It is high time that the MAGA crowd acknowledge that there is a great difference between their accusations of “socialism” and demonstrable evidence of a social conscience by Democratic administrations throughout American history!
July 9, 2026
Heather Cox Richardson
Jul 10
Today marks the anniversary of a dramatic reworking of the U.S. constitutional order.
On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation that brought the principles of the Declaration of Independence to life. They required the federal government to protect the equal rights of all American men.
In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.
Northern Republican lawmakers refused to accept this caricature of freedom. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.
Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.
But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.
Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.
It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll 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.”
The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.
The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.
The Fourteenth Amendment overturned that idea, recognizing the federal government’s power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures passed discriminatory laws. “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,” it said. And it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.
Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states.
The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.
Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.
Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, Blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”
At the time, Bork’s supporters expressed outrage at what they insisted was Kennedy’s smear campaign, for surely the right-wing attack on the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment would never so completely undermine modern society.
On July 1942, 2, most of the children of Lidice, a small village in what was then Czechoslovakia, were handed over to the gestapo office of the gestapo.
These 82 children were then transported to the of extermination camp 70 kilometers away. Once they arrived, they were gassed to death. This remarkable sculpture by Marie Uchytilová commemorates this massacre.
A group of Bronze Sculptures, paying tribute to the children who died. Its construction was decided in 1969 by the woman sculptor, Marie Uchytilova. As a symbol of an imaginary tomb of the 13 million most innocent victims of the war - children, she chose as model, 82 children of lidice asphyxiated in the gas rooms of chelmno.
She took 20 years to make this beautiful sculpture because she used the vintage documents to reproduce the faces of the missing children and to represent them according to their exact size.
Sometimes, the goal you achieve is larger and more rewarding than the goal you sought! Thank you, Scotland, for helping to turn American deviciveness into a joyous understanding of our own motto: E Pluribus Unum!
Accurate only up until the time that the Romans got hold of it! Then the interpretation got really twisted and self-serving for the benefit of the powerful and their needs for the stability of social order!
Just so anyone who stumbles into my blog understands where I stand on this issue:
In life, we all have choices to make. The ones made by following the hyped-up statements of Constitutional revolt made by the defeated presidential candidate,Donald J Trump, were absolutely wrong and absolutely un-American! Those who attacked the Congress, chose to be criminals and they were rightly charged with sedition. As much as any attack on our republic, the acts of those who attacked our Congress on January 6, 2021 shall forever live in infamy!
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When I was born, “three score and ten” was an indication of a long and healthy life. Today that number is “four score and ten” thanks to Fauci and thousands of others throughout the world who trusted the “scientific method” for the inquiry demanded of their professions. The Truth will set you free!
Who wants to get old in this society?? We're busy dismantling Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in order to send our poor people overseas to kill their poor people. When people get old enough to outlive whatever meager amount they somehow managed to save, we blame them for not working hard enough and not planning right, then we either park them in shitty, shitty nursing homes run for profit by private equity, in which they will slowly waste away while what's left of their mind ROTS, sitting in dirty Depends for hours crying "Help! Help!" while the "lazy" people we consider the dregs of society struggle under the burden of too many elderly to care for with too few staff on too little pay ...
Or we just leave the poverty-stricken elder homeless.
Maybe it's better we all die sooner.
Better yet, let's all make like that Star Trek episode and shoot ourselves at 65. Woopee! NO more need for that libtard "social safety net!" We'll just eliminate the needy people, since they are no good anyway, and then we'll be quit of it.
There are two important messages in this thoughtful post:
1. Things really are a lot worse since number 47 and his cadre of grifters took over our government!
and
2. Anyone who reads and has “eyes to see” knows why the young of our nation are so scared! As the Simon & Garfunkel song goes: “You who are on the road must have a code that you can live by….” And, as Neil Postman concluded: “Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.” We must all work together to change the message they see daily that is built around power, glory, greed, and unquenchable hatred.
One would have to be “blind” not to see the possible consequences. And, wasn’t it just yesterday that Pam Bondi “transitioned” to a lucrative “private sector job?” She probably “knows” people at all corporate levels thanks to her former position!
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