Exploring the destruction of liberty

At the close of the last post I asked the question. If the rights of the citizens of the states are not under consideration in the 14^th Amendment then what type of citizen is under consideration in the Amendment? To answer this we must first understand precisely what the 14^th Amendment was designed to do. The United States Supreme Court of 1873, just five years after the creation of the amendment, gave us the reason for the amendment:

"The history and aim of the 14th Amendment is well known, and the purpose had in view by its adoption, well understood. That purpose was to confer the status of citizenship upon a numerous class of persons domiciled within the limits of the United States who could not be brought within the operation of the naturalization laws because (of being) native born; and whose birth, though native, had at the same time left them without the status of citizenship. These persons were not white persons, but were, in the main, persons of African descent who had been held in slavery in this country or, if having themselves never been held in slavery, were the native-born descendants of slaves." Van Valkenberg v. Brown (1872),43 Cal. Sup. Ct. 43, 47. (Emphasis added.)

Plainly the amendment was written to give to the black slaves a citizenship of some type. Since the states would not recognize the slave’s natural born status nor would the state allow for naturalization citizenship, these people were left with no legal status of any kind. Ergo, the congress, through the 14^th Amendment created a special class of citizen which came to be known as a resident or citizens of the United States. This citizenship status was a citizen of the federal government. So following the 14^th Amendment passage the country now had three types of legal citizenship statuses; natural born, naturalized and federal, citizenships. The statements of the high court in the following cases confirm this as fact.

“The term resident and citizen of the United States are distinguished from a Citizen of one of the several states, in that the former is a special class of citizen created by congress.” U.S. v. Anthony

“A citizen of the United States is a citizen of the federal government . . . “Kitchens v. Steele

“Both before and after the Fourteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution, it has not been necessary for a person to be a Citizen of the United States in order to be a citizen of his state.” Crosse v. Board of Supervisors of Elections (1966)

Now, after the 14^th passage, the term United States citizens could mean any one of three statuses. Note that the first two statuses are grounded in the sovereignty of the states but the special class of federal citizen is grounded in the jurisdiction of the federal government. Also note that the court was very clear that the citizenship resulting from natural born status in a sovereign state was specifically different from that of the federal citizen. And the die is cast for the iteration of the Utah Supreme Court.

How do these truths affect the sovereign rights of the states and individual people?

Within striking distance,

The rattlesnake