Congress debated adding a question about citizenship to the US Census.

Representative Glenn Grothman of Wisconsin, being the full-blooded racist that he is, wants to keep immigrants from being counted. And to promote that, he thought he had found a gotcha clause that would just burn the Democrats. He forgot all about Representative Jamie Raskin:

Grothman: First of all, our pledge of allegiance, which we say every day, we pledge allegiance to the republic for which we stand - right - that the flag in the republic for which we stand. When Benjamin Franklin, after our Constitution was ratified, he talked about giving us a republic, if we can keep it. And I think people should analyze those two little quotes and wonder why they were references to the republic in both of them in any event.

Raskin: Speaker, thank you very much. I was about to yield to my friend, Miss Meng from New York but I'm inspired by the remarks of the gentleman from Wisconsin, especially about the word republic, which of course comes from Res Publica, on the public thing. He happened upon a subject that's of a lot of interest to me because I wrote a paper about it when I was in sixth grade, the Pledge of Allegiance. It was written by a radical Baptist minister named Frances Bellamy - I'm not sure if the gentleman's aware of that - on the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the new world. and for in Reverend Bellamy who was a an abolitionist in vermont was concerned about the continuing salute of the confederate battle flag in the southern states.

And so we wanted to write flag salute that would be unifying for the union and he wrote. "I pledge allegiance to my flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation... with liberty and justice for all." You notice what is not in there? He did not have "under God." That was added in 1954 by congress several weeks after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown versus Board of Education. But in any event, I'm not quite sure what the relevance is of the gentleman's invocation of the republic or of Ben Franklin and the famous vignette about him saying "if you can keep it."

Ben Franklin was, of course, a big supporter of immigration to the country, although he did display an anti-German bias in some of his writings.

But I'll tell you a little story about Ben Franklin that might be of relevance to what the gentleman's talking about. Apparently, because I just did a tour in Philadelphia with the Ben Franklin people up there, and we learned this wonderful story. He made a loan to a friend of his for $100, and then he recorded in his diary that this gentleman he made a loan to for $100, Josiah was always disappearing behind a tree or a building whenever Ben came along. And he finally caught up with them and he said, Josiah, I loaned you 100 bucks, and I'm wondering, am I gonna be able to get my principal back or at least the interest? And Josiah said, well, Ben, look, the $100 is well invested somewhere else, so you don't have to worry about that. Well, then Franklin said what about the interest? Well, I forgot to tell you that it's against my religion to pay interest, so I can't pay you the interest. So, Franklin said you mean to tell me that it's against your principle to pay me the interest and it's against your interest to pay me the principle. And Josiah said that's right. Franklin said, "Well, I can see I'm not going to get either."

Well, look, here our principles and our interests converge very much. The principles are set forth in the Constitution. Which is we count everybody, everybody is in the census and everybody is in the reapportionment process. It's been like that since 1790. We don't need to start finger painting on the Constitution with this silly election year proposal. But it is also in our interest, because as my colleagues have said, this is a land built on immigration. Except for the Native Americans who were already here and the people who were brought over as slaves, all of us are descendants of immigrants to this country. Tom Payne said, when he got to America in 1774, two years before the revolution, he said, "This land, if it lives up to its principles, will become an asylum to humanity." Not an insane asylum, mind you. An asylum to humanity, a place of refuge for people seeking freedom from religious, political and economic oppression. That's who we are

.

There is no doubt that Raskin's little lecture on American history went way over Grothman's head. Even if Grothman could understand just a fraction of what Raskin was saying, he'd reject it outright because it didn't fit his skewed sense of reality.

Regardless of whether Grothman appreciates the schooling he just received or is even aware that he had been schooled, it sure was satisfying to watch.