In last week’s column, I warned that brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers want to use illegal immigrants to join the armed forces in order to suppress patriotic rebellion against their plans. If we want to know what suppression would be like, we have a good precedent. After the War Between the States, the Union’s “Reconstruction” tyrannized the South.
Under the Constitution, the states are supposed to retain all powers not delegated to the central government. The fact that the South lost the war did not change that. The states were back in the Union, even though they didn’t want to be. But they hadn’t lost their rights under the Constitution.
The Radical Republicans overthrew the Constitution and established a military dictatorship that lasted until 1877. As Tom DiLorenzo says
“The main purpose (and effect) of the 1865–1877 “Reconstruction” policies was to centralize and consolidate state power and to establish Republican Party political hegemony. It was not to “heal the nation’s wounds” or economically revitalize the South. Indeed, Reconstruction created new wounds and economically destroyed the South. Its purpose was to continue the economic plundering of the Southern states for as long as possible, and to establish a national Republican Party political monopoly.” See this.
How did the Radical Republicans overthrow the Constitution? They did so through a cunning and illegal trick. The Republican-controlled Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which allowed the federal government to intervene in state affairs to protect “civil rights.” But there was an obstacle that had to be overcome. An Amendment has to be ratified by three-quarters of the states in order to become part of the Constitution. The Amendment couldn’t be passed just on the votes of the Northern states alone. There weren’t enough of them to do this. The Radicals couldn’t decide not to count the South as states any more—-remember, the whole point of the war from their perspective was that secession was illegal, The South was still in the Union. Thus, the Radicals needed to get as many Southern states to vote for the Amendment as they needed to secure its passage.
But the problem in doing this was obvious. The Southern states were hardly likely to vote for an amendment that would allow the federal government to interfere in their affairs. As you would expect, the Southern state legislatures voted down the Amendment. What could the Radicals do? Their answer was breathtaking in its audacity. They would refuse to recognize any state government that didn’t vote for the Amendment. Vote the way we want, or else!
The whole idea was logically preposterous. What meaning does a vote have if you have no choice except to vote “yes”? The Amendment process was designed by the Constitutional framers to be difficult. They wanted to make it hard to change the Constitution. But if Congress could compel a “yes” vote, the whole process of amendment would become easy. Once you had the needed number of votes in Congress, that would be enough to make the amendment part of the Constitution. The “ratification” would have no purpose.
There’s another problem with the alleged “ratification” of the amendment. Only a state (or a special convention called by the state) can ratify an amendment. The legislature that ratifies the amendment must be legally constituted. It can’t be just some assembly that doesn’t hold legitimate state power. If that is right, the notion of a state legislature ratifying the 14th Amendment as a condition of having Congress recognize it as legitimate is absurd. If the body that passed the coerced “ratification” vote wasn’t already a legislature, it didn’t ratify the Amendment. You have to be a recognized legislature first, before you have the ratification vote, not afterwards.
The great historian Forrest McDonald argued that because of the Radicals’ strong-arm and logically incoherent tactics, the Amendment is illegal:
“We now come to the pivotal point upon which the constitutionality of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment turns. Let us assume that the amendment had been constitutionally proposed; assume that the ratifications in Tennessee, Oregon, and West Virginia were proper and should have been counted; and assume that the rescissions by New Jersey and Ohio were illegal and that their ratifications should be counted. Even so, as of April 1, 1868, the approval of six more states was necessary to validate the amendment. Let us further assume that the Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867, was constitutional, and that ratification by the governments of the reconstituted southern states would count toward the necessary total.
Even if we make all these assumptions, it remains a fact that the southern state governments could have a voice in ratifying the amendment only if they were duly recognized as governments at the time they acted on the amendment. Congress had taken it upon itself-properly or improperly, it does not matter for present purposes-to be the arbiter of whether the governments were legitimate.
