And the South says, how do you get the power to do that?
And the North says we are enforcing a guarantee of republican government.
The 14th amendment is all about free speech, free press.
These are central elements of republican government.
You in the South have denied free speech and free press.
You tried to shut down discourse.
You've made it a capital offence to criticize slavery.
You wouldn't let Abraham Lincoln's name even
appear on the ballot south of Virginia.
He got zero popular, not electoral, popular vote south of
Virginia cause you created closed,
intolerant society and unrepublican government.
You actually really have backslid, in fact.
You've, and, and, and the Republic almost failed because of that.
We're not going to let you do that again, we're going to impose this on you.
And, by the way, we in the North have
already agreed that these are fair principles.
We in the North have, have, more than two thirds of
the northern states, the, the states that actually do have fair
elections, we've already agreed to this, and that's the condition for
you to come back, you have to ratify it as well.
And the South says, well, okay, but now why do we have to let blacks vote?
By the way, in the north, you don't let blacks vote in every northern state.
And here's what the republicans say.
Yeah, we don't and actually that's crummy.
But in New York, it's 2% of the free population that
are blacks that we don't let vote, or in Pennsylvania it's 3%.
In South Carolina it's over 50%.
So, you really are unrepublican when you're letting, you know, when you're
excluding more than 50% of your free adult males citizenry from voting.
That's not a republican government.
So, in the north it's a small percentage, in the south it's a big percentage.
And the South says,
well, but we didn't let them vote before the
Civil War, and we were allowed into the Union.
And the North says, well when you didn't let them
vote, let's be clear, they were slaves and it's one thing
not to let slaves vote, but not that they've become free,
it's a very different thing to not let free people vote.
You actually really have backslid in important ways.
Used to, no state at the founding excluded more than half of
it's free male citizens from voting, but that's
what you're now doing, now that they've become free.
You can't do that anymore.
Even if you've kept the same literacy test in place.
Now it is back sliding, because that originally excluded only ten percent
of your free population, adult free male population, and now it's excluding 60%.
So, you really have backslid, they say. In any event, it doesn't matter.
Even if it's not backsliding we read the republican government clause to allow, and
indeed invite, us to hold you
to the highest standards of republican government.
None of the Northern states supress speech the way you are, and free press.
So, we're going to hold you to free speech and free press.
The northern states, none of 'em have broad disenfranchisement of the
sort you do, so we're going to hold you to that high standard.
And the point is, you could think that
that was, it's a, it's a fair interpretation.
It's not an inevitable
one it's but it's baked, that
interpretation, is baked into the constitutional cake.
It's part of the very process in which the 14th Amendment and is
therefore now a new gloss on the old words of the republican government clause.
And if you want to think about what
the republican government clause means as a matter of
original intent you have to look, not just
at the founding, but how those words were reinterpreted
in the very process of adopting the 14th Amendment.
This was, in Charles Summers' famous phrase, he was a liberal lions
senator from from Massachusetts, kind of in the Ted Kennedy model or something.
He called the republican government the sleeping giant
of the Constitution that has awakened from slumbers.
And it becomes the most important clause in the Constitution
during the ratification, of the 14th Amendment during the enactment process.
And my claim is if we pay attention to how we the people actually did, not just
ordain the constitution but amend it, this is now baked into the constitutional cake.
A broad reading of republican government, and by the way, when, when the
reconstruction Republicans did this they were
basically following Marshall's, John Marshall's interpretive principles.
Maybe we're stretching a clause, but we're doing so to make sense
of the Constitution as a whole.
We looked the other way when slavery, as a
cancer, grew and grew and grew and corrupted the South.
And, and, and we did that at our peril because when we looked away
during the Antebellum Period this slavery, this
cancer grew and it almost destroyed us.
That's the civil war.
In order to make our system work we have to end that cancer.
We have to sort of excise the whole thing and that basically
means holding states to the highest standards of democratic accountability.
We had basically looked the other way.
We had allowed maybe de facto backsliding.
We're not going to do that again because that turned
out to be almost the death of us all.
That the new 14th Amendment vision, you can see
it in some of the texts of the 14th Amendment.
But my claim is you can also see it in
the very process, by which the 14th Amendment was adopted,
which to repeat, involved very expansive reading
of the republican government clause authorizing the
federal government to hold states to higher
and maybe even evolving standards of democracy.
Which, now when a bunch of states move in a democratic direction the federal
government has a proper warrant and authorization
for bringing the laggard states in line.
And that, along with five amendments that say the
right to vote, beginning with the 14th, all after
the Civil War, help explain a feature of today's
Constitution, which is, there's a much more robust protection
by the federal government of, of, of, of voting rights.
And by the way, recently the Supreme Court
said, you know, we don't think this Voting Rights
Act of 1965 is pretty fair, because some
states, because they have crummy voting records, are required
to, to to get special federal approval for, for new voting rules.
That doesn't seem fair.