The 14th Amendment, in a nutshell is unconstitutional...not as it is written, but as it's interpreted. If a State has an unconstitutional action, which is one that is disagreed with by the People of that State, it is up to the People to remedy it, NOT the federal government.
The Constitution was never intended to have any operation on the People who ordained and established it. For your perusal, here is View of the Constitution of the United States .
But a contract of this nature actually existed in a visible form, between the citizens of each state, respectively, in their several constitutions; it might therefore he deemed somewhat extraordinary, that in the establishment of a federal republic, it should have been thought necessary to extend it's operation to the persons of individuals, as well as to the states, composing the confederacy. It was apprehended by many, that this innovation would be construed to change the nature of the union, from a confederacy, to a consolidation of the states; that as the tenor of the instrument imported it to be the act of the people, the construction might be made accordingly: an interpretation that would tend to the annihilation of the states, and their authority. That this was the more to be apprehended, since all questions between the states, and the United States, would undergo the final decision of the latter.
This was used, I believe in the Heller case as evidence. It's the first legal paper written on the Constitution after Ratification.
No federal judicial court has the ability to sit in judgment of a State.
Which is why Texas vs. White, the cobbled-up Supreme Court decision the opinion in which was written and handed down by a Chief Justice who spent most of the Civil War as an active combatant in Lincoln's cabinet, was totally unconstitutional -- among other things, Chief Justice Chase found that the Confederate secession conventions were all, all illegal, that the People of the States had no power to withdraw from having the Union enforced on them.
i would argue as well that the Fourteenth Amendment is unconstitutional based upon its ratification process. Telling states that they cannot change their ratification ballots while forcing others to do just that pretty much violates the spirit of the amendment itself.