Trumps Indictment: Historical and Future Implications IV
First England, now France. Come on, U.S.
PARIS — France's left-wing New Popular Front alliance and President Emmanuel Macron's centrist coalition thwarted a far-right victory in legislative elections on Sunday, staging one of the greatest political upsets in recent French history.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/07/france-election-result-2024-left-far-right/
PARIS — France's left-wing New Popular Front alliance and President Emmanuel Macron's centrist coalition thwarted a far-right victory in legislative elections on Sunday, staging one of the greatest political upsets in recent French history.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/07/france-election-result-2024-left-far-right/
Considering how often Democrats have been accused of pedophilia, I thought this might help set the record straight...
https://ksltv.com/554305/utah-patriot-front-member-will-be-sentenced-for-child-pornography-charges/
https://ksltv.com/554305/utah-patriot-front-member-will-be-sentenced-for-child-pornography-charges/
For the MAGA constituency...
Anyone who worships a god who sacrificed his grown son to fix a problem he created...is part of a death cult.
If you pretend to eat and drink your dead savior...you are part of a death cult.
If you only get rewarded for your loyalty after you die...you are part of a death cult.
Anyone who worships a god who sacrificed his grown son to fix a problem he created...is part of a death cult.
If you pretend to eat and drink your dead savior...you are part of a death cult.
If you only get rewarded for your loyalty after you die...you are part of a death cult.
July 7, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUL 08, 2024
I have spent the weekend struggling mightily with a new manuscript and have had little time to study the news.
The most notable event from the day is that in a stunning upset, French voters have rejected members of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in legislative elections. After the first round of votes, National Rally candidates appeared to be comfortably ahead, but left-wing and centrist candidates combined forces to prevent splitting the vote, and voters then flooded the polls to elect the candidates that coalition fielded.
Le Pen has said her policies are the same ones advanced by Russian president Vladimir Putin and former president Trump.
On Thursday, elections in the United Kingdom saw a landslide victory for the center-left Labour Party for the first time in 14 years. Lauren Frayer and Fatima Al-Kassab of NPR noted that it was the worst defeat for the Conservatives in their almost 200-year history.
There are always many factors that go into any election, but these results at least raise the question of whether western politicians are finding effective ways to counter the techniques of Russian disinformation. France has been flooded with Russian disinformation trying to create divisions in society as Putin seeks to break European support for Ukraine. Russia openly supports Le Pen.
The U.K. also has been similarly flooded with Russian disinformation for years now. Russian trolls lie on social media websites and populate the comments sections of popular websites both to end support for Ukraine and to exploit wedge issues to split people apart.
These efforts were part of what Russian political theorists called “political technology”: the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media. Political theorists developed several techniques in this approach to politics: blackmailing opponents, abusing state power to help favored candidates, sponsoring “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to confuse voters on the other side and thus open the way for their own candidates, creating false parties to split the opposition, and, finally, creating a false narrative around an election or other event in order to control public debate.
These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. But those techniques dovetailed with the rhetoric of homegrown far-right figures as well.
It has always been a question what people who have embraced a virtual world will do when they figure out that the narrative on which they have based their government is fake. It seems possible that they create centrist coalitions and turn out to vote in huge numbers to reassert control over their politics and their country.
The United States has had a similarly contentious relationship with political technology, Russian disinformation, and far-right leaders echoing that disinformation as they seek to take power by dividing the American people.
And long before anyone had begun to call disinformation political technology, the United States had a small group of elite enslavers seeking to take control of the nation by hammering on their narrative that the only true basis for society was racial slavery and using racism to divide their opponents.
When they managed to get Congress and the Supreme Court to give them the right to move slavery into the American West, where new slave states could work with southern slave states to make slavery national, voters woke up. Disagreeing about immigration, internal improvements, public education, tariffs, and finance—all hot-button issues in the 1850s—they nonetheless built a centrist coalition to stop elite enslavers from replacing democracy with an oligarchy.
Indeed, their coalition was so effective that Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who had sponsored the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that permitted enslavement to move west, objected that it was unseemly for abolitionists who opposed human enslavement in principle to work with those like Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who focused on the Constitution and argued that it protected enslavement in the slave states.
In 1854, Lincoln answered Douglas: “Our Senator…objects that those who oppose him in this measure do not entirely agree with one another…. [H]e…says it is not quite fair to oppose him in this variety of ways. He should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
Six years later, that coalition of voters elected Lincoln to the White House.
The French elections left no party in an absolute majority, so governance will be messy. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez nonetheless cheered tonight’s results: “This week, two of the largest countries in Europe have chosen the same path that Spain chose a year ago: rejection of the extreme right and a decisive commitment to a social left that addresses people’s problems with serious and brave policies,” Sánchez posted on social media.
“The United Kingdom and France have said YES to progress and social advancement and NO to the regression in rights and freedoms. There is no agreement or government with the extreme right.”
Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-7-2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUL 08, 2024
I have spent the weekend struggling mightily with a new manuscript and have had little time to study the news.
The most notable event from the day is that in a stunning upset, French voters have rejected members of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in legislative elections. After the first round of votes, National Rally candidates appeared to be comfortably ahead, but left-wing and centrist candidates combined forces to prevent splitting the vote, and voters then flooded the polls to elect the candidates that coalition fielded.
Le Pen has said her policies are the same ones advanced by Russian president Vladimir Putin and former president Trump.
On Thursday, elections in the United Kingdom saw a landslide victory for the center-left Labour Party for the first time in 14 years. Lauren Frayer and Fatima Al-Kassab of NPR noted that it was the worst defeat for the Conservatives in their almost 200-year history.
There are always many factors that go into any election, but these results at least raise the question of whether western politicians are finding effective ways to counter the techniques of Russian disinformation. France has been flooded with Russian disinformation trying to create divisions in society as Putin seeks to break European support for Ukraine. Russia openly supports Le Pen.
The U.K. also has been similarly flooded with Russian disinformation for years now. Russian trolls lie on social media websites and populate the comments sections of popular websites both to end support for Ukraine and to exploit wedge issues to split people apart.
These efforts were part of what Russian political theorists called “political technology”: the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media. Political theorists developed several techniques in this approach to politics: blackmailing opponents, abusing state power to help favored candidates, sponsoring “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to confuse voters on the other side and thus open the way for their own candidates, creating false parties to split the opposition, and, finally, creating a false narrative around an election or other event in order to control public debate.
These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. But those techniques dovetailed with the rhetoric of homegrown far-right figures as well.
It has always been a question what people who have embraced a virtual world will do when they figure out that the narrative on which they have based their government is fake. It seems possible that they create centrist coalitions and turn out to vote in huge numbers to reassert control over their politics and their country.
The United States has had a similarly contentious relationship with political technology, Russian disinformation, and far-right leaders echoing that disinformation as they seek to take power by dividing the American people.
And long before anyone had begun to call disinformation political technology, the United States had a small group of elite enslavers seeking to take control of the nation by hammering on their narrative that the only true basis for society was racial slavery and using racism to divide their opponents.
When they managed to get Congress and the Supreme Court to give them the right to move slavery into the American West, where new slave states could work with southern slave states to make slavery national, voters woke up. Disagreeing about immigration, internal improvements, public education, tariffs, and finance—all hot-button issues in the 1850s—they nonetheless built a centrist coalition to stop elite enslavers from replacing democracy with an oligarchy.
Indeed, their coalition was so effective that Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who had sponsored the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that permitted enslavement to move west, objected that it was unseemly for abolitionists who opposed human enslavement in principle to work with those like Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who focused on the Constitution and argued that it protected enslavement in the slave states.
In 1854, Lincoln answered Douglas: “Our Senator…objects that those who oppose him in this measure do not entirely agree with one another…. [H]e…says it is not quite fair to oppose him in this variety of ways. He should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
Six years later, that coalition of voters elected Lincoln to the White House.
The French elections left no party in an absolute majority, so governance will be messy. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez nonetheless cheered tonight’s results: “This week, two of the largest countries in Europe have chosen the same path that Spain chose a year ago: rejection of the extreme right and a decisive commitment to a social left that addresses people’s problems with serious and brave policies,” Sánchez posted on social media.
“The United Kingdom and France have said YES to progress and social advancement and NO to the regression in rights and freedoms. There is no agreement or government with the extreme right.”
Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-7-2024
MidnightSonneteer said:For the MAGA constituency...
Anyone who worships a god who sacrificed his grown son to fix a problem he created...is part of a death cult.
If you pretend to eat and drink your dead savior...you are part of a death cult.
If you only get rewarded for your loyalty after you die...you are part of a death cult.
The "Son" is one third part of the entire God, the other two being God the Father and the Holy Spirit.
That said, it becomes that God sacrificed himself on our behalf. What other "god" has allowed their own creation, to kill them to prove a point? I'll wait.
Rewards for loyalty, happen throughout this life as well as life beyond--it's being able to recognize them, is where many miss the mark.
Eating and drinking the Savior--originally was a symbolic gesture, not a literal one (John 6, 50-58). The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation has twisted that into the bread and wine, turning into Jesus, which then basically says that his initial sacrifice wasn't good enough, and we have to kill him over and over again, each time a Catholic mass is held.
Anyone who worships a god who sacrificed his grown son to fix a problem he created...is part of a death cult.
If you pretend to eat and drink your dead savior...you are part of a death cult.
If you only get rewarded for your loyalty after you die...you are part of a death cult.
The "Son" is one third part of the entire God, the other two being God the Father and the Holy Spirit.
That said, it becomes that God sacrificed himself on our behalf. What other "god" has allowed their own creation, to kill them to prove a point? I'll wait.
Rewards for loyalty, happen throughout this life as well as life beyond--it's being able to recognize them, is where many miss the mark.
Eating and drinking the Savior--originally was a symbolic gesture, not a literal one (John 6, 50-58). The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation has twisted that into the bread and wine, turning into Jesus, which then basically says that his initial sacrifice wasn't good enough, and we have to kill him over and over again, each time a Catholic mass is held.
With every measure of respect that I can muster, religiosity of any type suggesting that it's a better version of group psychosis than another brand of religion...
is to hypocrisy...
what an addict who only shoots heroin does when he says to a meth addict that the meth addict is wrong for being a meth addict instead of a heroin addict.
The brand of the error isn't the issue.
And all of the above qualifies as addiction, since many rehab staffers, psychologists, and philosophers, have noted that many "recovering" addicts switch to religion for their so-called recovery.
Of course, we must be fair and acknowledge that existential angst is indeed the beast at the metaphorical wheel of all our fears, therefore we ought to recognize the universal nature of it as a human failing, even as we support our comrades who cannot bring themselves to face the threat of oblivion by insisting on the cold splash of honesty required to face that part of reality, which routinely shows us that if we want a chicken dinner, then a chicken must be killed for it, but that doesn't mean that the slain bird goes to chicken heaven afterwards.
Stop selling death when it is not required for sustenance. Maybe just go for a nice bike ride instead.
is to hypocrisy...
what an addict who only shoots heroin does when he says to a meth addict that the meth addict is wrong for being a meth addict instead of a heroin addict.
The brand of the error isn't the issue.
And all of the above qualifies as addiction, since many rehab staffers, psychologists, and philosophers, have noted that many "recovering" addicts switch to religion for their so-called recovery.
Of course, we must be fair and acknowledge that existential angst is indeed the beast at the metaphorical wheel of all our fears, therefore we ought to recognize the universal nature of it as a human failing, even as we support our comrades who cannot bring themselves to face the threat of oblivion by insisting on the cold splash of honesty required to face that part of reality, which routinely shows us that if we want a chicken dinner, then a chicken must be killed for it, but that doesn't mean that the slain bird goes to chicken heaven afterwards.
Stop selling death when it is not required for sustenance. Maybe just go for a nice bike ride instead.
It's not the belief in a religion that divides us.
Religion in and of itself is a personal choice. Each individual has their own destiny to walk and many times that involves a religion.
It's when that personal choice evolves beyond the person into an edict for other people. This is dangerous as history has repeatedly proven. No one knows what's best for another person because they don't possess another's heart nor the knowledge of its internal compass and destiny.
It's especially dangerous if it infiltrates a government of [ ALL ] the people, by [ ALL ] the people, and for [ ALL ] the people who are free by law to worship in the manner their heart dictates. That changes when such laws are replaced with religion and that religion implemented in government agencies and schools employing individuals who aren't Christians, and yet have proven beyond any moral turpitude their loyalty to the U.S. through an ethical life.
America is intended to be a melting pot of unity and Christian nationalism will destroy that unity quicker than anything by destroying a constitution inclusive of religious freedom, not to mention persecution of LGBTQ+ individuals who are guilty of nothing except love.
In the documentary I previously recommended in this thread, 'Bad Faith', were pastors of churches filmed saying to their congregations, "LGBT means Let God Burn Them." "LGBTQ means Let God Burn Them Quickly."
It's coming if you vote Trump, because Trump only wants power and position. He'll allow his constituents with money to implement whatever the fuck they want whether it destroys a country, the Earth, or its people therein who may not agree.
Have we learned nothing from history where a government implemented religion is concerned?
England? Anyone? Pilgrims?
Separation of Church and State: Biden
Religion in and of itself is a personal choice. Each individual has their own destiny to walk and many times that involves a religion.
It's when that personal choice evolves beyond the person into an edict for other people. This is dangerous as history has repeatedly proven. No one knows what's best for another person because they don't possess another's heart nor the knowledge of its internal compass and destiny.
It's especially dangerous if it infiltrates a government of [ ALL ] the people, by [ ALL ] the people, and for [ ALL ] the people who are free by law to worship in the manner their heart dictates. That changes when such laws are replaced with religion and that religion implemented in government agencies and schools employing individuals who aren't Christians, and yet have proven beyond any moral turpitude their loyalty to the U.S. through an ethical life.
America is intended to be a melting pot of unity and Christian nationalism will destroy that unity quicker than anything by destroying a constitution inclusive of religious freedom, not to mention persecution of LGBTQ+ individuals who are guilty of nothing except love.
In the documentary I previously recommended in this thread, 'Bad Faith', were pastors of churches filmed saying to their congregations, "LGBT means Let God Burn Them." "LGBTQ means Let God Burn Them Quickly."
It's coming if you vote Trump, because Trump only wants power and position. He'll allow his constituents with money to implement whatever the fuck they want whether it destroys a country, the Earth, or its people therein who may not agree.
Have we learned nothing from history where a government implemented religion is concerned?
England? Anyone? Pilgrims?
Separation of Church and State: Biden
The real litmus test of whether or not a "faith" is harmless or a predatory nightmare, can be determined by observing just how much they insist on having their faithful bow down to a list of nonsense laws, like what all the Levantine religions are unquestionably guilty of, and so much so that there is no significant difference between any of them, at least as seen in their very worst representatives, such as the Taliban, or the Spanish Inquisition...
and now including MAGA.
It really should come as no surprise to anyone that totalitarianism would be the default public policy of any Christian Nationalist promoter, when their whole worldview is to do what they say without question or you will burn in hell. It's the very pinnacle of misanthropy.
I realize that most people of faith aren't that bad necessarily, but when they give their votes over to the perpetuation of bad public policy dealers, then they become the enablers of terrible events worldwide.
And if no one thinks that conservatism isn't a coordinated international evil, then I think this makes it clear enough...
https://youtu.be/ewA2tXGPHFU?si=tRhLvfewZHtSdGWY
and now including MAGA.
It really should come as no surprise to anyone that totalitarianism would be the default public policy of any Christian Nationalist promoter, when their whole worldview is to do what they say without question or you will burn in hell. It's the very pinnacle of misanthropy.
I realize that most people of faith aren't that bad necessarily, but when they give their votes over to the perpetuation of bad public policy dealers, then they become the enablers of terrible events worldwide.
And if no one thinks that conservatism isn't a coordinated international evil, then I think this makes it clear enough...
https://youtu.be/ewA2tXGPHFU?si=tRhLvfewZHtSdGWY
MidnightSonneteer said:
[ . . . ]
and now including MAGA.
It really should come as no surprise to anyone that totalitarianism would be the default public policy of any Christian Nationalist promoter, when their whole worldview is to do what they say without question or you will burn in hell. It's the very pinnacle of misanthropy.
[ . . . ]
https://youtu.be/ewA2tXGPHFU?si=tRhLvfewZHtSdGWY
And in their case, hypocrisy.
[ . . . ]
and now including MAGA.
It really should come as no surprise to anyone that totalitarianism would be the default public policy of any Christian Nationalist promoter, when their whole worldview is to do what they say without question or you will burn in hell. It's the very pinnacle of misanthropy.
[ . . . ]
https://youtu.be/ewA2tXGPHFU?si=tRhLvfewZHtSdGWY
And in their case, hypocrisy.
A vote for Trump is tacit approval of rape...
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/katie-johnson-civil-case-for-rape-trump-epsteinpdf/257375882
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/katie-johnson-civil-case-for-rape-trump-epsteinpdf/257375882
MidnightSonneteer said:A vote for Trump is tacit approval of rape...
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/katie-johnson-civil-case-for-rape-trump-epsteinpdf/257375882
That poor girl is STILL in hiding. . .
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/katie-johnson-civil-case-for-rape-trump-epsteinpdf/257375882
That poor girl is STILL in hiding. . .
July 8, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUL 09, 2024
On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth had murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.
Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.
Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.
But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.
It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll 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.”
The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history; it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “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,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.
Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
From the perspective of 2024, Kennedy’s comments seem prescient, but the country could go even further backward. The 2024 Republican Party platform, released today, calls for using the Fourteenth Amendment not to protect equal rights for Americans from discriminatory laws, as those who wrote, passed, and ratified the amendment intended. Instead it calls for using the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the rights of fetuses from the time of fertilization. It says that states should start passing laws protecting those rights: so-called fetal personhood laws that have their roots in the 1960s and were considered a fringe idea until about fifteen years ago. Those laws prohibit all abortion, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and several forms of contraception.
Saying states should pass such laws echoes the language Trump has used to try to avoid the Republicans’ extreme and unpopular abortion stance by claiming, as the Supreme Court did in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, that states alone should write laws covering abortion. But in its reaction to the Republican platform today, the antiabortion Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America organization made it clear that the platform’s reference to the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to open the way for a national abortion ban. The Fourteenth Amendment, after all, gives Congress “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
“It is important that the [Republican Party] reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment,” the organization said in a statement. “Under this amendment, it is Congress that enacts and enforces its provisions. The Republican Party remains strongly pro-life at the national level.”
—
Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-8-2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUL 09, 2024
On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth had murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.
Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.
Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.
But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.
It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll 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.”
The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history; it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “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,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.
Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
From the perspective of 2024, Kennedy’s comments seem prescient, but the country could go even further backward. The 2024 Republican Party platform, released today, calls for using the Fourteenth Amendment not to protect equal rights for Americans from discriminatory laws, as those who wrote, passed, and ratified the amendment intended. Instead it calls for using the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the rights of fetuses from the time of fertilization. It says that states should start passing laws protecting those rights: so-called fetal personhood laws that have their roots in the 1960s and were considered a fringe idea until about fifteen years ago. Those laws prohibit all abortion, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and several forms of contraception.
Saying states should pass such laws echoes the language Trump has used to try to avoid the Republicans’ extreme and unpopular abortion stance by claiming, as the Supreme Court did in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, that states alone should write laws covering abortion. But in its reaction to the Republican platform today, the antiabortion Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America organization made it clear that the platform’s reference to the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to open the way for a national abortion ban. The Fourteenth Amendment, after all, gives Congress “power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
“It is important that the [Republican Party] reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment,” the organization said in a statement. “Under this amendment, it is Congress that enacts and enforces its provisions. The Republican Party remains strongly pro-life at the national level.”
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Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-8-2024
