Dear Unreconstructed,

It was wholly a pleasure to get your brief note, accompanied by voluminous documentation, solemnly informing me that there is no Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. No legal Fourteenth Amendment, anyway. You could’ve fooled me. I quoted from it not long ago on the subject of birthright citizenship, the idea that anyone born on American soil is an American citizen.

Race, creed, color or previous condition of servitude … none of that matters. If you’re born an American, you are an American. No questions asked. It’s one of many ideas that makes America exceptional.

The Fourteenth is the centerpiece of the three post-Civil War amendments that became the legal foundation of Reconstruction, and it long has irritated those who would prefer to ignore its broad proclamation of rights. Whether the rights are those of freedmen in the 19th century, corporations and labor unions and political dissenters in the 20th, or, in our time, the children of illegal immigrants who have had the great good fortune to be born here. (I speak from grateful experience, being the child of immigrants myself, and therefore American by birth and, as the bumper sticker says, Southern by the grace of God.)

I can understand your predicament as you set about trying to deny the legitimacy of this constitutional amendment. For its all-embracing text affords little comfort to those who would limit its application to only some Americans. To quote its comprehensive language:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

How find a crack in that wall of words to exempt certain Americans from its sweeping protections? Not easily. So rather than try to disassemble the amendment phrase by phrase, you claim the whole thing was never really adopted at all, not legally, and so may be ignored.

Your approach is not without precedent: The circumstances surrounding the adoption of the original Constitution inspired similar doubts among those who opposed it. Their arguments weren’t convincing, either.

To cite a principle of both law and common sense: What’s done is done. And I don’t think you’re going to be able to undo the Fourteenth Amendment at this late date, however annoying you may find it.

Entertaining as your arguments may be, they are scarcely new. By now they’ve failed to convince generation after generation of American judges. And today’s courts wouldn’t seem any more receptive to your kind of alternative history.

If the Fourteenth Amendment is illegal, the federal judiciary must have been mistaken all these years, and still is. Not to mention all those publishing houses who keep putting out copies of the Constitution of the United States, complete and unexpurgated, including Amendment No. 14 in its proper, numerical place.

Sir, I don’t know how to break this to you except simply, briefly and directly:

The War is over. Let it be over.

Peace,

Dear Unreliable Conservative,

It was wholly a pleasure to get your letter agreeing with the plain meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and its bedrock guarantee of birthright citizenship. It’s remarkable how many conservatives, or at least folks who call themselves conservatives, would prefer not to conserve the Fourteenth Amendment. Your message was assuring. There still are real conservatives out there.

Thank you, amen, selah, and more power to you. You’re what I think of as an ideologically unreliable conservative – one with a mind of your own. You follow no party line.

I think of your kind of lower-case conservatism as the equivalent on the right of what the late great Scoop Jackson represented on the left. He described himself as a liberal but added, “I try not to be a damfool.” I loved that man.

The essence of both the true conservative and the true liberal, it seems to me, is that neither is a slave to ideology but thinks for himself. I especially liked your phrase, “I do not get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and ask, ‘What’s the conservative line for today?’ ” Be warned: I fully intend to steal it someday. Like today.

Yours for the Constitution, all of it,

Inky Wretch

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