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Even after securing passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, John Ashcroft apparently remained unconvinced that he had cemented his claim to the title of Most Openly Fascist Attorney General of All Time. (Admittedly, the competition for this title is quite fierce.) To rectify this problem, Ashcroft had drafted in secret a sequel to the act, entitled the Domestic Security Enhancement Act but often described simply as "Patriot Act 2." If passed, this bill would have granted the Justice Department many horrifying new powers, among them the ability to revoke the American citizenship of individuals tied to political causes the government didn't like. (The text of the bill can be found online at http://www.publicintegrity.org; see section 501 for the provisions governing revocation of citizenship.) Someone in the Justice Department leaked Patriot Act 2 to the press, a firestorm of criticism ensued, and the act was shelved indefinitely.
Patriot Act 2, and especially the provisions concerning the revocation of citizenship, led even many conservative Republicans to denounce Ashcroft's extremism. But Clark Hanjian, author of The Sovrien: An Exploration of the Right to Be Stateless, takes a different view. According to Hanjian, it is not Ashcroft's position, but that currently embodied in American law, that should be described as "extreme" (p. 51). At present, "US law requires that the government cannot denationalize one of its citizens unless it can prove that the citizen has performed one of several expatriating acts both voluntarily and with the intention of US citizenship" (pp. 50-51). In other words, it is currently very difficult to strip Americans of their citizenship involuntarily. (In this regard, the U.S. is very unlike the USSR, which frequently stripped political dissidents of their Soviet citizenship.) Hanjian, however, finds it "absurd" that the government cannot revoke the citizenship of people who fail to pay taxes, or who do not vote, or who commit any sort of crime -- in short, for doing just about any damn thing the government doesn't like (pp. 51-52). Mr. Hanjian therefore finds himself in the position of agreeing with John Ashcroft in defending the rights of the government against "extremists" like the ACLU, although even Ashcroft does not go far enough in the direction Hanjian advocates.
To anyone who winds up in such...