It may seem kind of counter intuitive for a guy who hails as a 100% constitutionalist to so openly rail against certain amendments to the Constitution. I get how this can be confusing to the really simple minded and superficial thinker. On one hand we have a person such as myself, apparently screaming loudly to the world, “DON’T MESS WITH THE CONSTITUTION!!!” and on the other hand we have me screaming just as vociferously to, “REPEAL UNCONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS!!!”
I can’t believe that there are people out there who do not get this because it is really simple to understand. Amendments to the Constitution that were either passed outside of the Article Five process for amendments or which are in violation of the rights of the protections of the People and the States IS MESSING WITH THE CONSTITUTION, directly and invasively.
Let me give you a simple example. If an amendment is passed by simple majority, rather than two thirds majority, never signed by the president, approved of by a simple majority of States, rather than three quarters of States, and then signed as a constitutional amendment by executive order by the Secretary of State. The proposed amendment says, “The Congress has the power to eat California.”
This would be—it should be unnecessary to say—unconstitutional in the extreme. Article Five was not followed and it gives the federal government authority to deny one of the States and its People the right to exist without the extreme fear of being cannibalized.
Yet in the Fourteenth Amendment we have a case where; Congress couldn’t get the required two thirds votes so it, in violation of Article Five, ejected a large number of congressmen who opposed it from both houses, never sent it to the president, sent it to the States to ratify, which failed, so they ejected those states from the country even after those States supported the Thirteenth Amendment, it still failed to pass ratification, so they gave it to the Secretary of State to sign as an executive order. Then they made it a law that for the States to be allowed back into the country and have their congressmen again seated, they had to accept the amendment or endure military occupation. In the Fourteenth Amendment is a clause that strips away all of the State’s rights with regard to the citizen’s protections from the federal government and transfers them directly to the federal government, so it enjoys not only the distinction of being illegally enacted, it also radically alters the rights of the States and the People.
The corruption was so bad that three States, Ohio, Oregon and New Jersey, withdrew their support for the amendment in protest.
As mentioned in my last blog post, its enactment violated the Constitution six ways to Sunday. Sections Two, Three and Four contain punishments against the South for seceding when there was no law against it at that time. This is called an ex post facto law. As bad as that is, along with the rest of the violations of the Constitution in the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment, there are worse things that can happen.
As always I believe that the most important, and most ignored, part of the Constitution is the Tenth Amendment. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” This is part of the ever infamous Bill of Rights. It is stated as an absolute. Taking this into consideration as valid and immutable, there is no way that the federal government can expand its powers beyond the enumerated powers of the Constitution.
By contrast let’s look at Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment; “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Let’s look at this in order. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Prior to the enactment, rather than ratification, of the Fourteenth Amendment there was no such thing as a United States citizen. The People were only considered citizens of their own States. The federal government acted as an agency of the States and the People only in matters of national defense and international relations. Demonstrating this idea we have one of my favorite quotes from the Father of the Constitution, President James Madison.
"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. … The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people."
We can see from this that the Constitution was never intended to be a direct and all encompassing authority over the individual lives of the People and the authority of the States. The Constitution could have originally been considered to be a strong mutual protection and international agreement between individual and independently sovereign States. We can see from a close inspection of this principle, and through the actual text of the Constitution and its first twelve amendments, that the federal government was created by the States to act as an agency of the States only on matters that were common to all of the States on the national and international stage, leaving personal individual liberties to the protection of the governments of the States themselves. All powers of the federal government were few and well defined and limited by their own definitions within themselves and the Bill of Rights.
That was the whole point of the thing. Hold the country together without subjecting the People to the heavy hand of an oppressive centralized federal government. They’d just fought a war to get away from having a huge government telling them all what they had to do. They weren’t about to create a replacement for the rule of a king under the British government.
But what good is having direct possession, and I do mean possession, if you can’t do anything with it? So we come to the next sentence; “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
“But that’s our civil rights!” one may be tempted to say. “If you revoke the Fourteenth Amendment the People will have no civil rights!”
It is a seemingly interesting assessment but ultimately wrong because it is based on ignorance of other parts of the Constitution.
Our civil rights were already protected in Article Four, Section Two which says; “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” And reciprocity of those privileges and immunities was already establish in Article Four, Section One which says; “Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State.” The Full Faith and Credit clause is what makes us a unified country under the Constitution. Due process, as well as the protections of life, liberty or property is already covered by the Fifth Amendment which says in part; “…nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law….”
If the Fourteenth Amendment, which couldn’t be passed in accordance to well established due process of the law, contains a phrase against violation of a person’s due process of the law, a curious person would have to wonder how much the proponents of the Fourteenth really cared about the subject.
So if everything was already covered why would the proponents of the Fourteenth Amendment repeat these parts which were already stated in other parts of the Constitution? Well, my friend, that’s the easy part to see if one is just a little distrustful of unfettered centralized government power. It says, “No State shall make or enforce any law….” The effect of this is to take all of the State’s government’s power, and their already existing protections of their citizens, then transfer that power to the federal government. If a State does something that D.C. disapproves of, the federal government can rule by force against it.
That’s what is different. And that’s the only difference. Either the States have that power or the federal government has that power. Not both.
One might be tempted to question what the big deal is. If a State abuses its people then the federal government should come in and save them. Right?
The problem comes into being when the people in control of the federal government can use force to establish itself as superior to the States and to proclaim itself the sole judge of its own powers. (Note: I have to give credit to James Ronald Kennedy and Walter Donald Kennedy for this brilliant and pithy point. It comes from their book; The South Was Right!: A New Edition for the 21st Century (p. 223). Shotwell Publishing LLC. Kindle Edition. Some people may disagree with some of their points, as is natural, but it really is a great read.)
That singular idea regarding the use of force to establish itself as superior to the States and to proclaim itself the sole judge of its own powers is the exact dividing line between freedom and tyranny.
If we say that if a State abuses its citizens then the federal government should come in and save them then what exactly is it which we would hope for as a means of rescue if the federal government becomes abusive of its citizens?
“Well if that happens we can just vote them out!” a few people have answered to this question.
Okay. So they accept that they can vote out the abusive federal officials, over the massive conflicts of interest and numbers of People who might oppose them at the federal level, but for some reason can’t vote out the smaller numbers of abusive State officials closer to them in the same way? They would rather trust their chips to the big federal government rather than the smaller and easier to manipulate State governments?
This country was established in part on the basis of a series of checks and balances through divisions of power rather than having all of the power in one place. States are separations of power and part of the system of checks and balances against the federal government. If we accept that the federal government has direct control over our individual lives, over the will and power of the States, then there is no division of power or check and balance against federal power.
Putting in another and more personal way, if a State abuses you and it gets too awfully bad to endure, and it becomes impossible to vote the abusers out, under the original design you can just move to another State which is more amenable to your personal interests. Under monolithic federal rule there is no place you can go within the United States to escape. If you can’t vote the abusers out your only choices are revolution or to leave the country.
This is a fundamental shift in the form of the United States system of government. It is no longer what it was.
Niccolo Machiavelli wrote of this, that if you wish to subvert or overthrow a system of government and still keep control of the people you would have to “at least retain the semblance of the old forms” so the people think “that there has been no change in the institutions, even though in fact they are entirely different from the old ones.”
The simple fact is that under the pretense of “general welfare” and under the Fourteenth Amendment the federal government of the United States can control every aspect of the individual lives of the People and there is almost nothing your State can do to protect you. The federal government of the United States, through the president, Congress and Supreme Court, three parts of the same thing, is now the sole judge of its own powers.
Here we have another warning from the Father of the Constitution; "If Congress can employ money indefinitely to the general welfare, and are the sole and supreme judges of the general welfare, they may take the care of religion into their own hands; they may appoint teachers in every State, county and parish and pay them out of their public treasury; they may take into their own hands the education of children, establishing in like manner schools throughout the Union; they may assume the provision of the poor; they may undertake the regulation of all roads other than post-roads; in short, every thing, from the highest object of state legislation down to the most minute object of police, would be thrown under the power of Congress. ... Were the power of Congress to be established in the latitude contended for, it would subvert the very foundations, and transmute the very nature of the limited Government established by the people of America."—James Madison
Do you wonder as a patriotic American what has happened to your country? Does it seem to you to have become rather radical and insane? Does it seem like you can’t even recognize it as the same nation you were born and raised in?
Every single item on the modern liberal agenda depends on this. I cannot overemphasize this. Name anything the liberals in the federal government are doing and this is the source of their power. From abortions to gun control to men pretending to be women using the girl’s restroom and vaccine mandates based on junk science, all of it at the federal level depends on what the federal government arbitrarily calls “privileges and immunity.”
People have from time to time asked me when I think the United States will finally collapse and fall into a tyrannical and oppressive rule. I submit to you, my dear readers, that we will collapse and fall into tyrannical and oppressive rule on the Ninth of July, in the Year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty eight.
The Fourteenth Amendment: Epic Levels of Corruption, Part One
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