Repealing the 14th Amendment

ANOTHER SAD CHAPTER FOR THE GOP



It seems that the Tea Party movement can't help winning even as it loses.

The Tea Party lost two big ones very recently. A federal judge in Arizona ruled that those parts of the state's law to track down illegal immigrants violated federal policy and were therefore unconstitutional. That was followed this week by another federal judge, this time in California, ruling that Proposition 8 banning gay marriage in the state was also unconstitutional. In both cases, the legal process will likely be continued up to the U.S. Supreme Court, and therein lies the rub for the Tea Party whose activists have no desire to let the issues drop while waiting for higher courts to act.

Their major vehicle for activism is street demonstrations and the two decisions have created the opportunity for making a lot of new signs and new slogans to be vetted at the next outing. So for the Tea Party, the beat goes on even in the face of two important court judgments against two of their favorite causes--illegal immigration and gay rights.

But things have gotten even better for the Tea Party, and again it's immigration. This time it involves that part of the 14th amendment of the Constitution granting citizenship to anyone born in this country. There has been a right wing mumbling for some time about the need to amend the Constitution to get rid of that provision so children of illegal immigrants won't be automatically granted citizenship. The emphasis is on illegals and their children as though legal immigrants and voters have walled themselves off from their countrymen.

What was a low keyed issue from the right has now reached a higher decibel level with leading Republicans in the Senate taking up the cause. These include Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Senators John Kyl and John McCain of Arizona. Both Graham and McCain were previously supporters of comprehensive immigration reform that included a pathway for illegals to become legals. Outright repeal has little near or medium term prospects because of the difficult process for amending the Constitution. Hearings also are unlikely because of Democratic control of Congress, although GOP calls for such hearings, aided by right wing talk shows, can be loud and continuous, thus appealing to the Tea Party and its adherents.

But for the GOP, as pointed out by E. J. Dionne, Jr., in his column today (August 5) in the Washington Post, Republican underwriting of calls for repeal of or hearings on the 14th amendment is particularly sad because it was the Republican Party that put the amendment into the Constitution after the Civil War as a way to protect the rights of newly freed slaves. Dionne said it this way: "Dear Republicans, do you really want to endanger your party's greatest political legacy by turning the 14th Amendment to our Constitution into an excuse for election-year ugliness?"

However Dionne only taps into the beginning of the sad story. There's more to it and it is even uglier.

The blacks of this country gained their political toehold under Republican Party sponsorship starting with President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, followed by the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments added to the Constitution by Republicans who controlled the post-Civil War Congresses. More than that, it was the national Republican Party through the use of federal troops and a partnership of "carpetbaggers" (northerners going into the south to help the freed blacks or to make a profit) and "scalawags" (pro-federal reconstruction southerners, a definite minority) that secured the vote for the newly freed slaves and guaranteed Republican control of the government in nearly all southern states.

Unfortunately for the blacks of the south, as it became evident to the Republican Party that continued sponsorship of the black vote meant the loss of long term GOP survival in the south, the blacks were progressively abandoned by their sponsors. To try to maintain its position in the politics of the south, the Republican Party allowed the slow choking off of the black vote through fraud and corruption by southern Democrats who were slowly regaining control of local and state offices. Such fraud and corruption were not prevented by the federal Constitution which only established the rights, but allowed the specifics of election laws and practices to remain in the hands of state and local governments. (That was finally changed by various post-World War II laws, court rulings, and the 24th amendment abolishing the poll tax. The Voting Rights Act of l965 became the final and crucial piece of law, giving the federal government the last word over state and local voting procedures in states with a history of voting discrimination.It was the l965 law which finally gave blacks great political clout in the south.)

The l870s saw the final abandonment by the Republican Party of the southern black vote. First, it was evident that the Republican Party was hated by most of the white conservative south (an overwhelming majority of whites) because it was indeed perceived as the patron of the former slaves. Thus there was little chance that the GOP could maintain any kind of political viability in the south. Second, the financial panic of l873 re-directed the Republican Party to its primary orientation, the financial and business interests. And finally, to break an electoral deadlock in the election of l876, Republicans made a deal with conservative southern Democrats now back in Congress, that in exchange for Democratic support to seal the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as President, the new administration would pull the last federal troops out of the south.

The withdrawal of these troops led to the final spectacle of the political disenfrancisement of the blacks and enactment of a variety of Jim Crow laws to segregate the political, cultural, economic,and social life of the south. Layered on top of this was outright physical intimidation of blacks seeking to cast their vote and lynchings of blacks who were seen crossing strict racial segregation lines.

So witnessing today the Republican disregard for Hispanic interests should come as no shock since the GOP has a previous history of similar action with blacks when it comes to political self-interest. And it is another example of how the Tea Party has driven the Republican Party farther to the right.