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The Second Amendment comes from the right to protect themselves from slave revolts, and from uprisings by Native Americans. A revolt from people who were stolen from their land or revolt from people whose land was stolen from, that's what the genesis of the Second Amendment is.
Sep 10, 2025
(W)e do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment.
We need a constitutional amendment to allow the legislature to control the so-called free speech rights of corporations.
And, finally, as a Republican, I believe it is important to keep our word and keep our covenant, and that is exactly what we should do with the Wright amendment today.
The 1st Amendment protects the right to speak, not the right to spend.
No patent medicine was ever put to wider and more varied use than the Fourteenth Amendment.
I'm a crusader. I really believe in the First Amendment, and I use it fully, and I pay a price for that.
The Second Amendment says we have the right to bear arms, not to bear artillery.
But I know newspapers. They have the first amendment and they can tell any lie knowing it's a lie and they're protected if the person's famous or it's a company.
No one in their right mind can say to me with a straight face that the Patriot Act has not aggregated the Fourth Amendment.
Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.
Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent.
If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.
First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.
Amending the U.S. Constitution, the document most sacred to those who love freedom and liberty, is a delicate endeavor and should be done only on the basis of the most clear and convincing evidence that a proposed amendment is necessary.
If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed.
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment.
When I speak to students, I tell them why we have a First Amendment. I tell them about the Committees of Correspondence. I tell them how in a secret meeting of the Raleigh Tavern in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who did not agree with each other, started a Committee of Correspondence.
The first ten amendments were proposed and adopted largely because of fear that Government might unduly interfere with prized individual liberties. The people wanted and demanded a Bill of Rights written into their Constitution. The amendments embodying the Bill of Rights were intended to curb all branches of the Federal Government in the fields touched by the amendments-Legislative, Executive, and Judicial.
The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice. I have no fear of constitutional amendments properly adopted, but I do fear the rewriting of the Constitution by judges under the guise of interpretation.
No Congress ever has seen fit to amend the Constitution to address any issue related to marriage. No Constitutional Amendment was needed to ban polygamy or bigamy, nor was a Constitutional Amendment needed to set a uniform age of majority to ban child marriages.
The First Amendment says that we can protest and call to - on our government to address grievances.
Phil Robertson and his family are great citizens of the State of Louisiana. The politically correct crowd is tolerant of all viewpoints, except those they disagree with. I don’t agree with quite a bit of stuff I read in magazine interviews or see on TV. In fact, come to think of it, I find a good bit of it offensive. But I also acknowledge that this is a free country and everyone is entitled to express their views. In fact, I remember when TV networks believed in the First Amendment. It is a messed up situation when Miley Cyrus gets a laugh, and Phil Robertson gets suspended.
It is true that many Americans find the Commandments in accord with their personal beliefs. But we do not count heads before enforcing the First Amendment.
It is the will of the American people that we have a right to protect our flag and this can only be accomplished by passing a Constitutional amendment.
I'd say that [Louis] Brandeis practiced a kind of a "living originalism," to use the title of Jack Balkin's great book. He said you start with the paradigm case, which in the case of the Fourth Amendment was these general warrants or writs of assistance, but you define it at a level of abstraction that you can take it into our age and make it our own.
Who freed the slaves? To the extent that they were ever u2018freed,' they were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was authored and pressured into existence not by Lincoln but by the great emancipators nobody knows, the abolitionists and congressional leaders who created the climate and generated the pressure that goaded, prodded, drove, forced Lincoln into glory by associating him with a policy that he adamantly opposed for at least fifty-four of his fifty-six years of his life.
If the Bill of Rights was intended to place strict limits on federal power and protect individual and locality from the national government the 14th Amendment effectively defeated that purpose by placing the power to enforce the Bill of Rights in federal hands, where it was never intended to be.
Individuals for whom no orthodox cure is available surely are entitled to select a health care approach.....This right (is) specifically within,,,the 1st, 4th, 5th, 9th, and 14th amendments to the (US) Constitution....To be insensitive to the very fundamental civil liberties....(:) the choice...of the person whose body is being ravaged (by disease), is to display slight understanding of the essence of our free society and its constitutional underpinnings.
I have very deep concern about the legacy of the Rehnquist court and its efforts to restrict congressional authority to enact legislation by adopting a very narrow view of several provisions of the Constitution, including the commerce clause and the 14th Amendment. This trend, I believe, if continued, would restrict and could even prevent the Congress from addressing major environmental and social issues of the future.
I'm not up for changing the 10th amendment or the 14th amendment, the first amendment or the second amendment.
There's nothing in the 14th Amendment that says if you are born to a mother who is a citizen that you're automatically a citizen. It isn't there. Even some of our presidential candidates think that it is.
The Constitution is very clear: Congress has sole discretion over defining who is and who isn't a citizen and how you become one. It's not the 14th Amendment.
The Constitution says nothing about anchor babies. The 14th Amendment says nothing about birthright citizenship.
There's nothing in the 14th Amendment about anchor babies.
Who in their right mind ever thought that the birth of a child to an illegal immigrant converted to citizenship? A lot of people believe it. It's not in the 14th Amendment. You know where it is? It's in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 4.
Congress decides who becomes a citizen and how. To automatically say the 14th Amendment grants birthright citizenship, no, we can't change that. Amending the Constitution, not possible, takes too long. We gotta find another way of dealing with this. No, we don't, because it's not there. You don't have to amend the Constitution.
The left looks at the Constitution and sees things that aren't there and then they find 'em. They look at things that are there and claim they're not there. Like the Second Amendment, nah, nah, it's not there, they really didn't intend that. No, no. Abortion. You can't find it, yeah, there it is, plain as day, see, it's right there in the 14th Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, the Ninth Amendment, the Fifth - no, it's not.
These liberals are the craziest things. The Constitution, they see things in it that aren't there and ignore things which are. The 14th Amendment, nothing to do with gay marriage.
Defending birthright citizenship is about being on the right side of liberty. The 14th Amendment is a great legacy of the Republican Party.
The Court is making the preposterous assumption that the People of the United States somehow silently redefined marriage in 1868 when they ratified the 14th Amendment.
All children should be welcomed into the world and protected by the law. As President, I would immediately repeal President Clinton's five executive orders that promote abortion. I support a human life bill that defines unborn children as persons under the 14th Amendment. I will vigorously defend the pro-life plank in the Republican platform.
The 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War to apply to former slaves to ensure that they are treated like all other citizens. It never did have anything to do with gay marriage. It was never intended to have anything to do with gay marriage or animal marriage or any other kind of social contract. It was specific to slavery, and after the Civli War.
When did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868, when the 14th Amendment was adopted?
The 14th Amendment, 2nd Amendment, there's nothing in the Constitution that says that if you are born to an illegal immigrant in America, that you are an American citizen. It's not there. People think it is. They confuse it with being born to an American citizen in America or overseas. But there's nothing in the law, nothing in the Constitution.
When the 14th Amendment, equal protection clause was enacted, the galleries in the Senate were segregated. Now we have integration.
If those who wrote and ratified the 14th Amendment had imagined laws restricting immigration - and had anticipated huge waves of illegal immigration - is it reasonable to presume they would have wanted to provide the reward of citizenship to the children of the violators of those laws? Surely not.
The 14th Amendment is very questionable as to whether or not somebody can come over, have a baby and immediately that baby is a citizen.
The purpose that brought the fourteenth amendment into being was equality before the law, and equality, not separation, was written into the law.
History has shown us that, on extraordinarily rare occasions, it becomes necessary for the federal government to intervene on behalf of individuals whose 14th Amendment rights to legal due process and equal protection may be violated by a state.