What are the unenforced sections of the Fourteenth Amendment?
Can Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House, and the Republicans in the House of Representatives hold the national and world economies hostage over the debt ceiling negotiations?
Can the January 6th rioters be denied the right to hold public office?
Could the representation of the former Confederate states have been reduced when they passed the Jim Crow laws denying black citizens suffrage, or the right to vote?
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What were these Reconstruction Amendments?
• Thirteenth Amendment: Slavery is abolished, except for convict labor.
• Fourteenth Amendment: Everyone born or naturalized in the United States is a citizen of the US. All citizens are guaranteed due process and equal protection under the law.
• Fifteenth Amendment: All citizens have the right to vote.
Fourteenth Amendment
• Section 1: All persons born and naturalized in the United States are citizens, and all citizens are entitled to due process and equal protection under the law.
• Section 2: NEVER ENFORCED: If a state denies the right to vote to a class of its citizens, its representation for the Presidential Electoral College and the House of Representatives shall be reduced.
• Section 3. ENFORCED ONLY AFTER CIVIL WAR: Anyone guilty of insurrection or rebellion is disqualified from running for public office in not only the federal government, but also state and local elected offices.
• Section 4. NEVER ENFORCED: Ensuring the validity of the public debt of the United States.
In our main long-form video, we also reflect on:
• How the Confederate states were compelled to adopt these Reconstruction amendments before they were readmitted to the Union.
• Eric Foner’s book on the history of the Reconstruction Amendments, Second Founding.
• Comparing the disputed 1876 Presidential Election to the disputed 2020 Presidential election. How slates of alternate electors were selected by both parties in swing states.
• How Congress formed the Electoral Commission in 1877.
• How the Northern congressmen agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South in exchange for the Southerners agreeing to accept that the Republican candidate for President, Rutherford B Hayes.
• The Amnesty Act of 1872, and whether the 14th Amendment prohibitions applied to Madison Cawthorn or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or MJT.
• How the Supreme Court upheld the prospective application of validating the public debt in Perry v. United States.
• Obama and Biden and the debt ceiling crisis.
• Abraham Lincoln suspending the writ of habeas corpus in Maryland, and the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863.
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As Socrates teaches us, the examined life is a life worth living. We would be fools if we did not desire to learn from our multitude of friends whose words live in the works of the classics that have survived from past centuries and millennia. The Stoic and moral philosophers of Greece and Rome saw philosophy as an evangelical enterprise, seeking to spread the joy of living a godly life for its own sake.
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Studying the teachings of the ancient and modern stoic and moral philosophers on how to better lead a godly life.
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Studying issues of morality in the Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Jewish traditions.
This is original content based on research by Bruce Strom and his blogs. Images in the Public Domain, many from Wikipedia, some from the National Archives, are selected to provide illustration. When images of the actual topic or event are not available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.
All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. The ancient world was a warrior culture out of necessity, to learn from the distant past we should not only judge them from our modern perspective but also from their own ancient perspective on their own terms.
