14th Amendment: Wong Kim Ark, Slaughterhouse and the Insurrection Clause

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After the 13th Amendment ended slavery, Southern states passed Black Codes to restrict freed people. Congress responded with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, overriding President Andrew Johnson's veto, but Republicans feared a future Congress could repeal it and wrote its guarantees into the Constitution. Driven largely by Representative John Bingham, the 14th Amendment opened with the Citizenship Clause, a direct answer to the 1857 Dred Scott ruling. The phrase subject to the jurisdiction thereof was read in Elk v. Wilkins in 1884 to exclude Native Americans until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, while United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898 confirmed birthright citizenship regardless of parents' status. The episode also cites a June 30, 2026 ruling in Trump v. Barbara striking down a 2025 executive order on birthright citizenship.

When the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873 gutted the Privileges or Immunities Clause, lawyers turned to the Due Process Clause and slowly applied the Bill of Rights to the states. Substantive due process was used first in the Lochner era to strike down labor laws, then to build a right to privacy from Griswold v. Connecticut to Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges and Roe v. Wade, which Dobbs overturned in 2022. The Equal Protection Clause runs from Plessy and Brown v. Board of Education to Plyler v. Doe, Craig v. Boren, Bush v. Gore and the 2023 Harvard admissions ruling, and the later sections set new rules on representation, insurrection and public debt.

• Johnson's veto message argued that granting freed people citizenship at once was unfair to immigrants who had to wait to naturalize.
• Corporate personhood traces to a court reporter's headnote in the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad case.
• Section 2 put the word male in the Constitution for the first time, which Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw as a betrayal.
• Section 3 was used to remove New Mexico county commissioner Couy Griffin, but Trump v. Anderson in 2024 held that states cannot apply it to federal candidates.
• Section 4's guarantee that the public debt shall not be questioned has been floated, including by Bill Clinton, as a way around the debt ceiling.