Richard Albert: America's forgotten founders
There have been two Americas since the country's constitutional founding. Out of the devastation of the Civil War emerged a new republic. The United States was born anew under the banner of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, a revolutionary constitutional amendment that has forever transformed the nation.
The beauty of the Fourteenth Amendment is seen in both its text and its effect. The actual text of the Fourteenth Amendment is majestic in and of itself insofar as it promises due process and equal protection under law. But its larger and more powerful meaning is evident only in its effect, which has been to change the meaning of the entire Constitution.
Here is why: the Fourteenth Amendment protects the freedoms and liberties listed in the Bill of Rights against transgressions by state governments........Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Bingham--these and other draftspersons and drivers of the Fourteenth Amendment are Americans as great as the founding fathers. Only by learning from them may the Court help make real the promise of liberty and equality that America's second founding augured for the nation and its people.
The Supreme Court would therefore do well to expand its sphere of constitutional authority beyond Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson and other founding fathers to also include America's forgotten founders
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