Rensselaer Union, Volume 1, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 April 1869 — Some Considerations about the Fifteenth Amendment. [ARTICLE]

Some Considerations about the Fifteenth Amendment.

Error, engaged in a combat with truth ; sophistry, arrayed in hostility to reason, and conservatism, resisting the innovations of progress, have never lacked, singly or in combination, a multitude of specious arguments which served as a species of fortifications, behind which they might, as necessity demanded, take refuge from attack. We see this exemplified with reference to the opposition to the proposed Fifteenth Amendment, which is denounced by Democrats as infamous, on the plea that no authority exists, under our system of popular Government, to force upon any State, even by an amendment of the Constitution, a change in Its fundamental structure, by which Is meant a change in the prevailing distribution of political franchises among the community. But thta plea finds no support of fact or theory in the articles of Union. There we discover, in its fullest extent, that very disputed power to force an amendment to the Constitution upon an unwilling and rejecting State. It is stipulated that threefourths of all the States concurring in the ratification of an amendment, proposed according to specific forms, thereupon snch amendment shall become an integral part of the organic law, and hence supreme over all the constituent members of the Republic. If the dissent of a single State, or even if one fourth of the States could operate to defeat the ratification of any amendment, then the constitutional proviaon would become not merely * nullity, but a monument of stupidity, for it would lay down conditions that-could not, by any possibility, be fulfilled. Should it be averred, in answer, that the Constitution does not intend an amendment that would produce the changes that would result from the Fifteenth Amendment, it may be replied that this rebutter is only the original assumption, in a modified form, ana merely begging the question, as the very point in controversy is whether or not this Fifteenth Amendment can be forced upon an unwilling and dissenting State by a ratifyina concurrence of three-fourths of all the States. The Fourteenth Amendment unquestionably has made changes in the fundamental structure of the States of Kentucky and Missouri quite as radical as the Fifteenth could make. It be maintained that the Fourteenth Amendment is, on that account, invalid, inasmuch as some of the States refused their sanction t Yet the Democratic argument against the validity of the Fifteenth applies with equal force to the Fourteenth. Even supposing, for the sake of illustration, that there are exceptions to the Constitution-amending power, of the nature claimed, then who or what is to determine when any one of these exceptions arises? If each State is sole judge for itself in deciding this issue, then each individual State possesses authority-to defeat any given amendment, for, its prerogative of adjudging that such amendment does or does not belong to the exceptionable class being complete and unlimited, its adjudgment of invalidity would be sufficient to prevent ratification, even though all the rest of the States should concur In opposite opinion. No matter how unjust, or absurd, or dogmatic such decision might be, there would not be, according to the supposition, any way to reverse it No appelate or supervisory authority would exist to determine that the State had abused or prostituted its prerogative. Indeed, its discretion would be tne sole measure of its jurisdiction, and Its single action would be able, In every case of a proposed amendment, to debar the action of all its esStates. That such a power liable to such perversions and open to such complications forms no part of our political system, is so palpable that it does not require another word of exemplification. It would appear that It is a work of supererogation to thus gravely set out to prove what it almost as clear and indisputable as axiomatic truth, were it not that the argument we have reviewed is seriously mad extensively adduoed, not only by Democratic journals, but even in the halls of legislation by Democratic politicians, and finds wide currency among man who sat np for profound thinkers aid logical reasonem. What is this new dootruse but the resurrection, in a new form of that old political heresy which silenced the acruples of to many when wcewlou

was moving toward/ the abyss of civil war—the heresy that it is the right of the several Statep, as parties to the constitutional compact, to Judge, each for itself, in the last resort, as to the extent of the powers delegated to the central Government ? We fear the creed of State sovereignty was scotched, not killed, by the overthrow of the rebellion.— Chicago Republican, 12 th.