Opinion ID: 106850
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Language of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Text: The Court relies exclusively on that portion of ง 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment which provides that no State shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, and disregards entirely the significance of ง 2, which reads: Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State. (Emphasis added.) The Amendment is a single text. It was introduced and discussed as such in the Reconstruction Committee, [7] which reported it to the Congress. It was discussed as a unit in Congress and proposed as a unit to the States, [8] which ratified it as a unit. A proposal to split up the Amendment and submit each section to the States as a separate amendment was rejected by the Senate. [9] Whatever one might take to be the application to these cases of the Equal Protection Clause if it stood alone, I am unable to understand the Court's utter disregard of the second section which expressly recognizes the States' power to deny or in any way abridge the right of their inhabitants to vote for the members of the [State] Legislature, and its express provision of a remedy for such denial or abridgment. The comprehensive scope of the second section and its particular reference to the state legislatures preclude the suggestion that the first section was intended to have the result reached by the Court today. If indeed the words of the Fourteenth Amendment speak for themselves, as the majority's disregard of history seems to imply, they speak as clearly as may be against the construction which the majority puts on them. But we are not limited to the language of the Amendment itself.