Understanding the 14th Amendment to the Constitution

[hntnhole]

Many of us in the US received a fairly unbalanced public-school education, which infamously elided over numerous uncomfortable historical facts of US history.  I ran across a short series on Netflix a while ago, and finally found it again.   It's an informative-yet-entertaining bit of scholarship about how this amendment came to be, what it intended, how it became useful in later generations, and as we know, it is the basis for the Privacy Rights that are becoming more and more important to our peculiar interests every day.  

The title is:  Amend: the fight for America, and lays bare in an honest way why we have a number of problems here in the US, why we still have them, and does so in a clear, non-judgemental way.  For our friends elsewhere in the world who are wondering what those crazy Americans are doing to themselves lately, this would provide an understanding.  This series is follows the history of it's intent, how it's been used, and how tenuous the lynchpin we all depend on actually is.  At the least, it's better than listening to all the yammering by the correspondents and talking heads on tv, going over the latest poll, the latest insults of which candidates, blah blah blah.  

However:  if anyone decides to watch it, you tv won't bring it up until after you VOTE.  

[TaKinGDeePanal]

The way I see it (an outsider’s POV), most of the problems are caused by the misinterpretation and shortcomings/obfuscations of the following Amendments:

1st: allows people to run their mouths off

2nd: no further explanation required

 5th: a lawyer’s paradise

13th: a contentious contention: but the reality is that slavery “in state-mandated cases” is still legal, hence the prison-led economy of some states. While prisons require bodies to produce goods, the law is then required to convict more people on more charges that bring about imprisonment, hence more arrests of non-white members of society (having an air freshener in your car should NEVER be an arrestable offense). The slave economy of the South in the C19th operated upon pretty much the same idea: work them hard - and there’s no chance for them to take their services elsewhere or refuse to do what they are ordered to do. 

[BootmanLA]

7 hours ago, TaKinGDeePanal said:

The way I see it (an outsider’s POV), most of the problems are caused by the misinterpretation and shortcomings/obfuscations of the following Amendments:

1st: allows people to run their mouths off

2nd: no further explanation required

 5th: a lawyer’s paradise

13th: a contentious contention: but the reality is that slavery “in state-mandated cases” is still legal, hence the prison-led economy of some states. While prisons require bodies to produce goods, the law is then required to convict more people on more charges that bring about imprisonment, hence more arrests of non-white members of society (having an air freshener in your car should NEVER be an arrestable offense). The slave economy of the South in the C19th operated upon pretty much the same idea: work them hard - and there’s no chance for them to take their services elsewhere or refuse to do what they are ordered to do. 

I'd respectfully point out that the First Amendment is what prevents the government from sanctioning you for complaining about the First Amendment - without it, your post might well be criminalized (as it would be in some other countries) for being insufficiently patriotic, or whatever. "Running your mouth off" is *exactly* what it was intended to allow.

I agree that the Second Amendment has been grossly misconstrued over the last 40 years after nearly two centuries of a common, shared understanding that it meant something other than what the radical right claims today.

I have no idea what your beef with the Fifth Amendment is; it's probably, next to the First, the most important of the amendments in the original Bill of Rights. \

And as for the Thirteenth: you've certainly hit on its weak spot, allowing punishment at hard labor for crimes. And you're spot on about how southern states (Louisiana and Mississippi in particular, but others as well) exploited that loophole for decades to essentially re-enslave a large portion of the black male population.

But I would point out that in none of the states after the war were their economies "prison-led". It's true that a small number of people made a great deal of money through convict leasing, for instance, but compared with the numbers of slave prior to the Civil War, prisoners in such cases represented a much smaller portion of those states' economies. In part, that's because westward expansion added to domestic competition for certain crops; in part it's because of mechanization; and in part it's because of overseas competition, where certain goods could be produced far more cheaply without the overhead of owning the slave labor force. And finally, it's in part because although agriculture remained a large part of the economic base, other industries (lumber/timber, furniture making, oil exploration, and more) took hold in the south after the Civil War as well.