Could someone please explain to be what John Miller is so upset about in this morning's NRO? As far as I can tell, the old oath and the new oath say exactly the same thing. It's clear that our courts are so far past the Deconstructionist Line of Demarcation that just about any change could be grounds for any new interpretation if so desired. When things have reached this point, singling out a tortured reading of a dependent clause is to do too much about too little.

There does seem to be some legal issue at work here. Whenever language is cleaned up, the very change can become the basis for legal argumentation. Right now, our Attorney General here in Colorado is arguing that a language clean-up in the state's constitution a few decades ago supports his thesis that redistricting by any means can only occur once a decade. So you do need to be careful about these things. But the courts have shown no unwillingness to reinterpret language that hasn't changed at all, so I'm not sure this introduces any new threat to the loyalty of our new citizens.