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The Reintroduction of Slavery [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-01-02

One of Trump’s favorite lies is this:

That a woman’s right to bodily autonomy is a decision that he has rightfully given back to the states.

There is so much falsehood compacted into that statement as to be daunting. But the biggest, and most dangerous falsehood is exposed thusly:

If our rights are “decided” upon by the states, that brings us back to the days when states could decide who is a slave and who is free.

Americans, we know that our rights are not decided or granted by states. They are not even granted by the constitution. They are enshrined and guaranteed by the constitution.

Here's president Biden himself doing an adequate job of explaining it, how the most fundamental notion of WHERE our rights come from is absolutely diametrically opposed to where they come from in countries like monarchies, where they are granted by the monarch to the subjects.

"I told him that, unlike other countries, including Russia, we’re uniquely a product of an idea. You’ve heard me say this before, again and again, but I’m going to keep saying it. What’s that idea? We don’t derive our rights from the government; we possess them because we’re born — period. And we yield them to a government."

Of course our founders said it better:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

So, as Americans, we should all know, absolutely, that our rights do not come from, and are not to be “decided” by the states.

So where does this leave us? It leaves us with a SCOTUS, that not only rendered the Dobbs decision that purports to give the states the decision over women’s body autonomy, by denying everything we know, or should know, about our rights. But it’s even worse than that. Dobbs was not an isolated ruling.

That same court, in order to force states to keep an insurrectionist, that they had already duly adjudicated to be an insurrectionist, on their ballot, in Trump v. Anderson, ruled that:

14th Amendment, Section 5: "The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

means:

"ONLY the Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

Of course this section was not meant to mean ONLY. Its purpose was to make clear that the federal legislature can pass laws to FORCE the states to keep insurrectionists out of their state offices - a necessary and critical exception to the 10th amendment that had to be spelled out.

If we buy this SCOTUS rewrite, we have lost the 14th amendment. The entire thing. Our rights went from protected from the government (the very purpose of our constitution) to optionally protected by the government, or not protected at all.

Prior to this preposterous ruling, our rights, and the protections of the 14th amendment, were always held to be “self-executing.” Meaning they simply existed and had full force and effect of law, automatically.

"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."

If our 14th amendment protections require laws to enforce them, then our birthright citizenships (300+ million of us) are already all effectively “overturned.” Congress never passed a law to specifically “enforce” birthright citizenship*. Because we knew none was needed. We knew the constitution was the law of the land. But now that is turned upside down.

THAT'S HOW BONKERS THIS COURT IS.

THAT'S HOW BONKERS THEIR RULINGS ARE.

And it’s worse still.

If:

"The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

means:

"ONLY the Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."

Then the same words in the 13th amendment should have the same meaning.

13th Amendment, Section 2: "[ONLY?] Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

Our constitutional protections from slavery are now wholly dependent on the laws congress passed for that purpose.

Thankfully, in this case, unlike with birthright citizenship, there are some actual laws on the books that congress did pass specifically outlawing slavery and peonage. But just as congress once passed them, a republican controlled congress can simply repeal them. And make them just as worthless as the SCOTUS would have our insurrectionist prohibition.

Now, it is my understanding that the SCOTUS has made claims to assure us that their non-self executing carve-out, to keep Trump on state ballots, was just that, a very specific carve-out that does not apply to anything they don’t want it to, right now. Is that supposed to be assuring?

I won’t get into their explanations. Just like Republican senator Sen. John Cornyn, of Texas asked Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to explain the reasoning behind the Dred-Scott decision during her confirmation hearing, it is pointless to try to extract reason from something designed to defy it.

The simple truth is, if SCOTUS can “overrule” our fundamental understanding of our rights and constitution, they can certainly overrule their own logic-and-language-defying exceptions to temporarily assure us their ridiculous rulings aren’t quite as wrong as they obviously are.

Accepting those assurances is a slow but steady gaslight that lulls us into retreating from what is right and entertaining something we should all know is wrong. The hill worth dying for in the battle of our rights is that they are self-executing. They must be. That is what makes America America.

Either our constitution means what it says, or it doesn’t. We’ve seen enough confirmation hearings to know our Federalist Society SCOTUS members do not mean what they say. We must not exchange the ideological foundation of our rights for a promise, much less an obviously worthless and deceptive promise from liars. As our founders made sure we knew, it’s not even just about us. Future generations are at stake as well.

Either our constitution means what it says, or this is not America anymore.

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-the-supreme-court-got-wrong-in-the-trump-section-3-case

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/21/luttig-14th-amendment-trump-00132792

https://medium.com/@thegoodship/how-to-stop-an-illegitimate-president-f297b2058262

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/trump-was-disqualified-for-insurrection-in-the-only-two-states-that-actually-heard-evidence/

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/supreme-court-nominee-jackson-dred-scott-decision-basis

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/kavanaugh-hearing-yale-legacy.html

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-719/296994/20240118104059498_No.%2023-719_Brief.pdf

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/3/18632438/federalist-society-leonard-leo-brett-kavanaugh

* (Birthright citizen is only specifically discussed in congressional law for Native Americans and children of foreign diplomats.)

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