It says...”counting the whole number of persons in each State”. You can't just stop reading at the first comma. That's what the liberals do.
If you keep reading, the fuller context of the section becomes clear that it's for the purpose of ensuring that the right to vote is not infringed. The section lays out the penalty to the states for infringing on their citizens' right to vote by proportionally reducing their representation by the percentage of infringed voters to the total eligible voters. You can't assess that without counting voters, that is, citizens.
Furthermore, let's say that the argument becomes that blacks vote in such high numbers today that any disenfranchised black voters would be such a small number relative to the whole to be essentially meaningless, making the counting of citizens for this purpose essentially meaningless.
The rebuttal to this would be several:
- Even though the 14th amendment was intended to be about citizenship of former slaves, it's been expanded to include anyone, including anchor babies, when it serves the left. To narrow it back to just black disenfranchisement for the original purpose of counting citizens would be hypocritical.
- It's in the Constitution and can't be waived away because some people don't like it. It makes clear that Representatives were meant to be apportioned based on citizen voters, not just "whole number of persons."
- When reading the word "persons" and "people" in the Constitution, I take that to refer to "We the People" in the Preamble who ordained and established this Constitution. "Whole number of persons" meant "whole number of We the People," but was more economical writing. When the 10th amendment says "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people," I can't believe that they meant for those "people" to include illegal aliens as "persons." They meant "We the People" who ordained and established this Constitution, and OUR posterity.
- Even though this section was about punishing states for not allowing freed blacks to vote, the section also says "when the right to vote at any election is... in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime..." Allowing non-citizens to vote abridges the vote of legal voting citizens via nullification. This section would justify reducing the Representation in states turning a blind eye toward illegal citizen voting by the ratio of illegal voters to total legal voters. That would be devastating if it were enumerated.
-PJ