You turn on the TV today, and see all sorts of arguing. Argument about 2A, argument about free speech, argument about abortion, about immigration. A decade ago you would have heard argument about gay marriage. Before that, you’d hear about bussing, segregation, interracial marriage. The entire buzz around these is the constitutionality of them, whether or not this follows the “founder’s intent”. But what if I told you, that the only reason these are constitutional issues in the first place is due to an essentially illegitimate amendment?
Now, when I say essentially, I don’t mean literally. I’m not trying to make the argument that the Reconstruction Amendments (14A and 15A, 13A predates these) are literally de jure illegal. But they are obviously very different from every other amendment. Lincoln, who was frankly rather moderate among Republicans, supported a fast and generous path back into the Union for Southern states. It is suspected that this is one of the reasons John Wilkes Booth shot him, actually. Lincoln only really demanded that Southrons stopped engaging in Slavery and that a sizeable percentage of their population took oaths of loyalty to the U.S. Government. So, some have suspected that Booth shot Lincoln in order to force the Confederacy to fight until the bitter end. The alternative would be facing the Radical Republicans.
To go on a bit of a side tangent here, this idea wasn’t terribly uncommon. Jefferson Davis also did not plan to surrender after Lee surrendered. He planned to continue the fight in Texas and Louisiana, but was captured. Thousands of Confederate Soldiers fled into Mexico, swearing allegiance to the French-backed Maximillian. The Ku Klux Klan was something of a shadow of this sentiment, hiding in the Swamps and continuing to fight against Union occupiers during Reconstruction. It would be a cool thing to write an Alt-Hist about. Similar to Turtledove’s The Man with the Iron Heart.
Anyways, I think Andrew Johnson’s inert presidency is pretty well-known of. He wasn’t really in favor of harsh punishments for the South, but the legislature was and they manhandled him. A product of this was the forced ratification of the 14th Amendment as a prerequisite to readmission into the Union. Aside from Tennessee, this amounts to a war punishment that was signed under duress by the South. Combined with the 1866 Civil Rights Act (passed while very few Southern states were in the Union) this gave constitutional rights to all African Americans in the United States. Today, this is accepted as “fair”, but obviously it was done to increase Republican political power and humiliate Southrons. When this country was being fashioned, nobody would have imagined that just by living here African slaves were entitled to the political rights fought for by their masters and for their masters and their masters’ kinsmen. That’s why most emancipationists prior to the Civil War planned on repatriating Negroes to Africa. Southerners (correctly) did not view themselves as owing anything to their former slaves (let alone their descendants, who would never know slavery), but the quality of life of Afro-American slaves compared to most of the world at that time is a topic for another day. Long story short: Enslaved Blacks probably had better living conditions than most people outside of Northwestern Europe in the early 19th century.
As far as birthright citizenship goes, we know for a fact that it was never intended to be used for birthright citizenship. I would recommend this Alt-Hype video on the subject of the 14th Amendment and Birthright Citizenship! Watching this years ago is really what sort of opened my eyes to how insane everything surrounding 14A is. Might as well plug his ‘stack while I’m at it:
Anyways, the birthright citizenship thing is one of the largest effects of 14A, obviously. It has made any sort of mass deportation of immigrants or restriction of their political rights very difficult. In Europe, most migrants are not getting citizenship, while in America every little LatinX sharted out this side of the Rio Grande automatically gets citizenship. Not to mention, Chinese “Birth Tourists” and their ilk.
But if you want to talk about that, go watch that video I linked. We’re going to talk about the other most important elements of the 14th Amendment: The Equal Protections Clause, and the Due Process Clause. It is these two elements of 14A which have completely changed the Constitution and the power of the Supreme Court.
First of all, this is the driving force behind the Civil Rights Movement. It was entirely a movement through the courts first, and the people second. It’s actually difficult to even list how many landmark Civil Rights cases sat entirely on these two clauses because it’s pretty much every single one you can think of. Brown v. BoE, Loving v. Virginia, Swann v. BoE, Seidenberg v. McSorleys, Obergefell v. Hodges, the list goes on. The funniest part? Most of this was initiated by Earl Warren, who was only put on the Supreme Court in the first place because Eisenhower assumed he was going to be a fairly conservative judge. Warren was involved in legitimizing the (100% justified) Internment camps during the 40s when he was Attorney General of California, by the way.
But the buck doesn’t stop at “anti-discrimination”. Most demands for individual rights were also affirmed by the 14th Amendment, particularly its Due Process clause. This clause differed from the Due Process clause of the 5th Amendment, because it extended constitutional restrictions against American citizens onto state and local governments. The first and second amendments were initially only applied to the federal government. So Engel v. Vitale, Roe v. Wade, and also just about every state-level 2A decision rests on the 14th Amendment. Yes, I think a lot of us can confirm that it is nice to have the right to bear arms, but honestly I don’t think is really what the founders were going for. The point of 2A was to check the federal government. The federal government was already there to check state governments.
The Judicial System is not our friend and frankly hasn’t been for a long time, ever since the rise of bad-faith jurisprudence which we perfume under the term of “judicial activism”. You might be totally in favor of centralization. Despite my name, I’m not necessarily against that. But problems arise when you go about this by interpreting restrictions against the federal government enacted in order to give states more agency, as restrictions against all forms of government against all citizens (a term which has also been rendered largely meaningless by 14A). And now we are at a state where this stupid amendment, this petty punishment and political maneuver, has completely and irreparably derailed our political culture and the demographic composition of the body politic within the past 70 years. Yes, maybe you can say that America would have tended this way anyways. Maybe you can point to whatever vibes-based theory of history you favor, or maybe you can point to the Jews. And maybe you’re right, but it certainly would have been a much more grueling process and given us much more time to get people moving in the opposite direction, which is what we need above all else.
Breasts image to start it off. Great shit, “bub”
I think you should put boob breaks in every future substack