1. United States
2. Va.
3. Letter

The Senate must not confirm Whitney Hermandorfer to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Please do not let this be another right-wing, fascist that you vote for. Many of your previous “yeses” aren’t working out so great, are they? These are not normal politics. This is not “business as usual.” This is not simply “the pendulum swinging.” This is the deliberate dismantling of constitutional governance and its replacement with personalized, authoritarian rule. Whitney Hermandorfer has embraced radical and widely rejected theories that would tear up pieces of the U.S. Constitution and spit on our national values, and she cannot be trusted to put the law of the land above her extremist views when she holds the gavel. Birthright citizenship, the guarantee that any person born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen from birth, is at the very heart of our concepts of liberty and democracy – the idea that being an American is not limited to those of certain race or blood, that every American has the same rights as any other. It is also very explicitly secured in the 14th Amendment, and since 1898 every single court who has considered the rare challenge to this notion has resoundingly rejected it. Whitney Hermandorfer is among those who have concluded that the Constitution of the United States can be casually ignored if it gets in the way of their political desires, authoring a brief backing those wild and ahistorical challenges. That is a completely disqualifying position for a federal judgeship. Moreover, granting her a lifetime tenure would be an endorsement of her idea that countless citizens are somehow less than fully American, that we are not in fact equal. Please stand up for birthright citizenship and commit to blocking this appointment.