Originally posted at Liberal Street Fighter
Professor Garrett Epps reminds us in Salon that July 21st is a VERY important day in American history, especially for those of us who treasure civil liberties:
What’s better than a patriotic holiday in July? Pop a brew tonight, then, and let’s celebrate our heritage of democracy and equal rights. We owe these freedoms not so much to the events commemorated every July 4, but to those of July 21.
On this day in 1868, after a bruising ratification struggle, Congress passed a resolution proclaiming that the 14th Amendment was part of the Constitution. More than the Declaration of Independence, more than the original Constitution, more than even the Bill of Rights, it is the 14th Amendment that makes America a democratic country.
But, as the beer commercials say, celebrate responsibly: Our current toxic immigration debate shows that, more than a century later, genuine democracy has powerful enemies. In 2006, the anti-immigrant movement is attacking the amendment’s central meaning of equal protection of the law for all.
Please don’t feel bad if the words “14th Amendment” don’t immediately call to mind a list of rights. Most literate citizens — and even many lawyers — have trouble focusing on the radical changes this massive post-Civil War reform made in the original Constitution. The 14th Amendment is such a giant presence in our lives today that it’s hard to see it as a single thing.
But consider this. Until the 14th Amendment, the idea of human equality, extolled in the Declaration of Independence, appeared nowhere in the Constitution. The word “equal,” when written in the original document, referred mostly to voting privileges for the states. In addition, the Constitution contained no definition of American citizenship, seemingly leaving the matter to the states.
Even the Bill of Rights itself only covered the federal government — overreaching state governments could, and did, restrict free speech, freedom of religion, due process of law and other basic rights. In short, the Framers of 1787 set up a flawed confederation of insular states, each of which was free to oppress, and even enslave, some or all of its population.
Thanks to what passes for history and civics education in this country, most Americans fail to appreciate that the foundations of liberty we all believe this country stands for are the result of ongoing, and often bloody, struggle. It is a struggle that we are in danger of losing once again, as forces of intolerance and hate are cultivated by our deeply corrupt and venal political establishment.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s most sweeping and impactful section is section one, the Due Process clause:
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.
As Epps explains:
The first section of the amendment begins by guaranteeing that “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.” At one stroke, the framers eliminated the racist Dred Scott doctrine that “we the people” did not mean African-Americans; and they included as citizens every child born here, no matter where their parents were born or how they got here. After that, they required every state to observe the “privileges [and] immunities of citizens of the United States,” and to afford due process and equal protection of the laws to “any person” within their borders.
Ohio Rep. John Bingham, the principal architect of Section 1, had spent most of his career campaigning for the rights of slaves and immigrants. Even before the Civil War, he had laid out a vision of “one people, one Constitution, and one country!” States had no “rights” to interfere with their citizens’ constitutional rights: “The equality of the right to live; the right to know; to argue and to utter, according to conscience; to work and enjoy the product of their toil, is the rock on which [the] Constitution rests, its sure foundation and defense.” Immigrants enjoyed those rights as fully as natives, he insisted, because the Constitution obeyed “that higher law given by a voice out of heaven: ‘Ye shall have the same law for the stranger as for one of your own country.'”
Completing Rep. Bingham’s vision has been a continuous and an ongoing struggle. If you google “Fourteenth Amendment”, you will find numerous right-wing sites and publications inveighing against it. An example::
The Fourteenth Amendment has had precisely the effect that its nineteenth-century Republican party supporters intended it to have: it has greatly centralized power in Washington, D.C., and has subjected Americans to the kind of judicial tyranny that Thomas Jefferson warned about when he described federal judges as those who would be “constantly working underground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric.” It’s time for all Americans to reexamine the official history of the “Civil War” and its aftermath as taught by paid government propagandists in the “public” schools for the past 135 years.
Those were, of course, Lincoln-era Republicans, not the rapacious bullies we suffer under now. You can find current calls to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment in many places, if you care to look. Sad, here in the Twenty-First Century, that we have fellow citizens who wish so fervently to go back to a time where a bullying majority could use the power of the local state to deny full protection under the law to unwelcome minorities. There are, of course, such laws still operative, but the tide had been toward pushing them back … until the right-wing backlash of the last several decades.
So today, celebrate this important anniversary, even though we have still not completed the promise held within its words. Re-commit yourself to making this a country where ALL of our citizens are fully treated AS citizens, protected equally under the law. As Epps concludes:
Fireworks are appropriate on national holidays. But those who would dismantle our basic constitutional guarantees are playing with real fire. The history they want to repeat — the imposition of a hereditary, lifelong, racial caste system — was tragic, and a new system of permanent aliens would be no less so. Our best weapon against this evil is knowledge of our own history and values.
