Henry Thomas Canaday

Former low-level economist, recovering journalist, city mouse.

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

@JamesPPinkerton According to pre-election polls, most support for George came from whites, not blacks. In DC, college-educated whites are stupider about government than high-school dropout blacks.

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

Isn’t it strange that those two Minneapolis deaths of ICE protesters called “murder” by the Media-Democratic Party have not yielded any murder charges by local prosecutors, even in a lefty, manically ant-ICE city and state?

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

@AnnCoulter Isn’t it strange that those two Minneapolis deaths of ICE protesters called “murder” by the Media-Democratic Part have not yielded any murder charges by local prosecutors, even in a lefty, manically ant-ICE city and state?

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

@DissidentRight @charlesmurray In the West Village of Manhattan, pre-COVID, -BLM & Mamdani, I saw many couples with baby carriages or walking toddlers. Very few kids over 5. They were apparently whisked away to suburbs for space, safety and good schools.

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

1/ Of course I agree with Clarence Thomas and Ann Coulter on the wrongness of the Supreme Court’s decision, justified by Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, on birthright citizenship, or anchor babies. But opponents of this decision must reckon with the fact that . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

2/ As Thomas states, for more than a century provisions the 14th Amendment, especially the due process and equal protection clauses of Section 1, have been corrupted or, if you will, exploited to make the Amendment a Constitutional wildcard that the Court has used . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

3/ To enforce its preferred answers to controversial questions of domestic government, at the urging of both conservatives and liberals, and that many of the resulting decisions have become embedded in American law and, more important, embedded . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

4/ In the expectations of the American people. For there are two basic ways to view the 14th Amendment: first, the historical and original understanding view that it confirmed the Civil Rights Act of 1866’s establishment of the legal position of the . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

5/ Recently freed slaves, ensuring that a Democratic majority in Congress could not easily reverse this position; and second, that the Amendment set out grand principles that could be applied to any group, whatever their color, minority or majority . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

6/ Or legal persons, such as corporations, and giving the Court the power to interpret these principles on questions never contemplated by the authors or voters approving the Amendment. The first, historical interpretation was generally followed for several decades . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

7/ After passage of the Amendment by justices who remembered why the Amendment had been enacted and the awful war that made it possible. The second, much broader interpretation, giving the Court much more flexibility of interpretation . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

8/ Began, at the behest of business interests, early in the 20th Century to use the due process clause to restrict state legislatures’ ability to regulate businesses in ways that might reduce the value of a business’s property . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

9/ In the 1920s, this same general logic began to be used, at the behest of liberals, to apply the Bill of Rights, intended to restrict the Federal government only, as restrictions on state governments. This approach, called “incorporation,” continued to extend to . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

10/ More of the Bill of Rights’ protections – for example freedom of speech, religion and press and so forth – often in expanded form, to state governments. And for half a century, this approach applied a ban on state abortion laws, never imagined in either . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

11/ The Bill of Rights or the 14th Amendment. In the early 1950s, the equal protection clause of Section 1 was interpreted to ban segregation by race, a ban enforced in the mid-1960s. Later, equal protection was interpreted to protect other ethnic minorities, women . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

12/ And sexual minorities, from state laws judged wrong. This broad expansion of the Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses mostly applied protections sought by liberals. It included, for instance, the Bill of Right’s protection against self-incrimination and . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

13/ Unreasonable searches, setting off a 30-year crime wave that left an additional quarter-million Americans dead, while excluding protections against double jeopardy by state and Federal trials because liberals sought the ability to prosecute racial murders . . .

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

14/ In the South that had not been adequately judged under state laws. But in 2008, at the behest of conservatives, the Court pretended that the 2nd Amendment ban on Federal restrictions on personal guns also prevented states from controlling guns.

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

15/ So by the third decade of the 21st Century, nearly 160 years after the 14th Amendment was enacted, it has revolutionized American government, in criminal justice, in various individual freedoms, in the definition of marriage, in the status of various minorities.

[Henry Thomas Canaday @CanadayHen60416]

16/ And, whatever the initial justification for the changes or lack thereof, protections and restrictions of an un-historical interpretation of the 14th Amendment is a deep part of American law and assumed by the American people, both liberals and conservatives, to continue.