 Declaring all people born in the United States to be citizens would have freed the slaves in a single generation, and would probably not have caused the states to deny their membership in the United States. It would not have stolen the workforce from the people of the southern states. It would have given time and opportunity for the people most affected to find their way through this monstrous and magnificent change in the nature of the United States. There would still have been many challenges, as in a few ignorant people, arranging abortions for their slaves, so they would not have to deal with a free people. There would still have been challenges raised by those who were born slaves, declaring that they were younger and born free men and women. These would be matters for the courts, rather than for legislation. And why would this be ignorant? The work of slaves would still need to be done. Simply killing off the workers would not accomplish anything for the slave owner. Those who were born free would still need to grow into productive people, and their parents would have been slaves doing productive work. It is most likely that free men born to slaves would grow up to be the next generation of workers. There would still be racist divisions, but they would not arise as a cause for tearing the very fabric of American life. There would be time to adjust, a new generation raised in an environment where they shared citizenship however uncomfortably with one another. Instead, this was enacted in an attempt to further legislate a mass of social disruption. It was use of law to try to mitigate the damages already initiated through the constitutionally forbidden acts that leadership had taken. With the continued recognition of government sovereignty, we have reference to the ability to abuse citizens so long as it is done through due process of law. The sovereignty recognized in the states was assumed to extend to continuing some abuses so long as the requirement of legal processes were observed. The concept of equal protection of laws can only be called brilliant leadership. It wrote a common law principle into the constitution that laws cannot treat citizens differently. It was a stumbling block to every future attempt to use the law to benefit the right people at the expense of others. Accordingly, it has become one of the legal provisions most seriously violated by all branches of government. For example, a graduated income tax involves a law that intentionally penalizes citizens based on their financial successes. As written, equal protection of law has been so effectively misread as to say it supports the abuse as somehow demanded for fairness. Again, the executive branch has arranged for some favored businesses to be excused from having to follow all the regulatory rules that are applied to other less favored businesses. It has been misread to authorize the president to treat selected friends differently than others. Then again, the issue of pardons for crimes is not supported where it would simply treat one convicted criminal as different than others. Releasing one prisoner and then not another who has the same basic cause to be imprisoned is an open violation of this provision. The judges who are called to adjudicate a crime against some people where others are not prosecuted for the same crime would be able to refuse the action. There is no good way to authorize a prosecutor to pick and choose among criminals which will be prosecuted and which will not. The police authority who is told to excuse some people from arrest while arresting others should be able to refuse the order or continue application to all with the backing of the courts. Does issue of a warrant in one case refusing to issue it in another like case entitle the one who has taken damage to proceed against us judges and other officers involved? It is not so under the current reading of this provision. Equal protection of law is an assault on the very concept of sovereign right to rule. It reintroduces the purpose of justice as stated in the preamble. It is such inherent power that the courts have had to actively misread it to keep from interfering with sovereign legislation and privileged execution of law. The most common misreading addresses the equal protection provision as the equivalent of the due process clause but applied to state legislation instead of federal legislation. There it is again so long as the government leadership adheres to the processes permitted to the leaders, the courts will back up whatever they do. Section 2 in this amendment is somewhat independent from the first. It addresses the necessary and convenient changes to voting laws and to implementation of the enforcement of what civil war imposed on the people in the southern states. Again we have to note that what has to be imposed upon the people is not what the people support. It necessarily involves misrepresentation. In this case it is misrepresentation of the people in the southern states to serve the people in the northern states. It is legislation of a change that is not supported by we the people but by some of the people who would overcome the rest. Our civil war had killed 165,000 citizens but the damage did not stop even after the military hostilities had ceased. This was indeed a dark time for our nation. Section 3 addresses another issue with questionable approach. It sets a new requirement upon those who would be in leadership positions. It applied a sovereign loyalty test to those who might serve in the public leadership positions, limiting the choice of the people to elect those who might represent interest contrary to the northern states political leanings. This same was rational in the sense of preventing sharply discordant voices of those who would not support the sovereign government as rule over the people. It was the abused people in the southern states who would no longer have the option of being represented by anyone who had challenged the sovereignty of the administrative leaders in power. Section 4 continues the general theme of supporting sovereignty in government. It declares that debts incurred in accord with federal legal process cannot be officially questioned. The sovereign will not even hear a cause of limitation, but will do what leaders think is right. It is here that the conflict with sovereignty in the people is given economic substance. When parents died, their debts could not be passed to their children. The common law included inheritance laws that cut off such further debts that the estate process closed all debts public and private. The children were to be born free. This provision simply ignores this for the sovereign government and works to the effect that the public debts incurred on behalf of, by representing, the fathers would continue even after the death of the ones who were represented. It would hold the citizen responsible for the public debt, overriding the very purpose for probate law and denying the benefits to the people of the United States. The 15th Amendment was just one more in a series of benevolent sovereign actions, ignoring both the sovereignty of citizens necessary for the legality of government and the recently passed requirement for equal protection of law. We have an addition to the Constitution that would address some citizens as special. The loss of focus on legality and sovereignty in the citizen is inherent in addressing voting as a right. Voting is a privilege and only arises as a result of having a government. It is not something that the created government can choose to withhold from citizens who have an ownership right in the nation and in the government created under their authority. Election is a hiring process, not a coronation. And it's not choosing those who will rule over the other people. It is choosing representatives who are supposed to be fulfilling the requirements of the Constitution and the will of the people. Yet here is the written witness to a government that thought it had to hand out benefits to some of the people to make them equal to other citizens. Worse far, they felt the need to so deeply that they engaged in the process to witness their lack of understanding by appending it to a document that only existed for the purpose of ordaining and establishing a government. Could this have been done by common legislation? It could have been so accomplished, but only by recognition that we the people who are the states are to represent are the same people, the same we the people who are citizens of the United States. You would require a denial of the sovereignty of the states over the U.S. citizens. Indeed, the 15th amendment is a witness to both the times and the result of a lack of education concerning our foundation as a legal nation. With the 16th amendment, we have a witness to the almost total rejection of any constitutional limitation upon how our benevolent sovereign government can abuse its citizens. The leadership had learned nothing from our Civil War beyond what they as benevolent rulers had accomplished for some Americans at the expense of others. The death of 165,000 American citizens and smoldering resentment of those who still smarted at having their government seize their property was a political victory only. The shattered we the people continued suffering from this abuse. The same smug government, not satisfied with its breach of both law and purpose, stepped into a new atrocity and put their hands into the pockets of the sovereign citizens that they were only empowered to serve. Any citizen who put his hand into another citizen's pocket would be subject to prosecution. It was a criminal act. The people could not authorize, not even by original signature, their representatives to take such an action. This is theft by government, with the collusion of the courts because it was accomplished through an authorized process. A graduated income tax is not a legal way to fund the U.S. government. It is a criminal abuse of the sovereignty of citizens. There are legal ways to do things under the original Constitution. These would all have required recognizing the sovereignty of citizens and leadership had already rejected that outright. It would have required accountability to the people and political leaders had found that to be unacceptable. And so we find amendments to authorize what the Constitution forbade and that could only be sold as acceptable to a people who are ignorant of their personal sovereignty. This is our history as a nation and it is written in the form of constitutional amendments. We need to learn from our history so that we will not repeat the mistakes of the past.