Personal Rights

Yesterday, the Washington State Supreme court ruled that the second amendment to the constitution applies to the states through the Due Process clause of the 14th amendment. While I celebrate this reaffirmation of individual rights, I worry about the use of incorporation increasing Federal powers at the expense of the states. This is not the same nation that Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin gave us...... and dammit, I want my country back. Our family has been here since 1640 and we are disgusted by where the 20th century has taken us.

Legal scholar Gene Healy has made a powerful argument in favor of abolishing the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. When a fair vote was taken on it in 1865, in the aftermath of the War for Southern Independence, it was rejected by the Southern states and all the border states. Failing to secure the necessary three-fourths of the states, the Republican party, which controlled Congress, passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 which placed the entire South under military rule.

The purpose of this, according to one Republican congressman, was to coerce Southern legislators to vote for the amendment "at the point of a bayonet." President Andrew Johnson called this tactic "absolute despotism," the likes of which had not been exercised by any British monarch "for more than 500 years." For his outspokenness Johnson was impeached by the Republican Congress.

The South eventually voted to ratify the amendment, after which two Northern states-Ohio and New Jersey-withdrew support because of their disgust with Republican party tyranny. The Republicans just ignored this and declared the amendment valid despite their failure to secure the constitutionally-required three-fourths majority.

I once said to a major (professor at an Ivy) civil war historian in a private conversation that I felt that Lincoln destroyed the government bequeathed to us by Jefferson and Madison. His comment to me was, "Well, he had help."