The Poor 14th Amendment
Whenever we need to make something up we whip it out like pretzel dough to create something out of thin air.
Protestors illegally harassing Supreme Court Justices at their homes after the “leak” of Judge Alito's opinion regarding the Dodd case. 18 U.S. Code § 1507 forbids picketing or parading “in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer”. Yet Attorney General Garland did nothing to prevent it.
Legislators responsible for introducing the 14th Amendment’s provisions were Rep. John A. Bingham of Ohio, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, Rep. Henry Deming of Connecticut, Sen. Benjamin G. Brown of Missouri, and Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 primarily to grant formerly slave black Americans citizenship and all other rights in response to the flawed Dred Scott Supreme Court decision in 1857. Its language is not vague. For some reason, it is the go-to amendment used to create out of thin air justification for unconstitutional actions.
The 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.
Section 2
Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3
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.
Section 4
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5
The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
The Constitution is a contract like any other
Simply stated, the Constitution is a contract between two parties. “We the People” and the government we created. Like other contracts, once agreed to, neither party gets to just change the terms or interpret the words to suit its needs at the time. Would you tolerate your bank changing the terms or interpreting the words of your mortgage or car loan to suit its purposes? Yet the various branches of government have changed the terms and interpreted the words of our contract many times to suit their needs. Twisting the meaning and putting terms on the 2nd Amendment being only one outrageous example. And for some bizarre reason, “We the People” have tolerated it!
Jefferson on reading the Constitution
Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution. Let us not make it a blank paper by construction. - Thomas Jefferson, writing to Wilson Cary Nicholas, 7 September 1803
On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. - Thomas Jefferson
Things “found” in the 14th Amendment
As I said, the 14th is the go-to Amendment for making things up.
Raising the debt ceiling by executive fiat
Just as the Executive Branch has no power to forgive debt as Biden attempted with student loans without Congressional consent, it cannot issue new debt without Congressional consent either! The 14th Amendment clearly says the U.S. debt is to be acknowledged as valid as is to be paid. In no way, shape or form does it authorize the Executive Branch to create new debt!
Merely because Congress has approved new spending doesn’t mean the President can issue new debt on his own authority to finance it. He can’t issue new debt on his own to finance Medicare, for example.
All of which means that the melodrama over U.S. default is overwrought. That’s because even if federal spending begins to exceed federal tax revenue sometime in June, as Secretary Yellen says it will, Treasury can prioritize paying interest on Treasury bonds or retiring debt principal when it comes due.
Treasury has more than enough cash to do this. Federal tax receipts in March were $313 billion and interest payments were $67 billion, according to Treasury’s monthly report on revenue and outlays. In April receipts were $639 billion and interest was $62 billion. It would be the height of fiscal irresponsibility if Treasury failed to use that cash to meet U.S. contractual debt obligations. Mr. Biden and Ms. Yellen would also be violating the law.
Incidentally, Yellen is now threatening not to pay Social Security if the debt ceiling isn't raised! Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare are mandatory spending! Just impeach and throw the most incompetent Secretary of Treasury in our history in jail already and be done with it!
If POTUS is truly concerned about a debt default, he can also borrow money, but only on his own credit, perhaps by pledging the proceeds from his foreign business deals and mansions as collateral, and then donate it to the US Treasury. That won’t happen, of course, but POTUS could reduce uncertainty by simply pledging to sign whatever bill Congress passes. That, though, would not make FDR proud. - Robert E. Wright, a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research
A “right to privacy”
The Supreme Court has gone past merely interpreting the Constitution to actually adding parts or rewriting legislation from the bench many times in its history.
Unlike the phrase “separation of church and state”, which is an actual phrase from Thomas Jefferson in a private letter to the Danbury Baptists, that the state will never interfere in the private or public practice of religion which was completely turned on its head by the Supreme Court. The “right to privacy” was created completely out of thin air. Not only is it not in the 14th Amendment, but it is also nowhere in the Constitution, period!
How did the Supreme Court arrive at the conclusion of a right to privacy in the Constitution? Through the bizarre idea of “a penumbra of rights.”
A group of rights derived, by implication, from other rights explicitly protected in the Bill of Rights. These rights have been identified through a process of "reasoning-by-interpolation", where specific principles are recognized from "general ideas" that are explicitly expressed in other constitutional provisions.
In other words, implications of what is implied in the Constitution pulled out of thin air! The Constitution is a contract, just like your mortgage is a contract. Try doing this with your bank and see how far it gets you!
In 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut, Justice William O. Douglas's majority opinion famously inferred that a right to privacy existed within the Constitution, even though it does not explicitly exist in the document.
In 1973 in Roe v. Wade, the court repeated the right to privacy claim while totally ignoring “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”, regarding the unborn baby in this scenario.
Why Roe was overturned
The whole opinion can be found Here. Briefly, here are some points:
The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected in things “found” in the 14th Amendment.
As I said, the 14th Amendment is the go-to for making things up.
The defenders of Roe and Casey chiefly rely on the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Roe failed to even note the overwhelming amount of state laws already in place in 1868 prohibiting abortion. By the time the Amendment was adopted, 3/4 of the states had already made abortion a crime at any stage of pregnancy.
The Conclusion
Abortion presents a profound moral question. The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority. We now overrule those decisions and return that authority to the people and their elected representatives. - Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito
Birthright citizenship
The absurd idea that if you make it across the border, like sliding into home plate, and have a baby, then it is automatically a United States citizen that can then bring in all its relatives. It completely ignores the actual meaning of the phrase “under the jurisdiction thereof”. The original understanding referred to political allegiance.
From Matthew Spalding, the Kirby Professor in Constitutional Government at Hillsdale College and the Dean of the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., campus
Naturalization—the idea of a foreigner becoming an equal citizen as if by nature—follows directly from America's political principles. Individuals have a natural right to emigrate from their homeland, but they may only immigrate to this country with the consent of the American people as expressed through U.S. laws. With that consent, a person of any ethnic heritage or racial background can become, in every sense, an American citizen.
What about those who are born here?
After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment (overturning, in part, Dred Scott v. Sandford, which said that no black could be a U.S. citizen) clarified the conditions of citizenship: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside."
Being subject to U.S. jurisdiction meant, as then-Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Lyman Trumbull stated, "not owing allegiance to anybody else [but] subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States." The author of the provision, Sen. Jacob Merritt Howard of Michigan, pointed out that the jurisdiction language "will not, of course, include foreigners."
Being here illegally and marching in the street with the flag of a foreign country clearly nullifies allegiance to the United States! Using this flawed logic, all the babies born to diplomats while in the U.S. would automatically be U.S. citizens.
It was in 1898 (in United States v. Wong Kim Ark) that the Supreme Court expanded the constitutional mandate, holding that the children of legal, permanent residents were automatically citizens. While the decision could be (and is often) read more broadly, the court has never held that the clause confers this citizenship on the children of temporary visitors, much less of illegal residents.
The broader reading is a constitutional misreading. Not only does it grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, it also gives full due-process rights to the likes of Taliban fighter Yasir Hamdi (born in the United States of visiting Saudi parents and captured fighting U.S. soldiers 20 years later in Afghanistan).
But it is the principle of the matter that is most problematic. The broad claim of automatic birthright citizenship traces its roots more to the feudal concept of perpetual allegiance of subjects to kings, rather than equal rights and the consent of the governed. It violates bedrock American principles and undermines the rule of law.
18 U.S. Code § 2383 - Rebellion or insurrection
Whoever incites, sets on foot, assists, or engages in any rebellion or insurrection against the authority of the United States or the laws thereof, or gives aid or comfort thereto, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.
Insurrection is mentioned in the 14th Amendment. Committing it would prevent you from ever holding public office, which is why the whole Jan. 6 insurrection fairy tale was invented, to pin insurrection on Donald Trump to keep him out of office. I wrote about the rigged 2020 election and the Jan. 6 staged insurrection in The Bill of Rights Part II.
Who more correctly actually committed insurrection?
Accuse your enemy of what you are doing, as you are doing it to create confusion - Karl Marx
Some of the participants:
State Secretaries of State and other state and county officials who unconstitutionally changed election laws and practices when the Constitution clearly states in Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
The FBI who labeled the Hunter Biden laptop as Russian disinformation and ordered social and regular media to do the same to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.
Social and regular media that willingly participated.
The 51 “intelligence experts” who lied about the Hunter Biden laptop to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.
FOX NEWS calling Arizona for Biden despite 900,000 votes still uncounted.
Texas, Florida, etc., having tallies by midnight. Swing states Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Georgia STOP counting votes for the night on election day! Never in Presidential election history. Like stopping the World Series in the middle of the last game till tomorrow!
Tallies when the counting was halted:
Regarding Jan. 6
On Jan. 6, 2021, the Electoral College ballots were to be certified at the Capital and questions were going to be raised by Republicans based on information I previously mentioned. Since 2001, Congressional Democrats raised questions three times to the Republican Presidential Electoral College regarding votes, including those of President Trump. In fact, several Congressional Democrats boycotted President Trump’s Inauguration because they claimed he did not win. Were they seditious and treasonous insurrectionists?
Practically everyone knew there was going to be an incident at the Capital on Jan. 6:
Capital Police were warned in December 2020 of possible violence on Jan. 6.
Capital Police were warned from Baltimore that BLM and Antifa were coming to dress up as Trump supporters and riot! Could THAT be who was raising all the hell at the Capital?
Pelosi and Mayor Bowser both refused troops from President Trump.
Capital Police actually welcomed protesters into the Capital itself.
An FBI representative refused to respond to Sen. Ted Cruz whether FBI agents or confidential informants actively participated in the events of January 6, 2021, and whether they committed any crimes of violence or actively encouraged crimes of violence. Again. Who was actually rioting? Especially troublesome in light of their involvement with the Michigan Gov. Whitmire kidnap plot entrapment.
The Electoral College vote was cancelled with politicians evacuated. It was rescheduled Wednesday evening and without any objections approved. The wailing about “the Insurrection”, despite the alleged insurrectionists being unarmed, began as soon as it started. Donald Trump was named THE chief insurrectionist because he had questions about the election. Also, conveniently, being found guilty of insurrection makes someone ineligible to hold office in the United States.
The January 6 Committee with their made for TV rigged hearings. Manipulating evidence, testimony and video from Jan. 6 to come to their predetermined conclusions regarding President Trump.
Was Jan. 6 actually a coup and not an insurrection?
Coup - a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group
General Milley actually called his Chinese counterpart twice to say he would warn him if the U.S. was going to attack.
General Milley actually gave the order that if President Trump gave the military any orders they were supposed to run them by him first!
He was in communication with Speaker Pelosi behind the back of his Commander in Chief, President Trump!
From
The deeper you dig, the more obvious it becomes that Jan 6 was a coup, not an insurrection. One arranged by Milley and DOD.
Memorial Day
Monday, May 29, 2023, is Memorial Day, when we honor the brave American men and women serving in the military who gave their lives to keep the United States a free country.
Are we actually dishonoring them by allowing despots and traitors to destroy our country while we take for granted the freedoms they fought and died for? Time is short.
The sad thing is that so many young people don't know why we observe Memorial Day...
Great review, thanks!