Free Republic

Go home or go to jail! Those are the only two options for people living in one Mid-South neighborhood. The mayor of Helena-West Helena, Arkansas has issued a mandatory curfew. the curfew is in place for an area he refers to as a "hot spot" for crime. It applies to anyone, any age, and any time of day. According to Mayor James Valley, this move is in the best interest of the city. "This curfew is for all people...everyone is subject to be stopped - almost like marshal law. And that's exactly what some are calling it. The mayor has...

AUSTIN — A federal appeals court turned down Attorney General Greg Abbott's attempt to reinstate a ban on the sale and marketing of sex toys Friday, upholding its previous ruling that the prohibition violated Texans' right to privacy. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in February had struck down the Texas law, which made it illegal to sell or promote obscene devices. The attorney general sought a rehearing on the matter, decided by a panel of judges. The state argued that the full court should have a chance to rule, but the court turned down the request and said...

Contrary to popular opinion, current practice, and the conventional wisdom, children of illegal aliens born in the U.S. should not receive automatic citizenship. These children, sometimes called "anchor babies," have been thought to deserve automatic or birthright citizenship in accordance with the Constitution. However, Dr. Edward J. Erler, a political science professor at California State University, San Bernardino and a fellow at the Claremont Institute, makes a persuasive case against giving birthright citizenship to illegal-alien children born in the U.S. This month's issue of Hillsdale College's journal Imprimis discusses his views. It is one of the most valuable publications on...

Birthright Citizenship and Dual Citizenship: Harbingers of Administrative Tyranny by Edward J. Erler, Professor of Political Science, California State University, San Bernardino The following is adapted from a speech delivered at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar on February 12, 2008, in Phoenix, Arizona. Edward J. Erler is professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino, and a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. He earned his B.A. from San Jose State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in government from Claremont Graduate School. He has published numerous articles on constitutional topics in journals such as Interpretation, the...

Both of the men running for president displayed their shortcomings yesterday in reacting to the Supreme Court's ruling that the Second Amendment includes an individual right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense. The amendments at stake include not only the Second but also the First and the 14th, so even those who aren't handgun enthusiasts or partisans of gun control will want to pay attention. Senator Obama's statement was the more astounding one, if only because it came from a professor of constitutional law and a former editor of the Harvard Law Review. It's hard to know where...

The Second Amendment now applies in the nation's capital. What about the states?For the past 32 years, law-abiding residents of Washington, D.C. have been at the mercy of one of America's most unforgiving gun control laws: a total ban on the possession of handguns in the home, as well as strict trigger lock and disassembly requirements for rifles and shotguns. Taken together, these restrictions have left Washingtonians unable to mount any sort of meaningful defense of themselves, their families, and their homes from armed intruders. But things changed on Thursday. In a landmark 5-4 decision in the case of District...

Following Thursday's U.S. Supreme Court ruling on guns, sundry outraged mayors were fuming because the justices, "for the first time," discovered in the Constitution an individual right to bear arms, placing in danger all their precious (though thoroughly counterproductive) local victim disarmament edicts. The city of Chicago, for instance, currently governed by yet another Richard Daley (how many does this one make?) had filed an amicus brief arguing that since the Second Amendment restricts only federal gun-banning, it shouldn't apply to Cook County. That argument would have made some sense before enactment of the 14th Amendment in 1867 (apparently it...

Power, Legitimacy, and the 14th Amendment by Joseph E. Fallon The justification for the vast, intrusive, and coercive powers employed by the government of the United States against its citizens from affirmative action to hate-crimes legislation, from multilingualism to multiculturalism, from Waco to Ruby Ridge is the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution adopted in 1868, or, more specifically, the authority conferred upon Washington, explicitly or implicitly, by the privileges and immunities and equal protection clauses of that amendment. The government of the United States, as established by the U.S. Constitution in 1789, was effectively abolished by the 14th Amendment....

"Ladies' Night" was a hit single for the band Kool and the Gang in the '80s, but now it's become the subject of a lawsuit. New York attorney Roy Den Hollander has filed a class action lawsuit against several Manhattan bars and clubs, alleging that their ladies' night practices are unconstitutional. Hollander charges that when they host ladies' night they are violating the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law. Hollander is seeking to be named class representative for all men charged more money or burdened by stricter time restraints than woman. He seeks nominal damages and an...

A common misconception is that the Constitution through the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship upon everyone born in the United States whether or not they were born to an illegal alien. Actually, the Constitution itself does not provide citizenship to those born of illegal parents; the Supreme Court only said it did in an 1898 decision known as ‘U.S. v. Wong Ark Can’, and it is politically correct to accept this Supreme Court decision while ignoring others. The problem is that the court majority in the Wong Ark Can case, as is so often today, ‘made law’ according to their personal...

14th Amendment The Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution was passed by both houses on 8th June and the 13th June, 1866. The amendment was designed to grant citizenship to and protect the civil liberties of recently freed slaves. It did this by prohibiting states from denying or abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, depriving any person of his life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or denying to any person within their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Most Southern states refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and therefore Radical Republicans such...

THE MOTHER OF ALL LOOPHOLES D.J. Connolly The author is a reformed bureaucrat living in northern Ohio          If it wasn't for the Fourteenth Amendment, federal judges would have to think up another way to protect nude dancing in bars. They'd have to make up totally different stories to use to outlaw school prayer and protect abortionists. They'd have a much tougher time keeping criminals out on the streets. For the last fifty years, or so, judges have used the Fourteenth Amendment, along with the due process scam, to grab control of an endless variety of state and local issues....

The U.S. Supreme Court said today it would decide whether race could be used as a factor in deciding which students are admitted to specific public schools. Recall the divided court in 2003, the last time it confronted similar issues in a pair of 5-4 rulings that involved preferences for minorities in university admissions decisions. One issue facing the court will be whether a school can promote racial diversity without violating the Constitution's guarantee against discrimination (I am yet to find this well hidden guarantee.) An U.S. appeals court ruled 7-4 that a school district has a compelling interest to...

   A Natural Born Disaster May 25, 2006 When it comes to the illegal immigration issue you might as well keep singing “the more things change the more they stay the same” until the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is changed,.  The President, the MSM and most of Congress is bamboozling the American public with byzantine solutions (that intentionally won’t work) to what should be a simple task...secure our borders; make illegal presence in the country a felony; make the hiring of illegal immigrants a felony for the employer; cease public assistance for illegal immigrants and amend the Fourteenth Amendment. As...

Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday on a Vermont law that would curb the flow of campaign money.The role of money in elections is one of the most volatile fault lines in American politics. Liberals generally favor limits on how much gets raised for campaigns. Many conservatives want few if any restrictions. Tuesday, the US Supreme Court is set to hear arguments about a Vermont law that goes a step further than limits on campaign contributions. It also restricts how much candidates can spend. It's that limit on spending that makes the case, Randall v. Sorrell, so closely watched. The high...

I cannot say I am surprised by the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District ruling handed down by U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III, but as always, surprised how such cases are so easily seen as a federal issue. The ruling as usual is void of facts and relies on previous unsupported court myths (called precedent). The usual propaganda is repeated such as: It is contended that the ID [Intelligent Design] Policy constitutes an establishment of religion prohibited by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which is made applicable to the states by the Fourteenth Amendment...The prohibition...

Ever since the subject of Congress taking up Birthright Citizenship have we seen the power of ignorance at work through the MSM. It is difficult to find any editorial or wire story that correctly gives the reader an honest and accurate historical account of the Fourteenth Amendment in regards to children born to foreign parents within the United States. Most often the media presents a fabled and inaccurate account of just what the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment means. Recent story lines go something like this: "Currently the Constitution says that a person born in this country is an...

Alien Birthright Citizenship: A Fable That Lives Through Ignorance Ever since the subject of Congress taking up Birthright Citizenship have we seen the power of ignorance at work through the MSM. It is difficult to find any editorial or wire story that correctly gives the reader an honest and accurate historical account of the Fourteenth Amendment in regards to children born to foreign parents within the United States. Most often the media presents a fabled and inaccurate account of just what the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment means. Recent story lines go something like this: "Currently the Constitution says...

Does the Fourteenth Amendment make the entire Bill of Rights a restriction against the States? If so, which amendments or clauses? What did both "due process of the law" and "equal protection" mean to the Congress who produced the Amendment? Does the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee State paid education to aliens? [snip] I hope everyone reads this because for me it was the most important reading of the year. One of the most wonderful discoveries you will find from reading is where equal protection of the laws came from and how it was defined to mean by the author of the...

For a city with a reputation as being a bastion of liberal values, Boston has an equally rich history of censorship. In the latest crackdown, Boston mayor Thomas Menino has called for city Inspectional Services Division officials to seize all t-shirts bearing the message "Stop Snitchin'." "It’s wrong," Menino said. "We are going into every retail store that sells the shirts and remove them." The mayor's patience was apparently pushed beyond its limit when the mother of gang member wore one of the shirts to her sons trial for the death of 10-year-old Trina Persad. It is unknown on what...

...[I]t was William Rehnquist who was most personally responsible for what is now called "the New Federalism" -- the revival of the ideas that judiciary should protect the role of the states within the federal system and enforce the textual limits on the powers of Congress. Establishing the New Federalism took enormous effort and leadership by Rehnquist over many years. Now that legacy is in jeopardy. At the founding, and for some 150 years thereafter, the limits on congressional power provided by the Constitution... as modified by the Fourteenth Amendment-- were enforced by the Supreme Court. According to the textual...

If the nation's top colleges stopped considering race in admissions the number of African-American and Hispanic students at elite schools would plummet, while the number of Asian students would rise, according to a new study. A pair of Princeton University researchers reviewed more than 45,000 applications from three elite colleges and universities to determine what would have happened if the schools eliminated affirmative action. "The most important conclusion is the negative impact on African-American and Hispanic students," said Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociology professor who co-authored the study published in June's issue of Social Science Quarterly. The study found the...

There is debate continuing to surface over America's Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee that everyone born on U.S. soil be granted U.S. citizenship. Many have resolved it among themselves, having been misguided by unwilling lawmakers claiming there is nothing that can be done to deny illegal aliens the opportunity to complicate their deportation procedures with the birth of what is commonly known as "anchor babies". This idea is however, false, predicated upon the fact politicians and lawmakers dare not appear to "evict" a "citizen" from these United States and that America is also too "compassionate" to do so. Although the Fourteenth Amendment...

The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) has become the key Constitutional issue of the immigration mess. The relevant section reads, "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." The problem is that this has been misinterpreted in recent years to mean simply that anyone born in the U.S, under any circumstances, is an American citizen. This is neither the original intent of the law nor the way it was interpreted by the courts in subsequent decades. Some Americans speak of birthright citizenship...

Rutherford Institute Attorneys Win Civil Rights Victory for Pennsylvania Pro-Life Activist William Depner PITTSBURGH—Attorneys for The Rutherford Institute won a civil rights victory for pro-life activist William S. Depner, a resident of McKeesport, Penn. After Institute attorneys filed an appeal on Depner’s behalf, a Court of Common Pleas judge acquitted Depner of harassment charges for photographing girls who appeared to be underage as they entered a local Planned Parenthood facility. Depner claims he was concerned that girls under the age of 18 were being treated by Planned Parenthood without parental consent and believed photographs were the best way to prove...

The Reconstruction Amendments, and especially the Fourteenth, transformed the Constitution from a document primarily concerned with federal-state relations and the rights of property into a vehicle through which members of vulnerable minorities could stake a claim to substantive freedom and seek protection against misconduct by all levels of government. The rewriting of the Constitution promoted a sense of the document’s malleability, and suggested that the rights of individual citizens were intimately connected to federal power. The Bill of Rights had linked civil liberties and the autonomy of the states. Its language -- "Congress shall make no law" -- reflected the...

Congress already holds the power to define marriage: Despite their success in the 2004 election, gay-marriage opponents can’t seem to shake their sense of doom. Eleven states may have passed constitutional amendments defining marriage as between a man and a woman, but same-sex marriage still has an apparently ineluctable logic on its side. As homosexual activists continue to advance their cause in a sympathetic judiciary, more and more states will have gay marriage imposed on them. Gay marriage will then be imported into other states, so that eventually the Supreme Court—which for the past ten years has overturned or disregarded...

E-mail Author Send to a Friend <% printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%> Print Version April 07, 2004, 8:20 a.m. Blocking the VoteDefenders of racial preferences twist the law in Michigan. By Ward Connerly Whatever we do, we can't let the people vote. That seems to be the attitude of the elites in the state of Michigan. They will do anything to prevent the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) — a proposition to end racial preferences in the public arena — from getting on the ballot. My organization, the American Civil Rights Coalition, and I are working with the brave folks in...

Seeing Rosie O’Donnell condemn President Bush just after she “married” her girlfriend, Kelli Carpenter, was bizarre in a tiresome sort of way. O’Donnell claimed, “We were inspired to come here by the sitting president and the vile and vicious and hateful comments he made.”If O’Donnell had any sense of humor or irony, she would look at herself and say, “Gee, for such a tolerant, open-minded person, I sure do condemn and vituperate an awful lot, especially on what should have been the happiest day of my life.”Maybe I’m some sort of pervert, but I don’t recall bearing anyone in the...

Alejandra Fabiola Juarez gave birth to a healthy baby girl this week, one day after U.S Border Patrol agents caught her entering the country illegally.She was the first of two illegal aliens from Mexico to be transported to Yuma Regional Medical Center this week for labor pains moments after agents caught them entering near the U.S. Port of Entry at Andrade, Calif. in seperate incidents.Sandra Esquival Contreras, an 18 year old from San Luis Rio Colorado, Son., was the second woman to experience labor pains. Contreras, who was caught Friday night, did not give birth and was expected to be...

Did the Fourteenth Amendment make the American People Citizens of the Federal Government? By Robert Greenslade In recent years, it has been asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment diluted or abrogated State citizenship by making the American people citizens of the federal government. Section 1 of the Amendment states: 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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall...

IF YOU FEEL THAT MY CASE IS DESERVING OF NRA'S ASSISTANCE (WHICH IT IS UNDER THE RULES OF THE NRA'S CIVIL RIGHTS DEFENSE FUND) PLEASE CONTACT HORALD VOLKMER, DIRECTOR, NRA CIVIL RIGHTS DEFENSE FUND AT NRA HQ IN FAIRFAX, VA.