"Before and After the Civil
War"
by
Paul Andrew Mitchell
Private Attorney General
June 29, 2004 A.D.
All Rights Reserved
As a direct result of the
decision in Dred
Scott v. Sandford,
blacks were officially considered property and not Citizens,
due to apartheid proven to exist in the U.S. Constitution
and in many other laws at that time.
The holding in that
decision was that a black slave was not
a Citizen of Missouri and, therefore, he had no
standing
to petition for Habeas Corpus relief.
The decision was correct,
but luminaries like Abraham Lincoln,
a practicing lawyer at the time, chose to criticize the
decision,
rather than to work for the solution which C.J. Taney expressed
so clearly (paraphrasing):
"If you find this
apartheid result offensive, then the procedure
for amending the Constitution is available to you in Article V.
But, don't look to the Supreme Court to amend that
Constitution,
because we have no authority whatsoever to do so."
Now, the solution that is
obvious, using 20/20 hindsight,
was a proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution as follows:
"The status of
Citizen of the United States of America
shall not be denied or abridged by the United States,
or by any State, on account of race."
It is quite possible that,
if such an amendment had been
proposed immediately after the Dred
Scott decision in 1856,
the Southern States would have seen the writing on the
wall,
and might have worked out a peaceful solution to
Emancipation
of all black slaves, perhaps over some transition
period.
But, this simple solution
escaped the lawyers of that era,
like Lincoln, and a horribly bloody Civil War intervened.
Immediately after that
Civil War, all States, including also
the Southern States, voted to ratify an Amendment prohibiting
all slavery and involuntary servitude.
The lawyers then huddled
and convinced the rest of the world
that this Thirteenth Amendment may
have freed the black slaves,
but it did NOT grant them any kind of citizenship; and that
additional legislation would be required in order for them to
acquire any rights of
citizens, like the right to enter contracts.
Instead of using the
simple language we present above,
a group of Radical Republicans led by Thaddeus Stevens
decided that a second class
of citizens would solve the
problem, as long as that second class were legally defined
as subjects
of the District of Columbia -- thus placing all
newly defined "federal" citizens under federal
jurisdiction
first and foremost (or "primary and paramount" as
the
courts have ruled).
Thus was born the 1866 Civil Rights Act -- a federal
municipal
law which could and should have used the term "federal citizen",
instead of trying to steal the terminology already found in
the Qualifications Clauses of the
U.S. Constitution --
but with one small yet terribly significant change
that was hardly noticed:
"Citizen" was changed
to "citizen"
Anyone who bothers to read
the Dred
Scott decision will
find quite a few references to "municipal" law,
and this
is the key to understanding the 1866 Civil Rights Act.
Insofar as Lincoln failed
to read and understand the
entire decision (and it remains one of the longest in
the history of American constitutional jurisprudence),
he was deprived of these pivotally important lessons in
federal municipal law.
And, it should have been
clear to everyone who joined this
debate at that time, that the Congress cannot amend the
U.S. Constitution either. Accordingly, the Qualifications
Clauses
were NOT being amended by that Act, because Congress
cannot amend the U.S. Constitution, period! These Clauses
are immensely significant, because they define who is
eligible to become voting members of the House and Senate,
and who is eligible to occupy the Office of the President.
And, they have never been amended.
Not long after that Act,
Congress then proposed the infamous
Fourteenth amendment: at best, that proposal was merely
declaratory of existing law and, even if it had been properly
ratified, it never could have "created" federal
citizenship,
because that second class of citizens had already been
created by the 1866
Civil Rights Act (the existing
law),
two years earlier.
If you know where to look,
courts have already ruled that
the so-called Fourteenth amendment did not
"create"
federal citizenship.
It could never have "created"
it,
because federal citizenship already existed, beginning
in 1866.
Another subtlety here is
that, being federal municipal law
which created a second class
of citizens domiciled in D.C.,
the 1866 Civil
Rights Act could never have extended
State Citizenship to
blacks, because D.C. has never
joined the Union, and it can not join the Union as
long
as the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction
there. Again, a
constitutional amendment would be
required to allow D.C. to join the Union as another
Union
State on an equal footing with all other States.
Another way of proving
that this Act created a second
class of citizens is to confirm a second privileges
and immunities clause in the so-called 14th amendment
(lower-case
"p" and lower-case "i").
If blacks had been given
State Citizenship, first and
foremost, they would automatically have acquired protection
under the organic Privileges and Immunities Clause at 4:2:1
(UPPER-CASE "P"
and UPPER-CASE "I"), which had already
protected all State Citizens beginning on June 21, 1788 A.D.
-- the
day the U.S. Constitution first became Law --
and continuing right up to the present time.
In summary,
then, Congress chose to create a second class
of
citizens for newly freed blacks, rather than to propose
a simpler amendment.
A simpler amendment would have solved
the problem created by the Dred Scott
decision, i.e.
by extending State Citizenship to blacks as well as whites
without all the extra baggage that was later introduced
by the so-called 14th amendment, and
without foisting
on America legislation which has generated an immense
amount of litigation due to its lack of clarity and now
obvious ambiguities (e.g.
"United States" has 3 meanings
in law, all different).
Unfortunately, the
language which Congress did choose has
also created an immense amount of confusion and
controversy,
because the term "citizens of the United
States" sounds
exactly the same as the first class of State Citizens,
who are identified in the Qualifications
Clauses as
"Citizens
of the United States". The ONLY textual difference
between these two terms is the capitalization, or lack
thereof,
in the third letter of the English alphabet.
Finally, on authority of
the Utah Supreme Court in
Dyett v.
Turner, decided in 1968, we now know that the
so-called 14th
amendment was never properly ratified.
It is perhaps no
coincidence that this court decision was
issued exactly 100 years after the so-called 14th amendment
was merely "declared" into Law in 1868 A.D.
Accordingly, it is now
correct to say that there is
no constitutional authority for the proposition that
federal citizens are also Citizens of the State
in which they may "reside". Given the utter frequency
with which Congress has re-defined the term
"State" --
over a very long period of time after Eisner v. Macomber
--
it should come as no surprise that the "State
residency"
to which that failed amendment refers is more accurately
described as another feature of the giant ruse it originally
intended.
Why? Because the Supreme Court has officially
recognized a "state
within a State", as if this
were a perfectly acceptable fiction that would be
understandable to the entire population; but,
more confusion and deception were the inevitable
result of such deliberately devious language.
Thus, the original
proposal to amend the U.S.
Constitution
with the so-called 14th amendment should be
declared
null and void, ab initio, for deliberate
vagueness,
pursuant to the Void for Vagueness Doctrine that is
founded on the Sixth Amendment. Remember, now,
as of 1871,
the U.S. Constitution was expressly
extended into D.C. That
had the intended effect of
applying the Nature and Cause Clause of
that Amendment
to all federal municipal laws, and even proposals
to
amend the Constitution.
However, deliberate
vagueness is fraud, and it is
high time America slapped the hands of corrupt lawmakers
in Congress who continue to sustain such frauds,
long after they have been thoroughly exposed.
Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell