Tea Party's Push to Repeal the 14th and 17th Amendments
This paper analyzes the Tea Party movement's efforts to repeal the 14th and 17th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. It argues that while the Tea Party frames these efforts as a defense of states' rights and personal liberty, a closer examination reveals deep connections to racialist ideology and prejudice. The paper traces the 14th Amendment's origins in post-Civil War Reconstruction and its guarantee of equal protection, then considers the 17th Amendment's role in establishing the direct popular election of senators. Drawing on the movement's hostility toward immigration and its rhetorical parallels to Confederate-era states' rights arguments, the paper concludes that repealing these amendments would reverse over a century of civil rights progress.
- Introduction: The Tea Party's Constitutional Agenda: Tea Party aims to repeal key constitutional amendments
- The 14th Amendment and Equal Protection: Origins and text of the 14th Amendment
- Immigration, Race, and Tea Party Opposition to the 14th Amendment: Racialist motivations behind the repeal effort
- The 17th Amendment and the Tea Party's States' Rights Argument: Tea Party opposition to direct Senate elections
- Historical Parallels: Confederate Ideology and the States' Rights Rhetoric: Comparison to Confederate-era political arguments
- Conclusion: Liberty for the Few: Repeal agenda threatens civil rights gains
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds its argument in the actual text of the 14th Amendment, quoting it directly to anchor the analysis in constitutional language rather than abstraction.
- It draws a sustained historical parallel between Tea Party rhetoric and Confederate-era states' rights ideology, giving the argument meaningful depth and context.
- The paper moves logically from the 14th Amendment to the 17th Amendment, showing how both repeal efforts flow from the same underlying ideological framework.
- It uses secondary sources (Kosmonaut and McMorris-Santoro) to support specific factual claims while maintaining the author's own critical perspective throughout.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of ideological critique: it takes the Tea Party's stated rationale at face value, then systematically exposes the gap between that rationale and the historical and social context surrounding it. By connecting contemporary political positions to their historical antecedents, the paper shows how surface-level constitutional arguments can mask deeper social biases.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a thesis-driven introduction establishing the Tea Party's goals and the author's central claim. It then devotes separate sections to each amendment, building the racial and ideological critique progressively. A pivotal section draws the Confederate-era parallel, and the conclusion returns to the irony of liberty rhetoric deployed against the very populations such liberty was meant to protect. The structure is linear and argumentative throughout.
Introduction: The Tea Party's Constitutional Agenda
At its core, the Tea Party identifies itself as a political faction intended to reduce what it perceives as the tyrannical power of the federal government over the rights of corporations, states, and citizens. This is the perspective that underlies the Tea Party's aggressive posturing in recent political affairs and especially its vitriolic hostility toward President Obama. As part of the Tea Party's agenda, the group has sought sweeping reform in governmental structures so as to reduce what it views as central executive and legislative branches with far too much authority over citizens' lives. Within the context of this view, the Tea Party has been especially vocal where certain terms of the Bill of Rights are concerned. The arch-conservative group, recognizing the difficulty of shifting judicial perspective and precedent on constitutional law, has instead attempted to push quite simply for the repeal of those constitutional principles that diverge from its belief system.
It is thus that the Tea Party has spearheaded the movement to repeal the 14th and 17th Amendments. However, consistent with the general belief system proposed by Tea Partiers, the notion that these constitutional amendments should be repealed is both contrary to the democratic underpinnings of the United States and carries significant implications of racial, ethnic, and ideological prejudice. If the Tea Party were to succeed in its mission, it would also have succeeded in driving back American civil rights and individual liberties by more than a hundred years. The result would be a significant thrust toward creating a scenario in which states would essentially retain the right to engage in highly prejudicial, racialist, and bigoted policy.
Works Cited
Cornell University Law School. (1992). 14th Amendment. Law.cornell.edu.
Cornell University Law School. (1992). 17th Amendment. Law.cornell.edu.
Kosmonaut, D. (2010). "Birthers," Anti-Immigration and the Repeal of the 14th Amendment. Age of Nepotism.
McMorris-Santoro, E. (2010). Tea Party-Backed Repeal of the 17th Amendment Gets Republicans Into Trouble. Talking Points Memo.
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