Tag: Politics

This is a long read, but worth the effort.

In the winter of 1983, archival research expert David Dodge, and former Baltimore police investigator Tom Dunn, were searching for evidence of government corruption in public records stored in the Belfast Library on the coast of Maine.

By chance, they discovered the library’s oldest authentic copy of the Constitution of the United States (printed in 1825). Both men were stunned to see this document included a 13th Amendment that no longer appears on current copies of the Constitution.

Moreover, after studying the Amendment’s language and historical context, they realized the principle intent of this “missing” 13th Amendment was to prohibit lawyers from serving in government.

Additional copies of the Constitution with the “missing” 13th Amendment printed in at least eighteen separate publications by ten different states and territories over four decades from 1822 to 1860 have been uncovered.

Evidence has been uncovered that this missing 13th Amendment had indeed been lawfully ratified by the state of Virginia and was therefore an authentic Amendment to the American Constitution. If the evidence is correct and no logical errors have been made, a 13th Amendment restricting lawyers from serving in government was ratified in 1819 and removed from the U.S. Constitution during the tumult of the Civil War. Since the Amendment was never lawfully repealed, it is still the Law today. The implications are enormous.

The “missing” 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads as follows:
“If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive, or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office, or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince, or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.”

At the first reading, the meaning of this 13th Amendment (also called the “title of nobility” Amendment) seems obscure; unimportant. The references to “nobility,” “honour,” “emperor,” “king,” and “prince,” lead us to dismiss this Amendment as a petty post-revolution act of spite directed against the British monarchy. The U.S. modern world of Prince Charles, make anti-royalist sentiments seem so archaic and quaint, that the Amendment can be ignored.

Not so. Consider some evidence of its historical significance: First, “titles of nobility” were prohibited in both Article VI of the Articles of Confederation (1777) and in Article I, Sections 9 and 10 of the Constitution of the United States (1787);

Second, although already prohibited by the Constitution, an additional “title of nobility” amendment was proposed in 1789, again in 1810, and finally ratified in 1819. Clearly, the founding fathers saw such a serious threat in “titles of nobility” and “honors” that anyone receiving them would forfeit their citizenship. Since the government prohibited “titles of nobility” several times over four decades, and went through the amending process (even though “titles of nobility” were already prohibited by the Constitution), it’s obvious that the Amendment carried much more significance for our founding fathers than is readily apparent today.

To understand the meaning of this “missing” 13th Amendment, we must understand its historical context — the era surrounding the American Revolution.

We tend to regard the notion of “a Republic” as benign, harmless, and politically unremarkable. But at the time of the American Revolution, King George III and the other monarchies of Europe saw Republics and sovereignty of the common people as an unnatural, ungodly ideological threat, every bit as dangerously radical as Communism was once regarded by modern Western nations.

Just as the 1917 Communist Revolution in Russia spawned other revolutions around the world, the American Revolution provided an example and incentive for people all over the world to overthrow their European monarchies.

Even though the Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, the simple fact of our existence threatened the monarchies. The United States stood as a heroic role model for other nations, that inspired them to also struggle against oppressive monarchies. The French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Polish national uprising (1794) were in part encouraged by the American Revolution.

Though we stood like a beacon of hope for most of the world, the monarchies regarded the United States as a political typhoid Mary, the principle source of a Representative Republic that was destroying monarchies around the world. The monarchies must have realized that if the principle source of that infection could be destroyed, the rest of the world might avoid the contagion and the monarchies would be saved.

Their survival at stake, the monarchies sought to destroy or subvert the American system of government. Knowing they couldn’t destroy us militarily, they resorted to more covert methods of political subversion, employing spies and secret agents skilled in bribery and legal deception — it was, perhaps, the first “cold war”. Since governments run on money, politicians run for money, and money is the usual enticement to commit treason, much of the monarchy’s counter- revolutionary efforts emanated from English banks.

The essence of banking was once explained by Sir Josiah Stamp, a former president of the Bank of England: ”The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin… Bankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back again… Take this great power away from them, or if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit.”

The last great abuse of the U.S. banking system occurred in the early 1900’s and caused the depression of the 1930’s. Today’s abuses may cause another. Current monetary and bank scandals illustrate the on-going relationships between banks, lawyers, politicians, and government agencies.

The systematic robbery of productive individuals by parasitic bankers and lawyers is not a recent phenomenon. This abuse is a human tradition that predates the Bible and spread from Europe to America despite early colonial prohibitions.

When the first United States Bank was chartered by Congress in 1790, there were only three state banks in existence. At one time, banks were prohibited by law in most states because many of the early settlers were all too familiar with the practices of the European goldsmith banks.

Goldsmith banks were safe-houses used to store client’s gold. In exchange for the deposited gold, customers were issued notes (paper money) which were redeemable in gold. The goldsmith bankers quickly succumbed to the temptation to issue “extra” notes, (unbacked by gold).

Why? Because the “extra” notes enriched the bankers by allowing them to buy property with notes for gold that they did not own, gold that did not even exist. Colonists knew that bankers occasionally printed too much paper money, found themselves over-leveraged, and caused a “run on the bank”. If the bankers lacked sufficient gold to meet the demand, the paper money became worthless and common citizens left holding the paper were ruined. Although over-leveraged bankers were sometime hung, the bankers continued printing extra money to increase their fortunes at the expense of the productive members of society.

If the colonists forgot the lessons of goldsmith bankers, the American Revolution refreshed their memories. To finance the war, Congress authorized the printing of continental bills of credit in an amount not to exceed $200,000,000. The States issued another $200,000,000 in paper notes. Ultimately, the value of the paper money fell so low that they were soon traded on speculation from 5000 to 1000 paper bills for one coin.

A few examples of the attempts by the monarchies and banks that almost succeeded in destroying the United States:
-According to the Tennessee Laws (1715-1820, vol. II, p. 774), in the 1794 Jay Treaty, the United States agreed to pay 600,000 pounds sterling to King George III, as reparations for the American revolution.

The Senate ratified the treaty in secret session and ordered that it not be published. When Benjamin Franklin’s grandson published it anyway, the exposure and resulting public uproar so angered the Congress that it passed the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) so federal judges could prosecute editors and publishers for reporting the truth about the government.

Since we had won the Revolutionary War, why would U.S. Senators agree to pay reparations to the loser? And why would they agree to pay 600,000 pounds sterling, eleven years after the war ended? It doesn’t make sense, especially in light of Senate’s secrecy and later fury over being exposed, unless we assume U.S. Senators had been bribed to serve the British monarchy and betray the American people. That’s subversion.

-The United States Bank had been opposed by the Jeffersonians from the beginning, but the Federalists (the pro-monarchy party) won out in its establishment. The initial capitalization was $10,000,000 — 80% of which would be owned by foreign bankers. Since the bank was authorized to lend up to $20,000,000 (double its paid in capital), it was a profitable deal for both the government and the bankers since they could lend, and collect interest on, $10,000,000 that didn’t exist.

However, the European bankers outfoxed the government and by 1796, the government owed the bank $6,200,000 and was forced to sell its shares. (By 1802, the U.S. government owned no stock in the United States Bank.) The sheer power of the banks and their ability to influence representative government by economic manipulation and outright bribery was exposed in 1811, when the people discovered that European banking interests owned 80% of the bank. Congress therefore refused to renew the bank’s charter. This led to the withdrawal of $7,000,000 in specie by European investors, which in turn, precipitated an economic recession, and the War of 1812. That’s destruction.

A book called “2 VA LAW” resides in the Library of Congress Law Library. This is an un-catalogued book in the rare book section that reveals a plan to overthrow the constitutional government by secret agreements engineered by the lawyers.

That is one of the reasons why this Amendment was ratified by Virginia and the notification was lost in the mail. There is no public record that this book exists. That may sound surprising, but according to The Gazette (5/10/91), “the Library of Congress has 349,402 un-catalogued rare books and 13.9 million un-catalogued rare manuscripts.” There may be secrets buried in that mass of documents even more astonishing than a missing Constitutional Amendment.

In seeking to destroy the United States, (and incidentally rule the world), bankers committed many crimes. Foremost among these crimes were fraud, conversion, and plain old theft. To escape prosecution for their crimes, the bankers did the same thing any career criminal does. They hired and formed alliances with the best lawyers and judges money could buy. These alliances, originally forged in Europe (particularly in Great Britain), spread to the colonies, and later into the newly formed United States of America.

Despite their criminal foundation, these alliances generated wealth, and ultimately, respectability. Like any modern member of organized crime, English bankers and lawyers wanted to be admired as “legitimate businessmen”. As their criminal fortunes grew so did their usefulness, so the British monarchy legitimized these thieves by granting them “titles of nobility”.

Historically, the British peerage system referred to knights as “Squires” and to those who bore the knight’s shields as “Esquires”. As lances, shields, and physical violence gave way to the more civilized means of theft, the pen grew mightier (and more profitable) than the sword, and the clever wielders of those pens (bankers and lawyers) came to hold titles of nobility. The most common title was “Esquire” (used, even today, by some lawyers).

In Colonial America, attorneys trained attorneys but most held no “title of nobility” or “honor”. There was no requirement that one be a lawyer to hold the position of district attorney, attorney general, or judge; a citizen’s “counsel of choice” was not restricted to a lawyer; there were no state or national bar associations.

The only organization that certified lawyers was the International Bar Association (IBA), chartered by the King of England, headquartered in London, and closely associated with the international banking system. Lawyers admitted to the IBA received the rank “Esquire” — a “title of nobility”. “Esquire” was the principle title of nobility which the 13th Amendment sought to prohibit from the United States.

Why? Because the loyalty of “Esquire” lawyers was suspect. Bankers and lawyers with an “Esquire” behind their names were agents of the monarchy, members of an organization whose principle purposes were political, not economic, and regarded with the same wariness that some people today reserve for members of the KGB or the CIA.

Article 1, Sect. 9 of the Constitution sought to prohibit the International Bar Association (or any other agency that granted titles of nobility) from operating in America. But the Constitution neglected to specify a penalty, so the prohibition was ignored, and agents of the monarchy continued to infiltrate and influence the government (as in the Jay Treaty and the US Bank charter incidents).

Therefore, a “title of nobility” amendment that specified a penalty (loss of citizenship) was proposed in 1789, and again in 1810. The meaning of the amendment is seen in its intent to prohibit persons having titles of nobility and loyalties to foreign governments and bankers from voting, holding public office, or using their skills to subvert the government.

The missing Amendment is referred to as the “title of nobility” Amendment, but the second prohibition against “honour” (honor), may be more significant.

According to Webster’s Dictionary, the archaic definition of “honor” (as used when the 13th Amendment was ratified) meant anyone “obtaining or having an advantage or privilege over another”. A contemporary example of an “honor” granted to only a few Americans is the privilege of being a judge: Lawyers can be judges and exercise the attendant privileges and powers; non-lawyers cannot.

By prohibiting “honors”, the missing Amendment prohibits any advantage or privilege that would grant some citizens an unequal opportunity to achieve or exercise political power. Therefore, the second meaning (intent) of the 13th Amendment was to ensure political equality among all American citizens, by prohibiting anyone, even government officials, from claiming or exercising a special privilege or power (an “honor”) over other citizens.

If this interpretation is correct, “honor” would be the key concept in the 13th Amendment.

Why?

Because, while “titles of nobility” may no longer apply in today’s political system, the concept of “honor” remains relevant. For example, anyone who had a specific “immunity” from lawsuits which were not afforded to all citizens, would be enjoying a separate privilege, an “honor”, and would therefore forfeit his right to vote or hold public office. Think of the “immunities” from lawsuits that U.S. judges, lawyers, politicians, and bureaucrats currently enjoy. As another example, think of all the “special interest” legislation the U.S. government passes: “special interests” are simply euphemisms for “special privileges” (honors).

If the missing 13th Amendment were restored, “special interests” and “immunities” might be rendered unconstitutional.

The prohibition against “honors” (privileges) would compel the entire government to operate under the same laws as the citizens of this nation.

Without their current personal immunities (honors), US judges and I.R.S. agents would be unable to abuse common citizens without fear of legal liability. If this 13th Amendment were restored, the entire U.S. Government would have to conduct itself according to the same standards of decency, respect, law, and liability as the rest of the nation.

If this Amendment and the term “honor” were applied today, U.S. Government’s ability to systematically coerce and abuse the public would be all but eliminated.

Imagine! A government without special privileges or immunities. How could we describe it? It would be … almost like … a government … of the people … by the people … for the people!

Imagine: a government … whose members were truly accountable to the public; a government that could not systematically exploit its own people! It’s unheard of … it’s never been done before. Not ever in the entire history of the world.

This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.

(c) 2018

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude —

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
–Amendment XV

Passed by Congress on March 3, 1869, and ratified in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments. Though the language of the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits all race-based discrimination in qualifications for voting, the Framers were primarily concerned with the enfranchisement of African-Americans. As early as 1866, many of the Republicans were convinced of the need for a constitutional amendment that would require the states to allow African-Americans to vote. Indeed, at one point the Joint Committee on Reconstruction voted to report a version of the Fourteenth Amendment that explicitly embraced the principle of race-blind suffrage. However, many Northerners continued to oppose black suffrage in principle, and fears of a political backlash led the committee to abandon the issue before the proposed amendment came to the floor.

Congress had forced black suffrage on the ex-Confederate states by statute, and Republicans faced the charge that they were hypocritical in not imposing the same requirement on Northern states. Some also believed that if blacks were enfranchised in the states that had remained in the Union, they would provide critical support for Republican candidates in those states.

Republicans were, nevertheless, deeply divided over the question of what precise language should be adopted. A number of prominent Republicans complained that this narrow language would allow states intentionally to disfranchise most African-Americans by adopting qualifications that, although neutral on their face, would in practice be impossible for most freed slaves to satisfy. Responding to these and other concerns, the Senate proposed to eliminate not only discrimination on the basis of race, color, and previous condition of servitude but also discrimination on the basis of nativity, property, education, or creed in both the right to vote and the right to hold elective office.

In the complex parliamentary horse trading that followed, the Senate did not vote to enter into conference; instead, the entire drafting process began again in both houses. The House then produced a draft that tracked the original Senate version, except that it deleted the reference to discrimination on the basis of education.

The Senate, by contrast, now passed a simple prohibition on racial discrimination with respect to the rights to vote and hold office. A conference committee was convened, and it produced the current language of the Fifteenth Amendment, which embraced only the prohibition on racial discrimination in voting, omitting any reference to the right to hold office.

Because of the difficulty of agreeing to the precise language, the framers adopted a simple prohibition on discrimination on the basis of race, color, and previous condition of servitude even though there was a risk that a court could interpret the language narrowly and thereby allow deliberate evasion by facially neutral statutes. At first, the Supreme Court did exactly that and refused to inquire into the motives of those who adopted facially neutral statutes, such as literacy tests.

The Court has invoked both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to invalidate facially neutral restrictions on voting rights where the legislative history reveals an intention to exclude or hinder African-Americans. Rogers v. Lodge (1982), Hunter v. Underwood (1985). The Court also invoked the amendments in cases where there was evident racial gerrymandering designed to disenfranchise blacks. Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960). On the other hand, the Court has held that race may be considered in the redistricting process only so long as racial considerations do not predominate, and there is no effort to dilute the voting strength of minorities. Bush v. Vera (1996).

Similarly, the Court adopted variable views on the sweep of allowable congressional authority under the enforcement clause. One critical issue was whether the amendment armed Congress with the power to regulate purely private action. Many of the congressional Republicans, who were responsible for passing the Fifteenth Amendment, apparently believed they had such authority: a section in a statute passed in 1870 made private, racially motivated interference with voting a federal crime. Nonetheless, although Ex parte Yarbrough (1884) suggested that this statute was constitutional, in 1903 the Supreme Court reversed course and held that the Fifteenth Amendment did not allow Congress to regulate purely private activity. James v. Bowman (1903). This basic principle was maintained until at least 1941, United States v. Classic, although the Court preferred to take the route of expansively defining nongovernmental activity as state action for purposes of the Fifteenth Amendment, applied particularly to the institution of the white primary. Smith v. Allwright (1944), Terry v. Adams (1953).

Recent decisions have upheld the constitutionality of sweeping remedial measures adopted to combat government-imposed racial discrimination. For example, when Congress had evidence of widespread racial discrimination in state elections, the Court allowed Congress to place the entire state and local electoral apparatus under federal supervision and to forbid the adoption of measures that had even the effect of diluting the voting power of racial minorities. Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). The Court, asserting that enforcement power had the same breadth as a necessary and proper clause, has also upheld the power of Congress to forbid literacy tests. South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966).

As usual, where politicians are involved, in an attempt to remedy one perceived problem, the solution has created many more. And, in the process, the American taxpayer has been bitten in the ass by the law of unintended consequences.

The social reality is that pregnant women are traveling to the United States by the thousands using travel visas with the hope of giving birth in the country, which would make their child an American citizen under the Citizenship Clause of the United States Constitution.

This practice of birth tourism, common among Chinese,Taiwanese, and Turkish nationals, has continued to grow in recent years. While undocumented immigration into the United States across the Mexican border remains the main topic in U.S. immigration debates, birth tourism represents a new topic that many in the United States are ill -prepared to tackle. Birth tourists to the United States mainly come
from Pacific Rim countries like Taiwan and China. Some private companies even transport, house, and provide the necessary arrangements for birth tourists to enter the United States and remain until they are able to give birth.

For example, throughout the latter part of 2012 and early 2013, individuals in Chino Hills, California made national news for protests of apartment buildings alleged to be “maternity hotels.” In The Washington Post, longtime birth tourist business-owner Robert Zhou reminded Americans that his company does not “encourage moms to
break the law —just to take advantage of it.”

Following the abolition of slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, sought to grant all Americans born within the United States standing to file suit, partly in an effort to avoid outcomes similar to that of the notorious case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.

In an effort to address the “loophole” created by the Citizenship Clause, many states have implemented policies to prevent “anchor babies”—children born to undocumented parents in the country and used as an “anchor” into U.S. citizenship for the parents—but federal law, the ultimate authority on regulating immigration, is largely silent on birth tourism. This makes law enforcement problematic, since technically these “tourists” enter the country legally. However, birth tourism seems to strike many as unethical because it allows foreign citizens to take advantage of a “loophole” to gain U.S. citizenship for their children.

Jon Feere,  testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security; “between 350,000 and 400,000 children are born annually to an illegal-alien mother residing in the United States — as many as one in ten births nationwide. As of 2010, four out of five children of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. were born here — some 4 million kids”.

Reporting that finding, the Pew Research Center noted that, while illegal immigrants make up about 4 percent of the adult population, “because they have high birthrates, their children make up a much larger share of both the newborn population (8 percent) and the child population (7 percent) in this country.”

The cost of this is not negligible. Inflation-adjusted figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture projected that a child born in 2013 would cost his parents $304,480 from birth to his eighteenth birthday.

Given that illegal-alien households are normally low-income households (three out of five illegal aliens and their U.S.-born children live at or near the poverty line), one would expect that a significant portion of that cost will fall on the government. And that’s exactly what‘s happening.

71 percent of illegal-alien headed households with children received some sort of welfare in 2009, compared with 39 percent of native-headed houses with children. Illegal immigrants generally access welfare programs through their U.S.-born children, to whom government assistance is guaranteed. Additionally, U.S.-born children of illegal aliens are entitled to American public schools, health care, and more, even though illegal-alien households rarely pay taxes.

The short-term cost of “anchor babies” was revealed a decade ago in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. “‘Anchor babies’ born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income.”

While perhaps humane, measures such as the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which requires hospital emergency departments to treat all patients with an “emergency” (an infinitely malleable term), regardless of documentation or ability to pay, have facilitated the abuse of American health care by illegal aliens.

There are long-term costs, too. U.S.-born children of illegal aliens can sponsor the immigration of family members once they come of age. At 18, an “anchor baby” can sponsor an overseas spouse and unmarried children of his own; at 21, he can sponsor parents and siblings. There may be a long waiting period before that legal benefit is of use. But it’s a fact that illegal aliens with American-born children are much less likely to be deported, and that policy has been effectively enshrined in law.

In 1966 American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven formulated “The Cloward-Piven strategy” which was a blueprint for making massive disruptions in the welfare system of the United States

Cloward and Piven had determined that many people in the U.S. were eligible for welfare, but were not receiving it. They believed that if all these people were to apply for welfare all at once, the local welfare offices would be overwhelmed and the states would be threatened with bankruptcy.

In advocating such disruptions, Cloward and Piven were making a deliberate attempt to incite racial, ethnic, and class tensions, setting whites against racial minorities and middle class liberals against working class immigrant groups.

They further wrote: “The ultimate objective of this strategy—to wipe out poverty by establishing a guaranteed annual income—will be questioned by some. Because the ideal of individual social and economic mobility has deep roots, even activists seem reluctant to call for national programs to eliminate poverty by the outright redistribution of income.”

Anyone can see the so-far successful implementation of this strategy through the vehicle of illegal immigration and “anchor babies” through “maternity tourism”. The question then becomes; “What can we do to combat this?”

Stopping illegal immigration at the border, and instituting an actually effective visa-tracking system to crack down on overstays, would do much to discourage efforts to take advantage of American largesse, (while there is still American largesse to take advantage of).

This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.

(c) 2018

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.
Amendment XIV, Section 1

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Amendment XIV, Section 3

Before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, citizens of the states were automatically considered citizens of the United States. In 1857, the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision had held that no black of African descent (even a freed black) could be a citizen of the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment was thus necessary to overturn Dred Scott and to settle the question of the citizenship of the newly freed slaves. The Fourteenth Amendment made United States citizenship primary and state citizenship derivative.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 had previously asserted that “All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” The immediate impetus for the Fourteenth Amendment was to constitutionalize and validate the Civil Rights Act because some had questioned whether the Thirteenth Amendment was a sufficient basis for its constitutionality. A constitutional amendment would also have the advantage of preventing a later unfriendly Congress from repealing it.

One conspicuous departure from the language of the Civil Rights Act was the elimination of the phrase “Indians not taxed.” Senator Jacob Howard of Ohio, the author of the Citizenship Clause, defended the new language against the charge that it would make Indians citizens of the United States.

Most revealing, however, was Senator Howard’s contention that “every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States.” Almost everyone certainly would have understood “natural law” to refer to the social compact basis of citizenship, the basis for citizenship articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

The argument of the Declaration grounded citizenship in consent. The natural law argument of the Declaration was a repudiation of the notion of birthright citizenship that had been the basis of British citizenship.

The disqualification of former rebels for federal and state office was the most controversial of the sections of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was blatantly vindictive and intruded on the President’s pardon power. It certainly made the ratification of new state constitutions in the South less likely—and this was a deliberate stratagem to keep the Southern states out of the Union until after the 1868 election. An original draft of the section would have disqualified all who had voluntarily aided the Confederacy until 1870, but the Senate adopted Senator Jacob Howard’s more permanent version.

Congress lifted the disqualification of many individuals, and in 1872 it did so for all but Members of the Thirty-seventh (1861–1863) and Thirty-eighth Congresses (1863–1865), federal judicial and military officers, heads of departments, and foreign ministers. In 1898, Congress removed all disqualifications for previous disloyal conduct. Despite being written in a particular historical context, the clause is still in operation and would apply in the case of future insurrections or rebellion.

The animosity between the inhabitants of the north and south did not soften after the civil war ended. The battlefield went silent, but not in the hearts and minds of the now disarmed combatants. Yes, amnesty was granted to both sides and the 11 Southern states assumed their lawful position in the now supposedly un-dissolvable United States. But there was a catch.

Despite the fact that the southern states had been functioning peacefully for two years and had been counted to secure ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress passed the Reconstruction Act, which provided for the military occupation of 10 of the 11 southern states.  It excluded Tennessee from military occupation, and one must suspect it was because Tennessee had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment on July 7, 1866.  The Act further disfranchised practically all white voters and provided that no senator or congressman from the occupied states could be seated in Congress until a new constitution was adopted by each state which would be approved by Congress, and further provided that each of the 10 states must ratify the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, and the Fourteenth Amendment must become a part of the Constitution of the United States before the military occupancy would cease and the states be allowed seats in Congress.”

“By the time the Reconstruction Act had been declared to be the law, three more states had ratified the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, and two – Louisiana and Delaware – had rejected it.  Then Maryland withdrew its prior ratification and rejected the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. Ohio followed suit and withdrew its prior ratification, as also did New Jersey. California, which earlier had voted not to pass upon the proposal, now voted to reject the amendment. Thus 16 of the 37 states had rejected the proposed amendment.””By spurious, non representative governments, seven of the southern states, which had theretofore rejected the proposed amendment under the duress of military occupation and of being denied representation in Congress, did attempt to ratify the proposed Fourteenth Amendment.

Obviously, to the more attentive reader, it is clear that the 14th Amendment was ratified by the Southern States under intense duress by the Northern States. In effect, the 14th Amendment was ratified by political thuggery and at the point of a gun, which is not unheard-of in politics ….. or war.

In contract law, any contract signed under duress, especially under the threat of force or violence, can be declared null and void. So the question is, is a treaty, constitutional amendment, or a contract, entered into under the threat of force or violence, enforceable?

The 14th Amendment led to “anchor babies” which created a giant magnet for illegal aliens to invade the United States, due to an unconscionable perversion of the Amendment by the U. S. Supreme Court. The invasion and the cost of that invasion, continues to grow and magnify, especially with sanctuary jurisdictions defying federal immigration laws and adding to the magnets. Each producing American is paying for that invasion in the billions of dollars. But the 14th Amendment also seriously diluted state’s rights under the Constitution.

Sadly, the American people go on about their daily lives oblivious to the fact that they are quite likely being governed by laws and constitutional amendments that were passed in violation of that constitution.

This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.

(c) 2018

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Amendment XIII

In order to understand the background of the 13th,; 14th. & 15th. amendments to the Constitution, you must first understand the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 which were the precursor of them.

“The Electors shall meet in their respective states and vote by ballot for President and Vice-President, one of whom, at least, shall not be an inhabitant of the same state with themselves;”

The Twelfth Amendment sets out the procedures for the election of the President and Vice President: Electors cast one vote for each office in their respective states, and the candidate having the majority of votes cast for a particular office is elected. If no person has a majority for President, the House of Representatives votes from among the top three candidates, with each state delegation casting one vote. In the case of a failure of any vice presidential candidate to gain a majority of electoral votes, the Senate chooses between the top two candidates. The procedure for choosing the President and Vice President is set out in Article II, Section 1, Clauses 2–6, of the Constitution. This amendment replaces the third clause of that section, which had called for only a single set of votes for President and Vice President, so that the vice presidency would go to the presidential runner-up. In the unamended Constitution, the choice in the case of a nonmajority in the Electoral College fell to the House of Representatives, as it does under the amendment, and the runner-up there would be chosen as Vice President.

The Twelfth Amendment, the last to be proposed by the Founding generation, was proposed for ratification in December 1803 and was ratified in 1804, in time for the presidential election that year. The previous system had yielded, in the election of 1796, Federalist John Adams’s election as President, while his bitter rival and sometimes-close friend, Republican Thomas Jefferson, was elected Vice President. In the election of 1800, Republican, (the precursor of today’s Democrats), electors, though they clearly preferred Jefferson, sought to guarantee that Republicans won both offices, and cast seventy-three electoral votes for both Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. This threw the election into the House of Representatives, where it was only resolved (in Jefferson’s favor) on the thirty-sixth ballot. The hardening of party lines and concomitant voting by party slates (which the Framers had not contemplated) and some dissatisfaction with the way in which electors were chosen in the states led to proposals for change, including a proposal that electors be chosen in separate electoral districts in each state. However, the only change successfully accomplished was that of separate voting for President and Vice President.

Electors in all but two states (Maine and Nebraska) do vote as a bloc, effectively ensuring a two-party system.

Most presidential elections have not generated Twelfth Amendment controversy. However, the provisions of the Amendment have surfaced from time to time, most commonly when a third-party candidate threatens to take a substantial percentage of the vote. In 1824, the failure of either Andrew Jackson or John Quincy Adams to garner a majority of electoral votes threw the election into the House of Representatives, where Adams won the presidency despite having fewer electoral votes than Jackson. In 1876, similar circumstances were resolved differently, when neither Rutherford B. Hayes nor Samuel Tilden received a majority of electoral votes, due to disputed votes in three Southern states. In that instance, Hayes won the presidency when a congressional commission awarded him all disputed electoral votes (and thus a one-vote majority).

The Electoral College was created for two reasons.

The first purpose was to create a buffer between population and the selection of a President.

The second as part of the structure of the government that gave extra power to the smaller states.

The first reason that the founders created the Electoral College is that the founding fathers were afraid of direct election to the Presidency. They feared a tyrant could manipulate public opinion and come to power.

History has proven this fear to be justified by the creation of the “Imperial Presidency” first under Franklin Delano Roosevelt and later by Lyndon Baines Johnson; Richard Milhous Nixon and lately by Barack Hussein Obama. A charismatic and/or politically powerful leader combined with a complacent or complicit media can, very easily become a demagogue.

Hamilton and the other founders believed, wrongly, that the electors would be able to insure that only a qualified person becomes President. They believed that with the Electoral College no one would be able to manipulate the citizenry. It would act as check on an electorate that might be duped. Hamilton and the other founders did not trust the population to make the right choice.Their reasoning failed to take the rise in power of political parties into account.

The electoral college is also part of compromises made at the convention to satisfy the small states. Under the system of the Electoral College each state had the same number of electoral votes as they have representative in Congress, thus no state could have less then 3.

One aspect of the electoral system that is not mandated in the constitution is the fact that the winner takes all the votes in the state. While this tends to negate the power of the electorate, with the evolution of powerful political parties it concentrates great power in the hands of the “leaders” of those parties.

While there are clear problems with the Electoral College and there are some advantages to it, changing it is very unlikely. It would take a constitutional amendment ratified by 3/4 of states to change the system. It is hard to imagine the smaller states agreeing. One way of modifying the system is to eliminate the winner take all part of it. The method that the states vote for the electoral college is not mandated by the constitution but is decided by the states. Two states do not use the winner take all system, Maine and Nebraska. It would be difficult but not impossible to get other states to change their systems, unfortunately the party that has the advantage in the state is unlikely to agree to a unilateral change.

Although “Power to the People” was a slogan much bandied about starting in the upheaval of the 1960’s, the truth of the matter is much closer to a quote attributed to Josef Stalin:

The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State.
Amendment XI

The Eleventh Amendment was ratified in 1795 as a response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Chisholm v. Georgia (1793). Chisholm had held that the federal courts could hear suits by individuals against state governments for money damages, notwithstanding the sovereign immunity that the states had traditionally enjoyed. The resulting furor—based largely on concerns that the states would be held accountable for their Revolutionary War debts—gave rise in 1795 to the ratification of the Eleventh Amendment, which established a fairly narrow textual bar to jurisdiction in cases like Chisholm itself. Chisholm was the first major constitutional decision of the new Court, and the Eleventh Amendment reversed it, eight years before Marbury v. Madison (1803).

The notion of sovereign immunity predates the Eleventh Amendment, having its origins in the English common law. The Framers were clearly aware of the traditional doctrine that the states were immune from private lawsuits as sovereign entities, and some Anti-Federalists feared that Article III, Section 1, of the Constitution—which declares that the federal judicial power extends to suits “between a State and Citizens of another State”—would override that doctrine.

Several key Framers—including Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Marshall—are on record denying that the Constitution would, of its own force, deprive the states of this immunity. The more difficult questions are ones that the Framers did not confront directly: Did the states’ immunity apply in suits based on federal law, as opposed to the state common-law claim relied upon in Chisholm? And was that immunity constitutional in stature, or could Congress abrogate it?

The Court answered the first question in the 1890 case of Hans v. State of Louisiana, holding that the Eleventh Amendment bars private suits against the states even where federal jurisdiction is based on a federal question rather than diversity.

After Hans, the Court extended the states’ immunity in a number of other ways inconsistent with the amendment’s text, holding that the immunity applies in admiralty (notwithstanding the textual limitation to “suit[s] in law or equity”) and in suits by foreign sovereigns and Indian tribes (notwithstanding the textual limitation to “Citizens” of a “State” or “Foreign State”).

The second question—whether Congress may abrogate the states’ sovereign immunity—has preoccupied the Court more recently. There is little doubt that the states enjoyed, at the Founding, the sort of sovereign immunity recognized in common law. Most common-law doctrines, however, are subject to legislative override. Debates at the Constitutional and ratification conventions focused on whether Article III was itself intended to override this traditional immunity; they did not address, however, whether Congress could do so by later legislative enactment.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has set forth specific conditions for negating a state’s
Eleventh Amendment immunity against money damages in federal courts under some federal statutes.

The first two conditions apply to Congress, the source of the legislation. First, Congress can express its intent to nullify, or “abrogate,” Eleventh Amendment immunity for states under a specific federal statute, making it possible for states to be sued. However, Congress may do so only by making its intention unmistakably clear in the language of the legislation, as determined by the courts. Second, the courts must be persuaded that Congress has sufficient authority in the Constitution to nullify Eleventh Amendment immunity.The alternative condition applies to the states, which are the recipients of the immunity. Specifically, the state may waive, or knowingly and voluntarily give up, the immunity. For example, the state’s acceptance of federal funds may constitute such a waiver, depending on whether this acceptance is ultimately determined by a court to be informed consent or coercion.

Debates at the Constitutional and ratification conventions focused on whether Article III was itself intended to override this traditional immunity; they did not address, however, whether Congress could do so by later legislative enactment. The Court’s 1996 decision in Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida held that Congress may not abrogate state sovereign immunity, at least when it acts pursuant to its enumerated powers in Article I of the Constitution. Seminole Tribe determined that the states’ traditional immunity was not a mere holdover from the common law but rather a basic principle of the constitutional structure.

Three years later, in Alden v. Maine (1999), the Court held that, notwithstanding the amendment’s limited application to “[t]he Judicial power of the United States,” Congress also lacked power to override state sovereign immunity for suits in state court. Alden frankly acknowledged that no such principle could be gleaned from the amendment’s text; the Court relied, however, on a structural principle that predated the text and applied much more broadly. The phrase “Eleventh Amendment immunity,” Justice Anthony Kennedy said, “is something of a misnomer….Sovereign immunity derives not from the Eleventh Amendment but from the structure of the original Constitution itself.”

Notwithstanding Seminole Tribe and Alden, however, Congress retains power to abrogate state sovereign immunity when it acts pursuant to its power to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments (i.e., the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth). Several reasons have been given for this: those amendments postdate the Eleventh; they were designed by the Civil War victors to cut back on state sovereignty; and their textual grant of power to Congress to “enforce” their provisions may be interpreted to extend to subjecting the states to monetary remedies for violations. Although the Court decided the leading case on the enforcement power—Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer—in 1976, its more recent decisions have all reaffirmed that precedent.

In order to use the Fitzpatrick exception, Congress and private litigants have sought to rethink a number of federal statutory schemes, originally enacted under the Commerce Clause, as efforts to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. The Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Education Expense Board v. College Savings Bank (1999) decision rejected Congress’s attempt to use Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment to abrogate state sovereign immunity in patent and false-advertising suits as a means of preventing deprivations of property without due process of law. More recently, Kimel v. Florida Board of Regents (2000) and Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett (2001) rejected claims that state liability under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) and Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) would validly remedy violations of the Equal Protection Clause. Nonetheless, abrogation under the enforcement power is appropriate when a high proportion of statutory violations are also constitutional violations of rights protected by Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs (2003) held that Congress may subject a state to suits for money damages by state employees in the event of the state’s failure to comply with the family-care provision of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). Hibbs suggests that narrowly drawn abrogation statutes can pass muster under Section 5, particularly where the rights being enforced call for heightened judicial scrutiny.

In addition to abrogating state immunities under Section 5, Congress retains other important tools for holding state actors accountable for violations of federal law. Congress can, for example, require the states to waive their immunities as a condition for receipt of federal grants under the Spending Clause (Article I, Section 8, Clause 1). Furthermore, state sovereign immunity has never been understood to bar suits by the United States itself. Federal enforcement agencies thus may continue to enforce the ADEA and ADA against state governments. Nor does state immunity bar claims against state officers for injunctive relief or (when the officer is sued in his personal capacity) for money damages. So long as these options exist, the sovereign immunity embodied in the Eleventh Amendment and its extratextual background principles will tend to force suits against the states into certain channels without entirely eliminating the possibility of relief.

So, once again we have an instance where the Constitution, (or in this case an amendment to the Constitution), means exactly what it says it means… unless the Supreme Court decides otherwise, (regardless of the context or intent of the original Framers), in which case the Constitution means exactly what the Supreme Court says it means… unless the Congress decides that they are sufficiently unhappy with what the Supreme Court has ruled in which case they can craft legislation that contravenes the Supreme Courts’ decision on the matter. Clear as mud, no?

Once more we are given an indication that while the common meme is that we are a nation of laws, we are, in fact, a nation of men… and in many cases a nation of very confused men.

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