Opinion ID: 108221
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Joint Committee

Text: The first place to look for the understanding of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment is the Journal of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. [22] The exact sequence of the actions of this Committee presumably had little or no effect on the members of Congress who were not on the Committee, for the Committee attempted to keep its deliberations secret, [23] and the Journal itself was lost for nearly 20 years. [24] Nevertheless the Journal, although only a record of proposals and votes, illustrates the thoughts of those leading figures of Congress who were members and participated in the drafting of the Amendment. Two features emerge from such a review with startling clarity. First, the Committee regularly rejected explicitly enfranchising proposals in favor of plans which would postpone enfranchisement, leave it to congressional discretion, or abandon it altogether. Second, the abandonment of Negro suffrage as a goal exactly corresponded with the adoption of provisions to reduce representation for discriminatory restrictions on the ballot. This correspondence was present from the start. Five plans were proposed to deal with representation. One would have prohibited racial qualifications for voters and based representation on the whole number of citizens in the State; the other four proposals contained no enfranchising provision but in various ways would have reduced representation for States where the vote was racially restricted. Kendrick 41-44. A subcommittee reduced the five proposals to two, one prohibiting discrimination and the other reducing representation where it was present. On Stevens' motion the latter alternative was accepted by a vote of 11 to 3, Kendrick 51; with minor changes it was subsequently reported as H. R. 51. The subcommittee also proposed that whichever provision on the basis of representation was adopted, the Congress should be empowered to legislate to secure all citizens the same political rights and privileges and also equal protection in the enjoyment of life, liberty and property. Kendrick 51. After the Committee reported H. R. 51, it turned to consideration of this proposal. At a meeting attended by only 10 members, a motion to strike out the clause authorizing Congress to legislate for equal political rights and privileges lost by a vote of six to four. Kendrick 57. At a subsequent meeting, however, Bingham had the subcommittee proposal replaced with another which did not mention political rights and privileges, but was otherwise quite similar. Kendrick 61; see the opinion of MR. JUSTICE BRENNAN, MR. JUSTICE WHITE, and MR. JUSTICE MARSHALL, post, at 258-259, for the text of the two provisions. The Committee reported the substitute as H. R. 63. In the House so much concern was expressed over the centralization of power the amendment would worka few said it would even authorize Congress to regulate the suffragethat the matter was dropped. Post, at 260. The Fourteenth Amendment had as its most direct antecedent a proposal drafted by Robert Dale Owen, who was not a member of Congress, and presented to the Joint Committee by Stevens. [25] Originally the plan provided for mandatory enfranchisement in 1876 and for reduction of representation until that date. Kendrick 82-84. However, Stevens was pressured by various congressional delegations who wanted nothing to do with Negro suffrage, even at a remove of 10 years. [26] He therefore successfully moved to strike out the enfranchising provision and correspondingly to abolish the 10-year limitation on reduction of representation for racial discrimination. The motion carried by a vote of 12 to 2. Kendrick 101. Bingham was then successful in replacing § 1 of Owen's proposal, which read: No discrimination shall be made by any State, or by the United States, as to the civil rights of persons, because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude with the following now-familiar language: 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. Kendrick 106. The summary style of the Journal leaves unclear the reasons for the change. However, Bingham himself had rather consistently voted against proposals for direct and immediate enfranchisement, [27] and on the face of things it seems unlikely that the other members of the Joint Committee understood his provision to be an enfranchising proposal. [28] That they did not so understand is demonstrated by the speeches in the debates on the floor. [29] Before I examine those debates, a word of explanation is in order. For obvious reasons, the discussions of voter qualifications in the 39th Congress and among the public were cast primarily in terms of racial disqualifications. This does not detract from their utility as guides to interpretation. When an individual speaker said that the Amendment would not result in the enfranchisement of Negroes, he must have taken one of two views: either the Amendment did not reach voter qualifications at all; or it set standards limiting state restrictions on the ballot, but those standards did not prohibit racial discrimination. I have already set out some of the reasons which lead me to conclude that the former interpretation is correct, and that it is the understanding shared by the framers of the Amendment, as well as by almost all of the opponents. The mere statement of the latter position appears to me to be a complete refutation of it. Even on its wholly unsupportable assumptions (1) that certain framers of the Amendment contemplated that the privileges and immunities of citizens included the vote, (2) that they intended to permit state laws to abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens whenever it was rational to do so, and (3) that they agreed on the rationality of prohibiting the freed slaves from voting, this remarkable theory still fails to explain why they understood the Amendment to permit racial voting qualifications in the free States of the North.