It’s interesting (okay, infuriating) to note the highly selective “originalism” practiced by retrograde justices on the Supreme Court. In their professed zeal to mind-meld with the nation’s earliest Founders, they entirely ignore what scholars have called “the Second Founding”–the post-Civil War passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.
Ratified in the years immediately following the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution—together known as the Reconstruction Amendments—abolished slavery, safeguarded a set of basic national liberties, and expanded the right to vote.
Both Justice Ketanji Jackson and Heather Cox Richardson have recently reminded us of that “original” history.
President Andrew Johnson, an unrepentant racist, vetoed the 1866 civil rights bill, claiming–among other things– that it wasn’t race neutral. It wasn’t–and it wasn’t intended to be. Congress passed it over his veto– and based the Fourteenth Amendment on it.
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments explicitly give the federal government power to protect individual rights in the states. Scholars like Akhil Reed Amar, who teaches Constitutional Law at Yale, call their passage the “second founding.”
Amar explains that the Reconstruction Amendments shift emphasis somewhat from Madison’s first concern– protecting people from unrepresentative government (see Federalist 51)–to his second: protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority. The 14th prioritizes “ideals of liberty and equality.”
Amar and Richardson are two of the many historians and constitutional scholars who define the period following the Civil War as a “reconstruction” or “second founding.” (Amar’s magisterial book The Bill of Rights is subtitled Creation and Reconstruction.) So it is very interesting that today’s self-described “originalists” ignore that reconstruction.
I can see two reasons for that studied avoidance: first, the clear legal meaning of those Amendments, especially the 14th, is inconsistent with their theocratic revisionism; and second, they provide clear historical evidence that Constitutional principles have evolved to meet changing times.
A 2019 article in the New Yorker focused on the work of constitutional historian Eric Foner, who has written extensively on the Reconstruction Amendments. As Foner explains, the issues central to those Amendments remain central to our politics today.
Who should vote? Who should be a citizen? What does equality before the law really mean? But, most important, and without trying to denigrate any other scholar, I lecture a lot about Reconstruction—I lecture in law schools, I lecture in history departments, I lecture to public audiences outside the academy—and I have found that there’s very little knowledge of why the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments are important, or what they were trying to accomplish, even in law schools.
Foner points out that, even in the immediate wake of their passage, the Court narrowed application of the Amendments, arguing–against the evidence–that they hadn’t really effected much change. Foner and other historians disagree.
Many years ago, when I was doing research for a book I was writing, I unearthed contemporaneous newspaper coverage of the arguments for and against ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Those debates confirm Foner’s reading: the Americans who were preparing to vote on their state’s ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment believed it made very substantive expansions to the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship. It was with that understanding that they voted for (or against) ratification.
As one pundit noted during Amy Comes Barrett’s (excessively brief) confirmation hearing: “given that the Constitution was effectively rewritten by the Reconstruction Amendments, it would be great to see a Supreme Court nominee say something like “I will interpret the Constitution as it was understood in 1870.”
In 2004, the Brennan Center issued a paper explaining the real history of the Reconstruction Amendments, and the persistent failure of the Supreme Court to properly respect and interpret them.(The current court is simply a more egregious example of a longtime failure of jurisprudence.)
From the introduction to that paper
The Supreme Court’s recent turn away from civil rights and toward states rights claims legitimacy from a familiar but false history: the Constitution of 1787 carefully preserved the states sovereignty; Congress operated for 150 years within narrow constraints on its enumerated powers; the courts zealously policed the boundaries of proper federal action; and the half-century starting with the New Deal, when the Supreme Court allowed the federal government to do more or less what it wanted, was an anomaly.
None of this is true. If there is an anomalous period in the relationship between the Court and Congress, it began shortly after the Civil War … These decisions betrayed Lincoln, who had promised a new birth of freedom at Gettysburg, and the people who enacted the constitutional amendments and legislation to make that promise a reality…
Basically, the Court continues to ignore “the widely understood meaning and purpose of those amendments at the time they were ratified.”
We have very selective “originalists”!
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