Plank #3: The 14th Amendment is Invalid

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Enactment of plank #2 leads ineluctably to #3:  Declare the 14th Amendment invalid.  Forrest McDonald and Raul Berger (among other historians and scholars) have shown that the 14th Amendment was both passed illegally—a bare majority was deemed sufficient, the votes of Southern states were coerced, and new states were admitted in order to gain ratification—and misconstrued to cover a wide variety of privileges not anticipated (and specifically repudiated) by the authors, such as the rights to vote and hold office.

Since the Amendment was never enacted legally, all court decisions and Federal laws based in conformity or in expansion of the Amendment are automatically null and void.

I could list some of the more important consequences of this move, but "the task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you."

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Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina

6 Responses

  1. Robert Reavis says:
    February 20, 2021 at 9:01 am

    Yes we might as well. The third provision of the amendment 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,….. 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. …,
    This hasn’t been enforced anyhow in my memory. Giving aid and comfort to declared enemies of our country is the primary reason for Washington D. C., Senators Representatives in Congress, etc etc . It’s better to have no amendment whatsoever than to have one that is never enforced.

  2. Andrew G Van Sant says:
    February 20, 2021 at 11:38 am

    That covers the entire constitution, which is misconstrued or ignored most of the time.

  3. Craig Klampe says:
    February 20, 2021 at 6:23 pm

    Raoul Berger
    https://www.libertyfund.org/authors/raoul-berger/

  4. Ken Rosenberger says:
    February 20, 2021 at 9:24 pm

    Hasn’t the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment essentially been the Constitution since at least 22 January 1973, if not since 1865?

    As an aside, 22 January 1973–2 days after Nixon’s Second Inaugural—the date of the Roe decision, was also the day LBJ died (at 3:39 PM, CST, according to Wikipedia). In an age when conspiracy theories seem as numerous as the number of stars in the skies, I have never heard anyone say anything about the confluence of events on that day. Anyone else?

  5. Avatar photo Thomas Fleming says:
    February 21, 2021 at 8:52 am

    Ken, the Constitution as you must know, is a living document or even a chameleon that is forever changing to fit into new environments.

  6. David E. Bomar says:
    February 22, 2021 at 6:07 pm

    #FLEMING2024. Go, Tom, go!

    David Bomar