The 14th Amendment: The Big Lie That Justified All the Other Lies
The 14th Amendment was never legitimately ratified
The 14th Amendment was never legitimately ratified
(Michael DeSantis, Washington Examiner) - The states were coerced.
A constitutional amendment is supposed to reflect the voluntary consent of sovereign states. Instead, the federal government conditioned political participation on agreement with a constitutional change drafted in Washington. States were not freely deciding whether to adopt the amendment; they were required to ratify it as the price of restoring their place in the Union.
Defenders of Reconstruction point to the Guarantee Clause, arguing Congress had a duty to ensure republican government in the South. But that justification collapses under its own weight. The same clause meant to protect representative government was used to impose military administration, restructure electorates, and dictate the terms of constitutional change. In practice, “democracy” became federal control backed by force.
The legitimacy problem deepens when you examine who was allowed to participate. Entire classes of political actors were excluded. Former Confederate officials and large portions of the Southern political class were disenfranchised, with Congress later restoring rights to roughly 150,000 individuals through the Amnesty Act of 1872.
Whatever one thinks of those individuals, their exclusion meant the amendment was ratified under conditions that do not resemble ordinary republican self-government. The electorate was reshaped before the vote ever…
