The 14th Amendment – Racial and Political from the Start
14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Section 1. 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.
Ah, you gotta love the Republicans. The 14th Amendment was passed by the required 2/3 vote by an overwhelmingly Republican Congress in 1866. The Civil War having concluded with the defeat of the South, that defeat put the slavery question to rest and should have also put to rest the relative constitutional position of the states vis-à-vis the federal government. Alas, some bad ideas never die even when they are buried under the bodies of 600,000 slain soldiers.
So, the present Republican leadership in our Congress, playing on racial and ethnic prejudices, wants to reverse the impact of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment as that has been understood for 150 years, this, ostensibly, as a remedy for “furriners” coming to this country and having children who immediately qualify as American citizens. Illegal immigration is certainly a problem with which the federal government needs to deal; however, for the past 30 years administrations both Democrat and Republican have feared the electoral repercussions of offending one or another voting bloc and left the situation to deteriorate. Reagan did attempt some reform and in the process gave amnesty to 6 million people who had entered the country illegally at that time. Amnesty is no longer a viable option because Republicans have recognized that their racist postures over these 30 years have so alienated many groups that the future does not bode well for their electoral prospects as the racial and ethnic composition of the U.S. will shift over the next 40 years.
Of course, when the amendment first passed the freed slaves were grateful to Lincoln and his party and that gratitude was expressed in voting patterns well into the 20th century, until the Great Depression and the emergence of the New Deal. Those polarities have reversed. African-Americans have been abandoned by the party of Lincoln, which has bleached itself of every progressive element that it may have ever contained to become the spokesparty for plutocrats, the avaricious and the retrograde. The 14th Amendment was passed to guarantee the civil rights of slaves who had been freed and were subject to imposition of disabilities that would have reduced them once again to a kind of functional slavery. It should not be forgotten that generations of slaves born in the United States were not considered citizens, their lives and labor forfeit to generations of people who believed owning other people was perfectly consistent with the idea that “all men are created equal endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”
Why is this attempt to undo the spirit of the American ethos such vile hypocrisy? For two basic reasons. First, the vast majority of Americans living today are citizens by virtue of the fact that their immigrant forebears, both legal and illegal, gave birth to children on this soil automatically making those children and their progeny American citizens. That was their dream and apparently the dream is still alive. The argument that terrorists are exploiting one of this country’s virtues is laughable. 10,000 people are killed by guns in this country every year. All Osama needs to do is make large contributions to the NRA, sit back, and watch the fireworks. Second, this attempt on the part of Republicans to rewrite the Constitution for their electoral convenience smells to high heaven because it is consistent with their attempt to disenfranchise certain groups in general. So many African-American men are in prison (11% of all African-American men between the ages of 30-34) that disqualifying felons from voting can be the difference between victory and defeat in many political races in this country. It is not that felons ought to vote. Elections can just as easily be stolen by trolling voter registration lists for felons and then disqualifying many eligible voters in the process. (That exactly this tactic was used in the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 is easily documented.) What Republicans are doing in this recent maneuver is an attempt to disqualify voters at a more strategic juncture – the very point of citizenship itself.
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