The list includes, from Rep. Roy’s webpage: “[A] socialist party, a communist party, the Chinese Communist Party, or Islamic fundamentalist party, or advocates for socialism, communism, Marxism, or Islamic fundamentalism.” The bill targets people who engage in “writing, distributing, circulating, printing, displaying, possessing, or publishing” materials supporting socialism or any of those other ideas. “Possessing?” That single word means that owning a copy of Marx’s “Das Kapital,” or a pamphlet from a Palestinian solidarity group, or a battered paperback of Howard Zinn — or maybe even one of my books on the New Deal — would be enough to make a green card holder or a naturalized citizen “inadmissible or deportable.” “Affiliated with?” That would prevent anybody who’s ever affiliated themselves with the Democratic Socialists of America party in New York that Mamdani ran on behalf of (along with the normal Democratic Party; New York has fusion voting so you can run on two parties simultaneously) from staying in America.

Gone to a meeting, rally or put yourself on their mailing list? You’re toast. “Writing?” That means they’re coming for me, and for you if you’ve ever echoed in writing the kind of sentiments that Republicans call socialism, including food stamps and school lunches, free college, public libraries, a national healthcare system, police and fire departments, and highways that don’t have tolls. (When billionaire David Koch ran for vice president in 1980 on an antisocialism agenda, he called for the end of all these forms of “socialism”.) “Distributing?” And they’d be coming for Substack, too, it appears.

Along with your local bookstore or library. We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, when President John Adams had roughly 30 newspaper editors and publishers thrown in prison for attacking him. Ben Franklin’s grandson was arrested for publishing an editorial calling the president “old, querulous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams.” A town drunk in New Jersey was arrested for criticizing him while imbibing in a bar.

Adams’ overreach lost him the election of 1800 to his then-political enemy Thomas Jefferson, who openly opposed the legislation. But here we are again, and here’s another dangerous overreach on the GOP’s part in this legislation: Roy’s bill explicitly forbids judicial review of any inadmissibility, deportation or denaturalization decision made under it. In other words, if this law passes then no court can stop or second-guess the government: no habeas corpus, no meaningful appeals; just an order from the attorney general or some twit at ICE or Homeland Security and you’re on a plane or stuck in a hellhole “detention facility,” possibly for the rest of your life.

We haven’t seen anything this sweeping since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. That’s not immigration policy, that’s the architecture of a police state, and it’s modeled on how the Nazis stripped citizenship from German Jews and political dissidents in 1935 under the Reich Citizenship Laws. I’ve walked through Berlin’s Topography of Terror museum, and the documents on display tell the horrific story of how the lawyers who drafted those Nazi laws studied America’s own racial and political exclusion laws for inspiration.

Now Republican Chip Roy wants to bring them back to America as Republicans try to reinvent our country in the image of Trump mentor Putin’s Russia or — as the authors of Project 2025 openly suggest — Orbán’s Hungary. The bill’s namesake, Mayor Mamdani, became a U.S. citizen in 2018 after moving here from Uganda as a child. He hasn’t been credibly accused of any crime, and as the Brennan Center for Justice meticulously documents, the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected the use of stripping people of their citizenship as a political weapon like Putin now routinely does and Trump loves to threaten.

That goes all the way back to trying to overturn the 1943 Supreme Court ruling in Schneiderman v. United States, which held that to revoke citizenship, the government must prove a person’s “lack of attachment” to the Constitution by “clear, unequivocal, and convincing” evidence. Disagreeing with someone’s politics doesn’t cut it by a long shot.

But Roy and his allies aren’t interested in the existing jurisprudence; they want to write new laws that nullify that decision (and common decency) altogether. Roy told Breitbart his target is what he ca