Raising an issue for public debate is perfectly legitimate. If Trump and his party really wanted to have a reasonable discussion about whether, for the first time in its history, the U.S. should shift its understanding of citizenship from one based on place of birth (jus soli) to one based on blood descent (jus sanguines), then we could have that discussion. But there is nothing reasonable about how the president and his party want to conduct such a national conversation. On the contrary, they are willing and eager to prevail by deploying highly inflammatory rhetoric, brazen lies and exaggeration, racist fear-mongering and manipulation of facts, highly unorthodox legal arguments, and the giddy encouragement of outright hysteria…

If you wonder what the Democratic Party would sound like if it adopted a similarly Leninist approach to politics, imagine a future Democratic president announcing eight days before an election that he will soon be abolishing by fiat the individual right to bear arms (which, incidentally, was established by the Supreme Court just 10 years ago) and then making numerous speeches, promoting ads, and setting a media agenda asserting that every American faces an imminent threat of dying in a mass shooting — all capped off by the implication that Republicans actually want such atrocities to happen.