Proclamation

At least on paper, these amendments to the Constitution undid more than four centuries of black enslavement in America. The Fourteenth Amendment in particular, however, has had a longer-lasting and more far reaching impact on the civil rights of all Americans. The amendment reads:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The long-term result of this amendment has been to forbid the states — not just the national government, as before — from infringing upon the rights of the people, whether explicitly listed in the Bill of Rights or not. The process of protection from infringement has been a gradual one, made possible by numerous Supreme Court decisions.

The Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection” clause also gives rise to questions about the equity and fairness of virtually every governmental program. In fact, dozens of cases have been brought before the Supreme Court on the claim that a particular law or program was not equally applied for all people. In several voting rights cases, for example, the Court has ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment requires all voters to be treated as equally as possible and that any law that diluted or weakened the impact of an individual’s vote is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court’s standard for guaranteeing equal protection in the political process is to defend the principle of “one man, one vote.” When the Congress sought to limit the amount that an individual could contribute to a political candidate or party, many people believed that such limitations violated individual free speech rights guaranteed in the First Amendment. However, the Court upheld limitations on campaign contributions arguing that, in this case, the Fourteenth Amendment demanded that all voters’ First Amendment rights be treated equal. If an individual was able to give hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to political candidates, that individual’s “vote” would be more influential than people who could not afford to give so lavishly. The Court concluded that, in order to balance the right to free expression against the right of equal protection, reasonable limits on campaign contributions were constitutional.