“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,” reads Article IV, Section 4, “and shall protect each of them against Invasion and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence.” Guaranteeing democracyĪnother part of the constitution, this one in the body of the text rather than the preamble or amendments, prohibits the current drive by Republican-dominated state legislatures in Florida, Tennessee and elsewhere to install one-party rule. government to pay its debts, undermining Republican threats to force a catastrophic national default this summer. The 14th Amendment also requires the U.S. These rules also rebuke ongoing efforts by Republicans to demolish Medicaid, a direct descendant of Social Security, and to deny pregnant women and transgender youth access to health care. Constitution’s general welfare and equal protection clauses enable what founding father John Adams called “a more equal liberty” to advance, however unevenly, throughout American history.
leaders and leading to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The violence is widely credited for galvanizing U.S. In this March 1965 photo, clouds of tear gas fill the air as state troopers infamously break up a civil rights march in Selma, Ala. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, officially “an act to enforce the 15th Amendment to the Constitution,” is the best example of the power to bend the arc of history towards justice. They were aimed at building a national citizenship based on “the equal protection of the laws,” and they prohibited the states from denying that protection to any American. Other key sections come from what are known as the Reconstruction amendments (the 13th, 14th and 15th) that emerged from the blood and ashes of the Civil War. history - the full name for the Social Security Act of 1935, for example, was “an act to provide for the general welfare by establishing a system of federal old-age benefits.” This idea anchors many of the landmarks of U.S. Constitution begin in the preamble, which says that one of its core purposes is to “promote the general welfare” as opposed to private interests. This is why we hear so much about the second phrase of the Second Amendment - “ … the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”īut for all its limitations, the constitution remains the supreme law of the land in America, the one document that can guarantee the rights and liberties that Democrats correctly see as under threat from Republican extremism.Īs such, they need to rediscover its pro-democratic dimensions so they can work with the document - and make it work for them.
0 kommentar(er)
