Re: The Economy Of Plenty

Eric Watt Forste (arkuat@pigdog.org)
Mon, 22 Sep 1997 16:08:54 -0700

Darrell Parfitt writes:
(in reference to someone's use of "so-called 14th Amendment")
> I have a semantics problem with this paragraph. I understand
> referring to the Constitution of the United States as the so-called
> Constitution, as a constitution is a document that governs the
> legal workings of an organization, and many people think that the
> legal system often subverts and ignores the provisions of the
> constitution in pursuit of their political projects.
> However, an amendment is simply something in a document that was
> put in later through a process described in the original document.

This is precisely the point at issue among those who dispute
the legality of the 14th amendment and the other Reconstruction
Amendments. The process by which they were added to the
Constitution is not the process described in the original
document, because the legal situation at the time (one half the
country having been conquered by the other half) was never
foreseen by the Constitution.

> The 14th amendment was not in the Constitution as originally written
> and was added later. It is generally called the 14th Amendment,
> but that is because it is in fact the 14th Amendment, and not
> because of some disinformation program.

I wish the matter could be settled as simply as that, but unfortunately,
the minority side make a pretty strong case. Our legal protections
are mostly rooted in historical matters of fact, and history is
very messy.

--
Eric Watt Forste ++ arkuat@pigdog.org ++ expectation foils perception -pcd