The 14th Amendment was written in the 1860's. Clearly its guarantee of liberty meant more than the abolition of slavery, since the 13th Amendment took care of that. So the question arises, what did the framers of the 14th Amendment mean by "liberty"? If they had something specific in mind, or meant to freeze our concept of liberty to that of the 1860's, they could have just said so, perhaps in a bulleted list of liberties. But the framers of that amendment, who were not at all lazy or stupid, made a conscious choice to use an open-ended term that would leave the contours of liberty flexible, to be revisited from time to time by the Supreme Court. (Judicial review and the authority of Supreme Court on such matters had been established more than fifty years earlier). So you are absolutely right to extol and praise the framers of these important constitutional protections, but you sell them short if you assume that they were sloppy draftsmen who used vague terms while relying on future generations to study the debates and essays of the day to discern their meaning. They wrote the 14th Amendment the way they wrote it because, unlike you, they saw the Constitution as a living, breathing document. That is why the Constitution has survived so long. If it were the inflexible, specific, never-changing document that you posit, it never would have made it this long.
|