakers away to a closed-door meeting in Washington last week, according to two sources in the meeting, where he commenced to challenge a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent. That case, Plyler v. Doe, holds that it was a violation of the equal protection clause for states to deny undocumented children the same free public education state leaders provide to legal immigrants’ children — who are themselves citizens.

According to the Times, Miller wants to take advantage of partisan gridlock in Congress to encourage state lawmakers to pass the attacks on Plyler. But why is Miller so determined to “whittle down the 14th Amendment to essentially nothing,” asked Bouie.

In Bouie’s argument the 14th Amendment is “tied directly to the 13th.”

“The 13th Amendment states that ‘Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.’ It then adds, in section 2, that ‘Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.’”

But the 13^th Amendment was about more than just slavery, said Bouie. To the authors, it was “the foundation for the society they hoped to build” by outlawing “hereditary caste as much as” the end of chattel slavery.” Immediately after ratifying it, anti-slavery forces in Congress used it as an open door to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which established birthright citizenship and nullified the “Black Codes.”

The racist Supreme Court at the time neutered much of that good intent “as part of a larger political project to reconcile the white citizens of the United States” and give the white South the power to manage its own ‘affairs,’ and impose “imperial domination,” Bouie argued.

“Both Miller and the MAGA right are engaged in the same kind of work as their political forebears,” added Bouie. “It is no wonder, then, that they want to gut the 14th Amendment, which was revitalized by the struggles of Black Americans and other groups throughout the 20th century. Theirs is a project of subordination at home and abroad; of the re-inscription of caste and the recreation of tiered citizenship based on race and nationality. And now, as then, the 14th Amendment stands in the way.”