And what really seems strange to me -- these conservatives who say that they don't trust government nevertheless seem to be ready to trust government to say whether they are citizens or not.

is nothing less than Naziism. Godwin, whoever the hell he is, wants to shut the conversation when people start noticing the uncomfortable truth in front of them when they realize where they have seen this before.

How far back will the law apply?
All of us other than Native Americans? Only white immigrants get the law to apply to them?
The devil is in the details… but Republicans don't care about any of that. They just wish they could pass a law based on pigmentation, but they don't know what that is either.

Although falling foul of Godwin's law tends to cause the individual making the comparison to lose his argument or credibility, Godwin's law itself can be abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, fallaciously miscasting an opponent's argument as hyperbole when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate.[9] Similar criticisms of the "law" (or "at least the distorted version which purports to prohibit all comparisons to German crimes&quot have been made by Glenn Greenwald.[10]

I think there is nothing wrong with looking at policies that resemble Nazi Germany and seeing if there really are any comparisons. You seem to have found an interesting comparison. Where it diverges, is that Germany was not a democracy by the time your article was written. We at least have some checks and balances set up that would prevent many of the atrocities of the third reich. There is no way that citizens of the United States would deny rights of citizenship to those who already have it.

the veneer of democracy, elections, representative government in the Reichstag, a President and chancellor (prime minister) which Hitler combined into one office. Hitler learned from the failure of his beer hall putsch attempt to overthrow the government. When he got out of prison, he set about undermining the government from within, which he accomplished with a variety of moves Karl Rove probably learned from. The Weimar Republic was ended by the allies conquest of Germany.

Eom