Selma Civil Rights March: News Media Supports Historical Inaccuracy

They (the mainstream news media) are still crediting the "Emancipation Proclamation"  as the law that ended slavery, even though it really was the 13th Amendment that ended slavery.  The EP only applied to ten of the southern states, was an illegal over-reach of Presidential powers, and some northern states continued to practice slavery after it was issued.

But now we have a new historical fallacy regrading the attenuation of racial inequality.  People want to take credit for what someone else has done.  I have heard several news reports that the so-called Selma Civil Rights March "gave blacks the right to vote".  This is totally absurd.  Supposedly, this march led to adoption of the Voting Rights Act which they are saying "gave blacks the right to vote".

The 15th Amendment is what really guarantees that blacks (and people of any other race) have the right to vote.  To be more correct, they can't be denied the right to vote on the basis of race.  Here it is ratified nearly 100 years before all of this "Voting Rights Act" nonsense:

Section. 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Section. 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

According to Wikipedia, "In Mobile v. Bolden (1980), the Supreme Court held that as originally enacted in 1965, Section 2 [of the VRA] simply restated the Fifteenth Amendment..."  

The real purpose of the VRA was to give the Federal Government power to manipulate local elections so that the fat cats in Washington could stay in power.   The VRA does not do anything to protect blacks but does prohibit certain prerequisites for voting like literacy tests, educational or knowledge requirements, proof of good moral character, and requirements that a person be vouched for.  So this is really about making sure that corrupt, immoral and uneducated people can vote so that the votes of the honest, hardworking, and knowledgeable Americans can be diluted.  It is easier for a corrupt politician to get elected if the electorate is uneducated and selfish.  The VRA has absolutely nothing to do with race.

This is just another example why Americans need to do two things:  1. learn the Constitution 2. do not support any piece of legislation until you have read it yourself.  People are now making a big deal about this 50th anniversary of the Selma march because they want to take credit for something that had already been done a long time before that.

The Right Way to Amend the Constitution, part 20

This is part twenty of an ongoing series of articles containing my proposals for amendments to the Constitution.  For someone who claims so fervently to be a “Constitutionalist”, how is it that I can be so eager to change the Constitution?  Well, there are several reasons.  For one thing, I believe that after the Bill of Rights, much damage was done by some of the amendments that were added and the legitimacy of some of their ratifications are questionable.  Secondly, the Constitution has been violated so much that the necessity of further amendments is needed to resolve the resulting problems.  But this should be done extremely cautiously.  My amendments are extremely unlikely to ever be introduced, much less ratified, but hey, I can dream, can’t I?

After a long hiatus in this series, I have most recently come up with this:

Section 1.  An amendment to this Constitution may only be presented by Congress to the States for their consideration if two-thirds of the whole number of the members in their respective houses shall concur with the amendment.

Section 2.  Congress shall make no law penalizing or rewarding a State for ratifying, rejecting, or failing to ratify an amendment to this Constitution.  If Congress passes a law in violation of this section and if the affected amendment has not yet adopted into this Constitution, the presentment of the amendment shall be null and void.  Congress may withdraw an amendment which it has proposed at any time before it becomes a valid part of this Constitution.

Section 3.  Whenever an amendment is pending before the States and is not yet adopted into the Constitution, any State may change its position on ratification.

Section 4.  Ratification by a State of a pending amendment shall not be valid unless the State approves of the amendment exactly as proposed by Congress including all punctuation, capitalization, wording and spelling.

Section 5.  Any amendment purportedly adopted into this Constitution which would not have been valid if this amendment had been adopted prior to any purported action taken to adopt the purported amendment by either the Congress or the States, shall henceforth be inoperative until the conditions for adoption of amendments of the previous sections of this amendment and of Article V of this Constitution have been met.

Section 6.  This article of amendment shall be inoperative if not ratified under the conditions for adoption of amendments of the previous sections of this amendment and of Article V and shall not take effect until seven years following its ratification.

Commentary on this proposed amendment:

One purpose of this amendment would be to repeal the 14^th, 16^th, and possibly the 17^th amendments.  The 15^th amendment would also be lost through this amendment, but this amendment could probably easily be passed again and perhaps in an even better form (one which would, for example, not permit states from disqualifying people from running for office based on race and prohibit literacy tests).  I don’t know if there would be any other amendments removed from the Constitution, but the Corwin Amendment (a pro-slavery amendment) would be no longer be pending before the states because its passage in Congress did not meet the qualifications of Section 1.  Another purpose of the amendment would be to prevent any future amendments from being enacted which do not truly reflect the will of the people.  It corrects wrong interpretations of the Constitution concerning the amendment process like the two-thirds requirement being only of those present, the ability of the Congress to force the states to ratify an amendment, and the validity of inexact ratifications.  These misinterpretations have lead to the (alleged) adoption of these bad amendments without the proper super-majorities and great care which the Framers of the original Constitution intended.  This amendment would not be such a broad brush as an amendment which I had formulated earlier.