The Solid Rock that is the Constitution

When something like the voting rights Amendment or the Civil Rights Act passes, we often feel euphoria of triumph. After so many years and so much energy spent fighting it’s nice to just take a breath and look out upon all that has been accomplished. And once we have won it seems absurd to many that we should have to continue fighting as if we had never achieved anything at all. Unfortunately, there will always be those who oppose progress, and if they lose once they simply try again to undermine what has been accomplished.

The Supreme Court decision Roe V. Wade affirmed a woman’s right to choose in the United States nearly a half century ago. You would think that the issue would be closed. Unfortunately, even today people who have nothing better to do continue to attempt to restrict women’s health rights under the disguise of being “pro-life.”



Another example would be the situation currently taking place in Argentina. Last year, Argentina became the first Latin American nation-state to legalize gay marriage. This occurred with overwhelming support from the Argentine people. However, only a year after this radical Christians in Argentina are gathering petition signatures in an attempt to overturn the legalization of gay marriage.

In both these cases, it wasn’t enough for liberals and progressives to triumph in their goals, they then had to defend these victories from attacks that could be just as ruthless as the attacks used to try to prevent them from happening. This is why it is so important to ensure that the victories that we gain are safe from any future attempts to undo them.

Examples of this can be found throughout previous American history. Few are aware that almost immediately after the voting rights amendment passed there was a Supreme Court challenge against it by anti-feminists trying to claim that it’s ratification was unconstitutional. In 1985, Republicans in the House and Senate under Ronald Reagan gutted the two-decade-old Civil Rights Act. Restoration of this bill had to be undertaken several years later to re-implement many of the important parts of the Act that the Republicans had removed.

And today, in light of the recent Republican triumph in the House and in state legislatures there is a new massive attack against women’s health rights. Most noticeable in the recent budget debate in which Republicans refused to fund the government for the next year unless they could cut Planned Parenthood funding from the federal government (none of which actually goes to fund abortions, but rather contraceptives, cancer screenings, and treatments for sexually transmitted diseases).

There is also a new and virulent challenge to the 14th Amendment, which was adopted shortly after the Civil War and granted the right of citizenship to former slaves and anyone else born in the United States regardless of race. The justification used by Republicans is that undocumented immigrants from Mexico can use the Amendment’s clause that anyone born in the United States is a citizen in order to have “anchor babies” here in the United States and thus create an easier path to citizenship for themselves. The problem that I see is that many of these Republicans are not simply trying to change the single clause within the amendment, but want to obliterate the amendment entirely. One should also pause to consider that many of these same Republicans have argued in the past for the repeal of the 14th Amendment.

But with the challenge to the 14th Amendment comes a glimmer of hope. A constitutional amendment has only been repealed once in American history, and in order for an amendment to be repealed it has to go through the same process it went through during its implementation. That means it not only has to be repealed by a majority vote in both the House and Senate, but then has to be repealed by the legislatures of at least two-thirds the states.



Acts of Congress on the other hand are much easier to be dismantled by either the federal or even state governments. This should give us pause to reflect on the kind of routes we are taking in order to secure a progressive future for succeeding generations. Constitutional amendments, as opposed to acts of Congress, are harder for conservatives to overcome. Supreme Court rulings, which deem a law or change in laws as constitutional or not, are a very powerful means for securing not only wide-sweeping victories, but also permanent ones.

It isn’t enough to pass a bill saying that women should be paid equally to men, or that gay marriage should be legalized, or that everyone is equal regardless of race, or that women have a right to choose. We need to affirm the constitutionality of these changes, because the Constitution is a very greater obstacle to traditionalists than a bill in either the state or federal legislature or a lower court ruling is. Therefore it would be prudent to ensure that whenever we fight for some change in laws or greater freedom granted to the American people, that we ensure that we do so in a way that can’t be easily overcome by the conservative onslaught that will come a year later, or even 100 years later.