Posted on 06/04/2025 9:08:26 AM PDT by MosesKnows
I assert that the Constitution is not about what the people can and cannot do; the Constitution is solely about what the government can or cannot do.
The statement challenged is that “the Constitution is solely about how the newly constituted government is to function within the enumerated powers of legislative.”
I also assert that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are not law. This assertion includes the 18th, 19th, 23th, 24th, and 26th Amendments.
You are correct as to the overall structure of the Constitution, however The Federal Government and State Governments are limited separately, and not entirely the same ways.
That is correct. According to the late Judge Robert Bork, the recognized leading constitutional scholar of his time, the correct way to interpret and apply the Constitution is as written and originally understood and intended. Having done thus, I find the above assertions are correct.
I also assert that the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments are not law. This assertion includes the 18th, 19th, 23th, 24th, and 26th Amendments.
Upon what rationale do you base these assertions?
I would add what Navy Patriot said and say that the Constitution is mainly pointed at the federal gov’t which it created, with certain limited restrictions on the states.
Agree.
I base my assertions on the notion that only Congress can legislate.
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and the 18th, 19th, 23th, 24th, and 26th Amendments have this in common.
Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
It is impossible for a Constitutional Amendment to be 'unconstitutional.'
If your assertion involves how some or all of those amendments were ratified, then that's a different argument.
As long as the amendments were processed and duly ratified per constitutional requirements, then they are valid amendments and per the Supremacy Clause (US Const., Art. VI, Cl. 2) they are part of the Supreme Law of the Land.
I don’t see a problem with Congress being tasked to enforce these amendments. It’s asking Congress to enforce constitutional law.
ping
These amendments are not legislation, and they are law. The amendments modify the constitution to state what is allowed or not allowed. The clause you site about congress having power to enforce means that congress is enabled to build a legislative structure around the amendment “law” to ensure it is properly enforced.
Consider the first amendment. It starts with “Congress shall make no law”. Using the logic you present, the first wouldn’t be “law”, either. IMHO.
“As long as the amendments were processed and duly ratified per constitutional requirements . . .”
That is the problem with amendments 13, 14, and 15.
The consent of the southern states to these amendments was obtained though the coercion of federal bayonets.
Consent obtained through coercion is not consent.
The Goobermint through FORCE of all kinds will do whatever it wants, Constitution be dammed.
They have always done it that way.
Until The People say “No More!”.
That is debatable.
The southern states had seceded from the Union and the Union won the war to force them back as part of the USA. As severed states, their required voluntary ratification is questionable.
IMO, these Post-Civil-War Amendments were part of the Union victory over the South and the South's consent at that point wasn't necessary because the South itself were kind of pseudo-states in the process of re-uniting with the Union.
One problem with that argument is the conventional northern wisdom - backed up by an ex post facto ruling by the U.S. Supreme court - that the southern states did not secede.
No stars from the U.S. flag were ever removed signifying secession of the southern states.
Well a Southern Confederate gov’t set up and a four-year, very bloody war waged that said that the South had removed itself from and was the enemy of the USA regardless of a legal issue the Supreme Court may have had later.
Under those circumstances, I think the South’s consent was not necessary for those Post-Civil-War Reconstruction Amendments.
The new federal government powers were strictly enumerated, with all other powers reserved to the States, who created them.
Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, and the founders read him, Locke, others) talked about the tendency of power to seek more power. Following the 1860-1865 war and WWII, the feds started assuming powers they were never intended to have.
The framers, particularly the Anti-federalists in the big states, New York and Virginia, distrusted the notion of a strong central government.
They demanded a Bill of Rights the drafters didn’t think worthy of including. The Constitution was handwritten, it was too much trouble to re-write so they were appended.
Originally there were 12. Consider everything after the 10th (”All powers not delegated are reserved to the States”) as attempts by the federal government to usurp power from their Makers.
e.g. the 14th, a “Civil War amendment” was never intended to create ‘birthright citizenship’ or serve as a shelter for aliens here illegally. The Constitution isn’t a suicide pact.
At first glance that seems persuasive, however, a lot of fine people fought and died under the Stars and Bars.
You can’t have it both ways. The southern states maintained that they had seceded from the union. They cannot then turn around and make the argument that their ratification was needed to ratify these amendments. By these states’ own assertion, only 3/4 of the non-seceding states had to ratify them for them to take effect.
The Federal government at the time, while obviously asserting that the confederate states did not have the right to secede, certainly (when convenient, of course) proceeded as if they actually had seceded. Technically, for example, if these states had not seceded it would have been difficult to maintain a proper quorum in the House and Senate without the presence of southern congressmen and senators. Also, in international law, a blockade is an action that an independent nation imposed on another one - yet the US government certainly imposed a blockade on the CSA and expected other nations to honor that blockade. Finally, the Constitution prohibits the creation of new states from the territory of old onws without consent of the state legislature involved. The creation of West Virginia from Virginian territory would seem to be unconstitutional unless it were recognized that Virginia was no longer part of the USA, and hence that constitutional prohibition did not apply.
What did they call themselves? The Confederacy.
From the Articles of Confederation:
Article XIII. Every State shall abide by the determinations of the united states, in congress assembled, on all questions which by this confederation are submitted to them. And the Articles of this confederation shall be inviolably observed by every state, and the union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them, unless such alteration be agreed to in a congress of the united states, and be afterwards con-firmed by the legislatures of *every state*.
Connecticut refused to agree to a new federal government, it being a small state and afraid the larger states would take advantage.
Half the states decided to return to Articles of Confederacy. There was no such article as XIII., above, in the Constitution.
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