An "I voted" sticker on the front of my hoodie

I’ve written before about my own take on verifying citizenship for voters (at registration time, not at voting time) and on how the right to vote should be treated like other rights (not abridged without due process).

Critics fear that states could use the system to purge large numbers of valid voters from their rolls ahead of the midterm elections.

Source: Supreme Court Allows Use of Trump Administration’s Expansive Database for Voter Screening – NYT

I was briefly worrying about this, but then I remembered that I have already voted. Phew.

There’s a bill, the Enemy Expatriation Act, that aims to strip US citizens of their citizenship if they are accused of “engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.” (The term “hostilities” is defined to mean any conflict subject to the laws of war.)

This is almost certainly unconstitutional. The US Supreme Court held some years ago that it was impossible for a US citizen to unintentionally give up his citizenship. In particular, formally renouncing your citizenship in front of a foreign official was not enough to actually lose your citizenship, because maybe you intended to retain your citizenship (and were just going through the motions of renouncing it as part of obtaining citizenship of some other country).

Now, the Supreme Court has become pretty unreliable on this sort of thing of late, but it seems to me that if formally renouncing your citizenship is ineffective, just in case you didn’t really mean it, then a whole lot of things that fall under the general heading of “supporting” (such as donating money to a charity that is later found to have been diverting some of that money to groups that are in some way connected with other groups that are accused of) hostility certainly don’t qualify as intentional renunciation.