"The Supreme Law Of The Land" and Other Minor Matters

are incorrectly identified in the US Citizenship Test.

No. Really! I saw this on "the Book" the other day, and had thought I'd published something about it already, about how the HSA (which both administers the tests and guards our borders) had essentially begun to inculcate exogenes desirous of citizenship with the mythology, instead to the facts, about US civil life and culture.

Via Ed Brayton's "Despatches From the Culture Wars":

ProPublica has a really interesting article about a Canadian woman who just received American citizenship -- but only because she gave answers she knew to be wrong on the citizenship test.

"Friends told me I didn't need to study, the questions weren't that hard. But I wanted to and so for months I lugged around a set of government-issued flashcards [3], hoping to master the test. I pestered my family and friends to quiz me. Sometimes I quizzed my sources. I learned things (there are 27 amendments to the Constitution) and they learned things (there are 27 amendments to the Constitution). But then we began noticing errors in a number of the questions and answers.

Some examples:

Take Question 36. It asks applicants to name two members of the president's Cabinet. Among the correct answers is "Vice President." The vice president is a cabinet-level officer but he's not a Cabinet member. Cabinet members are unelected heads of executive departments [4], such as the Defense Department, or the State Department.
The official naturalization test booklet even hints as much: "The president may appoint other government officials to the cabinet but no elected official may serve on the cabinet while in office." Note to Homeland Security: The vice president is elected.

Still, a wonderful press officer in the New York immigration office noted that the White House's own website [5] lists the vice president as a member of the Cabinet. It's still wrong, I explained. I told her that my partner wrote an entire book about the vice president and won a Pulitzer Prize [6] for the stories. I was pretty sure about this one. A parade of constitutional scholars backed me up...

I also wasn't asked Question 1: "What is the supreme law of the land?"

The official answer: "the Constitution." A friend and legal scholar was aghast. That answer, he said, is "no more than one-third correct." He's right.

Article VI, clause 2 in the Constitution, known as the Supremacy Clause [9], explicitly says that three things -- the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties -- together "shall be the supreme law of the land."

Returning to that "Supreme Law Of the Land" shit:
Article VI, clause 2 in the Constitution, known as the Supremacy Clause [9], explicitly says that three things -- the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties -- together "shall be the supreme law of the land." Be handy to have this particular fragment on hand the next time some fucking Christard starts chapping about how the US is a "christian nation," given the express language in the treaty with the Barbary Coast Emirates in the 19th Century which utterly and absolutely DISCLAIMS ANY fealty to Christianity or any other religion.