In last week’s column, I warned that brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers want to use illegal immigrants to join the armed forces in order to suppress patriotic rebellion against their plans. If we want to know what suppression would be like, we have a good precedent. After the War Between the States, the Union’s “Reconstruction” tyrannized the South.
Under the Constitution, the states are supposed to retain all powers not delegated to the central government. The fact that the South lost the war did not change that. The states were back in the Union, even though they didn’t want to be. But they hadn’t lost their rights under the Constitution.
The Radical Republicans overthrew the Constitution and established a military dictatorship that lasted until 1877. As Tom DiLorenzo says
“The main purpose (and effect) of the 1865–1877 “Reconstruction” policies was to centralize and consolidate state power and to establish Republican Party political hegemony. It was not to “heal the nation’s wounds” or economically revitalize the South. Indeed, Reconstruction created new wounds and economically destroyed the South. Its purpose was to continue the economic plundering of the Southern states for as long as possible, and to establish a national Republican Party political monopoly.” See this.
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How did the Radical Republicans overthrow the Constitution? They did so through a cunning and illegal trick. The Republican-controlled Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which allowed the federal government to intervene in state affairs to protect “civil rights.” But there was an obstacle that had to be overcome. An Amendment has to be ratified by three-quarters of the states in order to become part of the Constitution. The Amendment couldn’t be passed just on the votes of the Northern states alone. There weren’t enough of them to do this. The Radicals couldn’t decide not to count the South as states any more—-remember, the whole point of the war from their perspective was that secession was illegal, The South was still in the Union. Thus, the Radicals needed to get as many Southern states to vote for the Amendment as they needed to secure its passage.
But the problem in doing this was obvious. The Southern states were hardly likely to vote for an amendment that would allow the federal government to interfere in their affairs. As you would expect, the Southern state legislatures voted down the Amendment. What could the Radicals do? Their answer was breathtaking in its audacity. They would refuse to recognize any state government that didn’t vote for the Amendment. Vote the way we want, or else!
The whole idea was logically preposterous. What meaning does a vote have if you have no choice except to vote “yes”? The Amendment process was designed by the Constitutional framers to be difficult. They wanted to make it hard to change the Constitution. But if Congress could compel a “yes” vote, the whole process of amendment would become easy. Once you had the needed number of votes in Congress, that would be enough to make the amendment part of the Constitution. The “ratification” would have no purpose.
There’s another problem with the alleged “ratification” of the amendment. Only a state (or a special convention called by the state) can ratify an amendment. The legislature that ratifies the amendment must be legally constituted. It can’t be just some assembly that doesn’t hold legitimate state power. If that is right, the notion of a state legislature ratifying the 14th Amendment as a condition of having Congress recognize it as legitimate is absurd. If the body that passed the coerced “ratification” vote wasn’t already a legislature, it didn’t ratify the Amendment. You have to be a recognized legislature first, before you have the ratification vote, not afterwards.
The great historian Forrest McDonald argued that because of the Radicals’ strong-arm and logically incoherent tactics, the Amendment is illegal:
“We now come to the pivotal point upon which the constitutionality of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment turns. Let us assume that the amendment had been constitutionally proposed; assume that the ratifications in Tennessee, Oregon, and West Virginia were proper and should have been counted; and assume that the rescissions by New Jersey and Ohio were illegal and that their ratifications should be counted. Even so, as of April 1, 1868, the approval of six more states was necessary to validate the amendment. Let us further assume that the Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867, was constitutional, and that ratification by the governments of the reconstituted southern states would count toward the necessary total.
Even if we make all these assumptions, it remains a fact that the southern state governments could have a voice in ratifying the amendment only if they were duly recognized as governments at the time they acted on the amendment. Congress had taken it upon itself-properly or improperly, it does not matter for present purposes-to be the arbiter of whether the governments were legitimate.
Clearly, then, the Fourteenth Amendment was never constitutionally ratified, even if it had been constitutionally proposed.”
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We can be sure that brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers would deal with resistance from “red” states in the same way. They would just change the rules so that the states had to “vote” the way they wanted. And there is another tactic that the Radicals used to accomplish this that they wouldn’t hesitate to put into practice. Like the Radicals, they would refuse to let people who opposed them vote. In the Reconstruction era, practically the entire white population was denied the right to vote. The disenfranchisement wasn’t just confined to officials in the former Confederate government. Even those who had given money to help wounded Confederate veterans or who had bought bonds couldn’t vote. It’s easy to get majority support if you can decide who gets to vote.
DiLorenzo explains what happened:
“At the same time, great resources were expended on registering the male ex-slaves to vote, while most Southern white men were disfranchised by a law denying the vote to anyone involved in the late “rebellion.” So rigorous were the restrictions placed on white Southern males that anyone who even organized contributions of food and clothing for one’s family and friends serving in the Confederate army was disfranchised, as were all who purchased bonds from the Confederate government. Even if one did not participate in the war effort, voter registration required a public proclamation that one’s sympathies had been with the federal armies during the war, something very few white Southerners would say.”
The result of these draconian measures was a regime of total corruption. New state legislatures, dominated by the Radicals and their supporters, imposed exorbitant property taxes on white owners. Sometimes they confiscated their land, in order to turn it over to their own supporters. The new legislatures voted themselves benefits with complete financial abandon.
You might object, “Bad as all these things were, didn’t the reluctance of the Southern states to extend equal rights to blacks make them necessary? The answer to this is simple. The Reconstruction governments didn’t help blacks, except the few fat cats who benefited from corrupt arrangements. The condition of Southern blacks under Reconstruction was much worse than in the antebellum South. Furthermore, the purpose of Reconstruction was not to help blacks. They were subject to widespread discrimination in the North as well.
At least they did better than the Indians exterminated by the U.S. Army so that railroad building could proceed apace. “In July of 1865, before his election as president, while still Commander of the U.S. Army, Grant gave General Sherman the assignment to conduct a campaign of ethnic genocide against the Plains Indians to make way for government-subsidized railroads. Sherman wrote to Grant in 1866,
We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress of the railroads. We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men women and children.”
The record of tyranny in Reconstruction is terrifying. Let’s do everything we can to stop brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers from doing the same to us.
