A National Debate on the 14th Amendment is Long Overdue

This country is in need of a long debate about the 14^th Amendment.  Activist judges have used the equal protection clause as a cudgel to impose their political biases upon the American people.  They set precedent and build upon it to the point where the original intent has been obfuscated in a cloud of judicial decrees.

No one can deny the equal protection clause was meant to protect ex-slaves and their progeny.  This was, after all, a post-Civil War amendment.  But the federal courts have completely bastardized the 14^th to a point where they have dictated our immigration policy.  Our illegal alien invasion is due to Supreme Court rulings such as birth right citizenship and mandating States educate illegal alien children. 

Now our First Amendment rights are under attack by black robed thugs.  Christians can no longer practice their faith outside of home and church.  A whole slew of grievance mongers have obtained protected class status.  Now, people of faith who own a business will be forced to participate in homosexual marriages.  Was that the original intent of the authors of the 14^th Amendment?  I don’t think so!

Are we a constitutional republic or a judicial oligarchy?  We’re supposed to have a federalist system that defines the roles of state and federal governments.  That has been discarded.  We are now in a post-constitutional era; an era where States are vassals to the federal ummah.

Many believe this ideological divide is just between liberals and conservatives.  Libertarians also have an expansive view on the role of the judiciary.  Damon Root of Reason Magazine stated the following on Carolina Journal Radio:

Root: Well, there’s very much an alliance between libertarians and conservatives that’s ongoing right now. But there is this fundamental disagreement, and when I say conservatives, I’m really referring to the Robert Bork school of legal conservatism that puts great emphasis on judicial deference. In his book, The Tempting of America, Robert Bork wrote, “In wide areas of life, majorities are entitled to rule if they wish, simply because they are majorities.” 

And he called that the first principle of our system, and the libertarian response is, well, the first principle is individual rights, and majority rule comes second. Those visions don’t clash in every case, but in some very fundamental ways, they really are at odds. So we see this alliance holding together sometimes but then really butting heads other times.

Kokai: Reason magazine, for those who are unfamiliar, is a libertarian magazine, so I would suspect that you and folks who work with you would like to see the courts be active when it comes to protecting these individuals rights, rather than just defer to the lawmaking braches.

Root: The libertarian legal view is basically that the Constitution is a liberty document. It protects a broad range of individual rights, both written down in the Constitution, but then also unemunerated rights, and that also the Constitution places strict limits on government power. And libertarians very much want to see the courts act as a check on the other branches of government and really have a fundamental problem with Bork’s framing of majority rule first above individual rights.

There is also the federalist view which is the Constitution enumerates the powers of the federal government, anything beyond that is left up to the States, hence, the 10^th Amendment.  Libertarians seem to have a problem with that.

 Source:

http://www.carolinajournal.com/exclusives/display_exclusive.html?id=12300

Federalist and Libertarians Debate the 14th Amendment

It all started with Kurt T. Lash’s critique on a new book entitled, Overruled:  The Long War for the Control of the Supreme Court by Damon Root.  Since then think tanks and liberal blogs, such as the Huffington Post, are weighing in on the 14^th Amendment, and particularly, the privileges and immunities clause.

This debate is enlightening for a layperson, such as me, wading through the morass of modern judicial activism, biased academia, journalistic utopian philosophy, and historical fiction.  The 14^th Amendment encapsulates all the above and we can all thank Rep. John Bingham and his ambiguous first section for this legalistic swamp gas.

I for one agree with Mr. Lash’s constitutional federalism assessment.  Here is an excerpt from his latest review:

Recently, I critically reviewed Damon Root’s new book, Overruled: The Long-War for the Control of the Supreme Court(see Part 1 and Part 2). In response, Root and others have now taken to the blogosphere in defense of the book and of libertarian constitutionalism. Unfortunately, Root just digs a deeper hole and his defenders only illustrate the problem with libertarian readings of the Privileges or Immunities Clause.

Root’s basic argument is that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause, like the Comity Clause of Article IV, protects unenumerated economic rights. The only difference is that the Privileges or Immunities Clause transforms the equally protected state-secured rights of the Comity Clause into absolute substantive rights. Thus, the Supreme Court wrongly rejected unenumerated substantive economic rights in The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) and in later New Deal decisions like Carolene Products (1938).

In my review, I pointed to a large body of historical evidence suggesting that Root is wrong about the original understanding of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. The Clause refers to the rights of citizens of the United States, not the rights of citizens in the several states as it says in the Comity Clause. Where the latter refers to state-secured rights, the former refers to constitutionally enumerated rights.  The man who drafted the Privileges or Immunities Clause expressly distinguished his handiwork from the Comity Clause and insisted that his efforts were aimed at requiring the states to respect the enumerated rights of the federal Constitution, especially those listed in the Bill of Rights. As a matter of original meaning, the treaty-based language Representative John Bingham (R-OH) chose had long been understood as pointing to federally enumerated rights.

To read what others are saying about this debate click the links below:

Source:

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2015/07/15/root-digs-a-deeper-hole-the-equal-protection-of-economic-privileges-and-immunities/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evan-bernick/yes-the-fourteenth-amendm_b_7787926.html

http://www.johnlocke.org/newsletters/research/2015-07-22-86hf3gfvoakfnunum1qifit0i1-legal-update.html

Sean Haugh the Craziest Senatorial Candidate in America

A North Carolina libertarian has just been dubbed the craziest senatorial candidate in America.  Sean Haugh has taken to tweeter to smack down republican candidate Thom Tillis and his supporters, as a bunch of homicidal racist, hell bent on mass murder.  And this guy has a solid 5% of the vote. Wow!

Here he is in a video telling the rest of us to get along with one another.  What a hypocrite.

Source:

http://dailycaller.com/2014/09/24/americas-craziest-senate-candidate-thinks-gop-loves-killing-black-people/

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/09/24/Could-a-Third-Party-Candidate-Be-the-Spoiler-in-NC-Senate-Race