Excerpt: CHAPTER 2

Our De Facto Government as a Legislative Democracy

from pages 29-36:

Although most of us assume that the Reconstruction Amendments were necessary and useful additions to our Constitution, subsequent history reveals a different picture altogether. For example in the first fifty years after adoption of these three amendments, just .5% (½ of 1 per cent) of the cases brought under the fourteenth amendment were on behalf of African Americans (despite the growing proliferation of Jim Crow laws and suspiciously rising racist sentiments) while fully 50% of the cases were brought on behalf of corporations. Also, of the 307 14th Amendment cases brought before the U.S. Supreme Court between 1890 and 1910, just nineteen dealt with the rights of African Americans and 288 dealt with corporations.

It is worth mentioning here the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision [163 U.S. 537 (1896)]. Plessy had argued to the Supreme Court that his 13th and 14th amendment rights had been violated when he was jailed under Louisiana law for sitting in the “White” car of the East Louisiana Railroad, yet the Supreme Court ruled against Plessy. The lone dissenting opinion of Justice Harlan showed remarkable insight and prescience, and perhaps a bit of courage as well:

Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. . . In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott Case . . . The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficient purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution.

Despite Justice Harlan's assertion that “Our Constitution is color-blind and Neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens” history itself makes clear that the Reconstruction Amendments did nothing to advance the unalienable rights of sovereign citizens, who were themselves of varying races, genders, religions, ethnic groups and so forth. For example, in cases brought before the courts which utilized the equal protections clause as a justification for allowing women the right to vote, it was not until 1971 that Chief Justice Warren Burger rendered the first US Supreme Court decision to apply the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause to gender or sexual distinctions.

Despite this failure of the courts to apply the equal protection clause as a means of upholding women's voting rights in early cases involving those rights, a landmark Supreme Court case occurred in 1886 which essentially changed the meaning of “person” to include corporations. This transformation of the meaning of “persons” occurred when the Supreme Court justices hearing the case agreed, before hearing arguments, that corporations would be included as “persons” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. [Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 U.S. 394, 1886].

This pre-argument “agreement” was actually not a part of the opinion itself but it was included in the summary which preceded the Court's ruling. The portion of the summary which then influenced later courts was this statement made by Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite: "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does.”

Future decisions then drew upon Chief Justice Waite's statement to render their decisions. It was in this manner that the courts then began laying the framework through which industry could be protected from governmental regulations, leaving us to wonder about the behind-the-scenes political or financial influences which may have impacted the courts of the time.

Additionally and just as curiously, even the 15th amendment did not advance women's suffrage, despite the fact that voting rights of “citizens” were protected by Section 1 of that amendment which states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Despite its clear language, this amendment also did little to further the voting rights of Blacks, as history makes clear.

Essentially, the 14th amendment created a new class of citizens that included corporations as persons, each of whom might or might not be protected by the due process clause, the equal protection clause, or the privileges and immunities clause. In so doing it dramatically affected, through court interpretation, the voting rights of a certain class of citizens and our subsequent understanding of the Constitution itself. Consider that no where in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights will you find any particular race or gender (or religious group) denied the right to vote, or for that matter given special privileges over another class of people.

Part of the reason for this was indeed political and owed to the fact that voting rights and qualifications varied widely among the separate colonies, and even within the individual colony. All thirteen colonies required voters to own a certain amount of property or pay a certain amount of taxes in order to vote. Because of this, in certain locations single women with property did vote. Women usually lost their property rights once they married, but sometimes voted in cases where the head of household was absent or incapacitated, so long as property qualifications were met.

Additional restrictions for voting were also often added to those of property rights or amount paid in taxes. For example, five of the colonies barred Catholics from voting, and four barred Jews - although by 1790 all states had eliminated religious restrictions. All these restrictions, taken together, meant that some 75% of the population in the colonies, both male and female, white and black, Catholic and Jew, etcetera, did not vote. This figure for all intents and purposes excludes Native American Indians, since they were considered to have their own nations and governing bodies.

Interestingly enough, for a short period after 1790, six of the new states permitted free African-Americans to vote. These states were Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Vermont. With respect to women's suffrage in particular, during the colonial era and immediately following ratification of the Constitution, it was property ownership and NOT gender that often determined the right to vote.

In Massachusetts, women property holders had voting privileges from 1691 up until 1780, when the 1780 Massachusetts State Constitution specifically excluded women from voting. During the same time period, New York and New Hampshire joined with Massachusetts in denying women the right to vote. Meanwhile, in its 1776 State Constitution, New Jersey gave "all inhabitants” the right to vote. The term “all inhabitants” was later spelled out in a 1790 law which defined inhabitants to be “he or she.”

In point of fact, the framers of the Constitution left qualifications and rights for voting, along with the issues of slavery and religion, up to the individual states. Again part of the reason for this was undoubtedly political, but another part is due to the fact that our government was created as a Constitutional Republic, in which – through unalienable rights – the people would govern themselves through their representatives.

Thus the Constitution and Bill of Rights were created so as to give the people the ability to govern themselves and limit the operations of the federal government and its potential to curtail our unalienable rights. Unlike the federal statutes created under the second constitution and its sovereign power structure, the Constitution and Bill of Rights do not specifically spell out individual rights, but instead protect our unalienable rights against overbearing government actions. It is no accident that the Constitution itself uses terms such as persons, people and electors which allows the interpretation of those beings to include men and women, blacks, Jews, Catholics, etcetera, etcetera.

All this being said, by the early 19th century most states dropped the property qualification for voting and at the same time extended voting rights to all males. Dropping property qualifications thus effectively eliminated the means by which women had been given the right to vote. Most states also began excluding blacks altogether. In this manner it was the individual states which one by one began to exclude classes of citizens, irrespective of the Constitution. Even after Reconstruction, the states themselves denied women and blacks the right to vote, and the courts, in reviewing the Reconstruction amendments - particularly the 14th amendment - upheld those states laws.

For example, in 1874 the Supreme Court upheld a decision of the Missouri Supreme Court denying Mrs. Virginia Minor the right to vote. This is but one of many examples in which we see that the 14th amendment has been used in a way that is antithetical to a sovereign citizen's unalienable rights, with the U.S. Supreme Court achieving a new status as final authority.

In the case of Virginia Minor, the Court ruled on the issue of women's suffrage in support of the Missouri Supreme Court decision. This was the conclusion of the Court's opinion in Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1874): “Being unanimously of the opinion that the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one, and that the constitutions and laws of the several States which commit that important trust to men alone are not necessarily void, we, AFFIRM THE JUDGEMENT” [of the Supreme Court of Missouri.]

Beyond these questions, Section 4 of the 14th Amendment also proclaimed that no citizen could challenge the validity of the debt incurred during war or rebellion - a factor that later enters into the Emergency Banking Act of 1933 and the adoption of a full debt-based currency. Section 4 of the 14th amendment reads: “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law. . . shall not be questioned.”

Trial attorney and Law professor John Remington Graham further asserts in his book Blood Money: The Civil War and The Federal Reserve that “The real purpose of the fourth section of the 14th Amendment. . . was to institutionalize the national debt which had been monetized through the National Bank Act of 1864, thereby making permanent the grip which Morgan, Rothschild, and their affiliates had acquired upon banking and currency in the United States.”

Graham goes on to say that “It is ironic that this so-called constitutional amendment was unconstitutionally imposed upon the country,” as Schroder also discusses, by requiring the Southern States to ratify the 14th amendment or become permanent subjects of a crisis government under martial law. Additionally, the southern people, in ratifying the 14th amendment, were “required to take a loyalty oath to support the federal government and abide by and support all laws and proclamations that had been made during the rebellion.” Thus, as Schroder further points out:

Under the constitution only public officials were required to take an oath to support the constitution. It [the loyalty oath requirement laid upon the southern people] was a total reversal of the roles of the people and the government, as well as a reversal of the roles of the state and federal governments. . . This resulted in a new form of dictatorship – legislative dictatorship. [Importantly] it is critical to note that the reconstruction amendments were war amendments, passed in time of crisis governments, and for the benefit of expanded powers of government. The applicability of these amendments to peacetime constitutional government is questionable. However, once power is gained, it is seldom given up. (Constitution: Fact or Fiction, present author's emphasis)

Essentially then, the Civil War and Reconstruction period following marked a massive shift in power away from the states and in favor of the federal government. This shift had been brought about by the escalating argument over slavery and - more importantly - its underlying economics, nicely summarized by Schroder as follows:

Until the Civil War, the federal government was still considered an agent of the states. The Civil War marked a shift in power. The roles were reversed, and the states became subordinate to the federal government. The states rights versus federal rights came to a head over slavery. . . At the turn of the century, most Americans in both north and south thought that slavery would die out of its own accord. It had already died out in the North simply because it didn't pay. . . Southern anti-slavery societies outnumbered northern groups in 1827. . . [But] Radical voices on both sides became the only ones heard. . . In 1793 Eli Whitney had invented the cotton gin [and] the Southerners switched from growing tobacco, rice and indigo to cotton. . . [By the time of the Civil War] Nearly 4 million slaves worked those southern cotton fields. Yet of 6 million southern whites, only 37,662 owned twenty or more slaves. Only 347,525 owned slaves at all. [Blacks themselves could and did own slaves during this period.] Most southerners were poor dirt farmers living in poverty. Plantation living was a lifestyle of the rich, not the typical southerner. . . [Meanwhile] Northerners were loudly decrying slavery while spinning the cotton into commercial goods in their factories, and northern ships brought the slaves in the first place. Also the northern factories used cheap immigrant labor [whose own living/working conditions paralleled or were even worse than that of slave labor] to fuel the industrial revolution. [Present author's emphasis and bracketed comment]

Trial attorney Graham lays out a well-argued case for how “Radical voices on both sides became the only ones heard,” in his book Blood Money, then draws the following conclusion:

Large banking houses in the United States and Europe were the culprits who paid for Mrs. Stowe's vicious pen, brought the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, stirred up trouble in the Kansas Territory, corrupted the judicial processes in the case of Dred Scott, and laid the foundations for the breakup of the [1860] Democratic convention in Charleston. They have since escaped the censure of historians, as they have hid behind a smoke screen of freeing the slaves and saving the Union.
[author's note: see Post Script #3 in Appendix I for an insider glimpse of the disappearing economic advantages of outright slavery for the money powers/investment classes, and what these powers proposed in its place. Post Scripts 4, 5 and 6 follow the same theme]

Today, nearly 175 years later, America is as divided as it ever was, including along racial lines, as a recent controversial and emotionally charged Supreme Court ruling on school integration reveals. This 5-4 decision to strike down the school integration plans in Louisville, Kentucky and Seattle, Washington was regarded by many as a decision that could impact similar plans which have been devised by state and local officials as a means by which to voluntarily integrate schools in hundreds of city and county school systems across the nation.

Interestingly enough, each side in this ruling took opposing views as to whether the court's decision supported the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education opinion which relied upon the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment when that court held that separate schools are inherently unequal. This recent decision shows that the Courts are using the 14th amendment as a filter through which to apply the Constitution and Bill of Rights as well as to control society. Not only is the 14th amendment being used in this manner, but the Supreme Court itself sharply disagrees on just how it should be applied.

An intriguing question here is: why did it take until 1954 for the Supreme Court to apply the equal protection clause as a means of protecting certain rights of blacks, and until 1971 for the high court to apply the equal protection clause to uphold at least certain rights of women? Furthermore, as you have seen and as Justice Harlan intimated, if the “Constitution was color blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” were the Reconstruction amendments really necessary? Or did they, particularly through early court rulings concerning them and upon which future decisions would rest, serve primarily to “stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating” as Justice Harlan warned?

Ultimately, we might ask, did the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments accomplish something quite different than what we have become accustomed to understand to be true? Did they not mark a shift in power where the states, and especially the people, became subordinate to the federal government, with all future legislation subject to interpretation which would be filtered through these amendments? Did they not in fact create a “new legal regime” or second constitution together with a new class of federal citizens who presumably would benefit from such a structure, thus setting the stage for a new, “invisible” sovereign power structure to be built? Did they not, as a result of the “new legal regime” they created together with the extremely powerful influence of the “invisible” government of the money powers, become ever more used to legislate for all manner of arenas which affect our daily lives - including issues involving education, industry, manufacturing, commerce, agriculture, religion and more?