In the Meme Time

https://bynw.com/in-the-meme-time-18/

The 14th Amendment: Why Efforts to Reverse It Could Reshape America

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is one of the most powerful and transformative amendments in American history. Ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, it was created to ensure that formerly enslaved Black Americans were recognized as full citizens under the law. In addition, it protected them from discrimination by state governments.

Today, debates surrounding the 14th Amendment have reentered the national spotlight, especially around birthright citizenship, equal protection, and federal authority. Some conservative political leaders and legal activists have argued for reinterpretations or in some cases reversals of portions of the amendment. At the same time, critics believe these efforts could have serious consequences for civil rights, democracy, and the balance of constitutional protections in America.

What Is the 14th Amendment?

The 14th Amendment contains several important clauses, but three are especially significant:

Citizenship Clause

This clause states that anyone born or naturalized in the United States is a citizen of the United States.

This established what is commonly known as “birthright citizenship,” preventing states from denying citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their descendants.

Due Process Clause

This protects individuals from being deprived of life, liberty, or property without fair legal procedures.

Equal Protection Clause

This requires states to provide equal protection under the law to all people.

This clause became the constitutional foundation for many major civil rights victories in American history.

Why the Amendment Matters So Much

The 14th Amendment has been used in landmark Supreme Court decisions involving:

• School desegregation
• Voting rights
• Marriage equality
• Civil rights protections
• Women’s rights
• Immigration issues
• Criminal justice protections

The 14 Amendment is needed

Without the 14th Amendment, many of the legal protections Americans now consider fundamental would not exist in the same way. For Black Americans in particular, the amendment represented a direct response to slavery. It also addressed the refusal of many Southern states to recognize freed Black people as equal citizens after the Civil War.

Many critics argue that efforts to weaken or reinterpret the 14th Amendment are deeply tied to America’s long history of racial exclusion. In addition, they link these efforts to attempts to limit who is considered fully protected under the Constitution.

Some Republicans and conservative legal scholars argue that parts of the amendment have been interpreted too broadly over time. One of the biggest current debates involves birthright citizenship. Specifically, some conservatives claim that children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants should not automatically receive citizenship.

Others argue that the Equal Protection Clause has allowed the federal government to interfere too heavily with states’ rights. Conservative constitutionalists often push for a stricter or more “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution. They believe courts have expanded the amendment beyond what its framers intended.

However, critics point out that the 14th Amendment was created specifically to protect formerly enslaved Black Americans from discrimination and unequal treatment after the Civil War. Because of that history, many people view attempts to weaken its protections as more than just political or legal disagreements. Furthermore, they see them as part of a broader pattern of rolling back civil rights protections that primarily benefit marginalized communities.

For many Americans, especially Black Americans, the fear is not simply about constitutional interpretation. Rather, it is about whether the country is slowly moving backward on issues of equality, citizenship, and civil rights.

The Political Divide

Supporters of revisiting the amendment often frame the debate around immigration enforcement, constitutional originalism, and states’ rights.

Opponents frame it as a civil rights issue and believe attempts to weaken the amendment disproportionately affect marginalized communities, especially Black and immigrant populations.

The debate reflects a larger national struggle over:

• Who is fully protected under the Constitution
• How much power states should have
• How America defines citizenship and equality

Why This Conversation Matters

The 14th Amendment is more than a legal document—it represents one of America’s biggest attempts to correct historic injustice.

For many people, especially within the Black community, discussions about limiting or weakening it feel deeply personal. This is because the amendment was specifically designed to guarantee citizenship and equal protection after centuries of slavery and discrimination.

Whether people support reinterpretation or strongly oppose it, the debate reveals how constitutional law continues to shape everyday life in America.

The 14th Amendment remains one of the cornerstones of American democracy. Any effort to reinterpret, weaken, or reverse parts of it carries enormous legal, political, and social consequences.

Supporters of change argue they are protecting constitutional integrity and border enforcement. Meanwhile, critics argue the risks are far greater, warning that weakening the amendment could destabilize civil rights protections that generations fought to secure.

Regardless of political affiliation, understanding the history and impact of the 14th Amendment is essential because its protections affect nearly every American today.

Quick lesson:

s the 14th Amendment Part of the Bill of Rights?

No. The 14th Amendment is not part of the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights refers to the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which were ratified in 1791. These amendments protect individual freedoms such as freedom of speech, religion, and the right to a fair trial.

The 14th Amendment was added much later in 1868 after the Civil War during the Reconstruction Era. It was created to protect formerly enslaved Black Americans by granting citizenship, equal protection under the law, and due process rights.

The amendment became one of the most important constitutional protections in American history because it expanded civil rights and helped ensure that states could not deny people equal treatment under the law.

Weird as it sounds, I think we need an actual law, like some kind of bill of rights, that says you can't notify me on my phone without offering me highly fine-tuned control of each kind of message.

Notifications intrude into my life. Sometimes my phone is on waiting for emergencies or other high-priority issues while I sleep. If a friend wakes me, I can have them dialed up or down in priority.

But Android is designed so Audible won't let me have control of my audiobooks in the lock screen without notifications turned on, yet once I've done that, Audible has no compunction against advertising new book releases in the middle of the night via notifications. I should be able to get cash compensation in court for that.

And my USB-C cable, once I plug it into my Android phone insists on randomly popping up an utterly inscrutible notification saying "you need to log in if you want to see notifications", or some such, and then when I do there is no notification to see. It was just random.

And Android Auto likes to give me two completely pointless notifications, one when I plug my phone into the car and one saying Android Auto is available. The first one I don't need a notification about because I just plugged in my phone. But more importantly, the second one is a lie. Android Auto MIGHT be available and it confirms nothing. The handshake may have been done wrong, so all it tells me is the thing I know already, which is that Android Auto is on the phone. But I might have to pull the plug and replug it to be properly connected. So the notification is worse than pointless and just floods my screen with stuff I don't care about that appears to need immediate attention. And then Android asks, as soon as I disconnect it, how my experience was. I always say "Bad" because part of my experience is getting asked that pesky message that I do not want and would happily say "never do this".

These all seem like technical problems, but they are not. They are reminders that we no longer control our lives, that companies can, at a whim, intrude into our lives with pointless rituals that whittle away our existence. I'm not being metaphorical when I say we need laws on this. I absolutely mean that if we don't write strong law on this, it will only get worse. Or we need to enforce the 4th Amendment on a theory, like Larry Lessig has effectively said in the past, that programmatic code is effectively a kind of government that binds us and our choices in life as surely as legal code does.

But what DO we get laws about? Having to login to use an operating system so they can track us better, know who we are and where we are at every moment. We need laws against such laws.

#marketing #notifications #android #ui #ux #settings #design #QualityOfLife #computers #LockScreen #permissions #law #legal #lawsuits #ClassAction #rights #HumanRights #BillOfRights #identity #intrusion #interruption #4thAmendment #government #code

“A bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.”*…

Following the often heated debate between Federalists and their opponents that led to the the ratification and adoption of the U.S. Constitution, the Anti-Federalists were still unsatisfied. Then-Representative James Madison, who studied the deficiencies of the Constitution pointed out by Anti-Federalists, collected proposals (16 in all), and then crafted a series of 12 proposed corrective amendments. Congress approved the twelve articles of amendment on September 25, 1789, and submitted them to the states for ratification. 10 were ultimately ratified– the first 10 amendments to our Constitution… or as we know them, The Bill of Rights.

In an excerpt from his book, Constitutional Myths: What We Get Wrong and How to Get It Right, Ray Raphael elaborates…

The Constitution of the United States, drafted in 1787 and ratified in 1788, did not follow the precedent set by these state constitutions. Despite spending almost four months drafting their new plan, the framers did not include within it a thoughtful listing of rights but only a scattering of guarantees. On September 12, just five days before the end of the Convention, George Mason finally suggested that delegates add a “Bill of Rights” similar to the state declarations of rights, but his motion failed to garner the support of a single state delegation.

Although state conventions ratified the Constitution, several included a caveat: the new plan should be amended as soon as possible. In fact, they proposed scores of amendments, some resembling provisions of what we now know as the Bill of Rights, but many others altering or even deleting structural features of the Constitution. New York’s convention coupled its list of proposed amendments with a demand for a second federal convention to consider these various proposals. The profusion of proposed amendments, plus the prospect of a second convention, frightened supporters of the Constitution, who feared that a new convention, if it met, would revise the fledgling Constitution before it could be put into effect and gut some of its major provisions.

Most leading Federalists hunkered down. In arguing against a second federal convention, they insisted that a bill of rights was not necessary and could even jeopardize rights that were not included. The job of the Constitution, they said, was to state what government could do, not what it couldn’t do. Rights already were secured because the government possessed no power that allowed it to impinge upon them. In fact, any catalog of specified rights would imply that rights were limited to those in the catalog, and not others.

James Madison and George Washington agreed with this argument, but they also took an accurate measure of people’s displeasure. It was strong and it was widespread. Rather than fight a rearguard action against the wave of discontent, they preferred to channel and control it. Article V of the Constitution stipulated that either Congress or state conventions might propose amendments. If Congress acted first, Madison and Washington reasoned, it could take charge of the issue and protect the substantive features of the new plan–congressional taxation, for instance–while giving ground elsewhere. Madison, meanwhile, pledged to his Virginia constituents that he would work to add a bill of rights if they elected him to represent them in Congress.

Once elected, in the First Federal Congress, Madison whittled down the large list of amendments suggested by the states’ ratifying conventions. With President Washington’s blessing, he proposed nineteen that did not endanger key constitutional components. After considerable debate and some revision, Congress pared Madison’s list down to twelve amendments, which it sent to the states for approval. Ten of these, which we call today the Bill of Rights, were ratified by three-quarters of the states, as required by the new Constitution. The genesis of the Bill of Rights, like the origins of the Constitution, was political as well as theoretical.

The short-term effect of the framing and ratification of the Bill of Rights was to put a Federalist stamp on the amendments and to doom the attempts by the Constitution’s opponents to modify the substantive or structural features of the new plan. The long-term effect was to reinforce America’s culture of rights and to infuse specific rights into American jurisprudence. After more than two centuries, the Bill of Rights, which had been so casually dismissed by the framers, figures so prominently in our minds that it often eclipses the Constitution itself. In an era when the word “government” has a bad name, the ten amendments that circumscribe the federal government’s authority over individuals are often viewed more favorably than the Constitution the framers created in 1787…

The backstory of the Bill of Rights, via the always-illuminating Delanceyplace.com

For more on the process that yielded them, and the texts of all 16 proposed amendments, see here.

* Thomas Jefferson, a critic of Federalists, in a 1787 letter to James Madison (who had originally been opposed to the idea of a “bill of rights,” both because he believed that the Constitution as written did not grant the federal government the power to take away people’s rights, and because he [and some other Framers] believed that we have natural rights too numerous to list– and that anything not explicitly included in a Bill of Rights would be unprotected.)

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As we ponder precedent, we might recall that it was on this date in 1930 that a BBC newsreader had nothing to communicate. His entire script for the 8:45 pm news bulletin was: “There is no news”… after which piano music was played for the rest of the 15-minute segment. The wireless service then returned to broadcasting from the Queen’s Hall in London, where the Wagner opera Parsifal was being performed.

If I had my say, the Bill of Rights would contain the right to be a goofball.

#goof #goofballs #BillOfRights