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> The fourteenth amendment says exactly that, actually. Depressingly, I actually checked. And I somehow kept skipping over the Fourteenth and reading the Fifte

• bmelton 13y ago
  There's a lot to be said that the fourteenth wasn't included in either the original Constitution or the original bill of rights, so your point isn't entirely without merit, nor does it go unheard. There's no person alive who could seriously suggest that the Constitution, either as originally written or as it currently exists, is a perfect document. Anybody suggesting otherwise should be immediately disregarded, IMO, but as I said, it prescribes its own medicine, so where it does fail, the remedy has, at least historically, been fairly straightforward. It is precisely because it has been amended so well in the past, and that amendments like the federal marriage act have failed, that I hold so much faith in it is a document that can persist. That said, I think it speaks well of the validity to the Constitution's "living document" mantra that it was indeed added when it needed to be. It's also another point on original intent, because if you look at other documents of the era, it gives the impression that it was tacitly included, if not explicitly. My (entirely baseless) suspicion is that it was either accidentally omitted, or withheld due to the conflict of slavery its express declaration would have posed.