Tag

14th Amendment

Blog

The Strange Career of the Fourteenth Amendment

When the first session of the 39th Congress met in December 1865, Radical Republicans were out for blood. President Lincoln had been assassinated in April and the new president, Andrew Johnson, had crafted what he thought was a good plan of reconstructing the South, based on what he meant by reconstruction and that was to restore those states back to…
Ryan Walters
April 8, 2026
Blog

A 14th Amendment Mindset

Brion McClanahan presents "A 14th Amendment MIndset" at the October 2025 Abbeville Institute conference on the 14th Amendment in Columbus, GA. Purchase all the lectures from the conference HERE. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_ZDyuKg5BE
Abbeville Institute
November 17, 2025
Blog

How Progressives Broke the Constitution and Praised Themselves For It

Originally published at Mises.org. In his article “Is the Constitution Broken beyond Repair?” David Gordon draws attention to a phenomenon that is often overlooked, namely, the great rejoicing among some constitutional lawyers over the fact that “to establish the new Constitution, Lincoln overthrew the first one… he replaced the old, immoral Constitution with a new one based on equality.” This…
Wanjiru Njoya
October 23, 2025
Blog

The Original Meaning of the 14th Amendment

On Friday, March 15, the Abbeville Institute hosted a webinar on the legal scholar Raoul Berger and the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Brion McClanahan hosted legal scholars Allen Mendenhall, William Watkins, and Jesse Meriam for a round table discussion on the Berger, the amendment, and Reconstruction. If you want to learn more about the fraudulent "ratification" of the…
Abbeville Institute
March 20, 2024
Blog

Judicial Review? No. Nullification

“Acts of congress, to be binding, must be made pursuant to the constitution; otherwise they are not laws, but a mere nullity.” -St. George Tucker “There is no danger I apprehend so much as the consolidation of our government by the noiseless, and therefore unalarming instrumentality of the Supreme Court.” -Thomas Jefferson As a pro-life Jeffersonian, I am constantly frustrated…
Earl Starbuck
February 22, 2021
Review Posts

Killing the Incorporation Doctrine

A review of The 14th Amendment and the Incorporation Doctrine by David Benner (Minneapolis: Life and Liberty Publishing Group, 2017) Even though I have always been a strong advocate of states’ rights and sovereignty, and for safeguarding the federal system, the “incorporation doctrine” had always troubled me. What is meant by the “incorporation doctrine”? The application, by the federal courts,…
Ryan Walters
May 22, 2018