"The protections of the 14th Amendment only apply to freed slaves and their descendants" is an argument I've seen multiple times today.
If you're a white person who doesn't want your town's cops going through your apartment without a warrant, you may want to rethink that one.
If you're a white person who doesn't want your town's cops going through your apartment without a warrant, you may want to rethink that one.
The 14th Amendment is the reason the protections of the Bill of Rights apply to the actions of state and local governments. Be careful what threads you pull on when you're trying to unravel it for people you don't like.
(To be clear, the argument that only slaves and their descendants get the rights inscribed in the 14th Amendment is catastrophically wrong and stupid for a great many reasons. But it's ridiculously self-defeating as well.)
The other big argument I'm getting today is that the 14th was written to protect children of legal but not illegal immigrants. Which would have been a neat trick, given the fact that that the country's first restrictive immigration law wasn't passed until seven years later.
I'm a historian with a PhD in US history and three plus decades of obsessive interest in American constitutional law, and I still research this stuff before spouting off on it. You can't just make it up and expect not to get it hilariously wrong.
