Conscience of a Conservative (Rediscovered Books): With linked Table of Contents

by Barry M. Goldwater

To my knowledge it has never been seriously argued—the argument certainly was not made by the Supreme Court—that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to alter the Constitutional scheme with regard to education. Indeed, in the famous school integration decision, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court justices expressly acknowledged that they were not being guided by the intentions of the amendment’s authors. “In approaching this problem,” Chief Justice Warren said “we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the amendment was adopted . . . We must consider public education in the light of its full development and in its present place in American life throughout the nation.” In effect, the Court said that what matters is not the ideas of the men who wrote the Constitution, but the Court’s ideas. It was only by engrafting its own views onto the established law of the land that the Court was able to reach the decision it did.

The same problem is at hand due to the first interpretation of the fourteenth amendment, because it was a physical change of the type of person and therefore a set of fights. I.e., “Citizens of these United States” versus “citizens of these united States”…A new and completely different class of person is being created but the first interpretation in the scotus. The first being an “original (or state) class of person” the second being a “federal class of citizenship.”