There are few areas of the law as deeply polarizing and emotionally heated as the application of the Constitution’s guarantee of the equal protection of the laws to all persons.  What is lost – all too often – in this heated and polarized discussion is the text and history of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause itself, along with the full sweep of our constitutional history: the principle of equality first stated in the Declaration of Independence, perfected in the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and further illuminated in the Nineteenth Amendment and other Amendments.

This is the fourth installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.  Click here to view previous posts from this series.
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by Elizabeth Wydra, Chief Counsel, Constitutional Accountability Center

Read Our New Series Dedicated to Setting the Record Straight on the Constitution:

A New Series Dedicated to Setting the Record Straight on the Constitution

This is the sixth installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history. Click here to view previous posts from this series.
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by Doug Kendall, President & Founder, Constitutional Accountability Center

This is the ninth installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.  Click here to view previous posts from this series.
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by Elizabeth Wydra, Chief Counsel, Constitutional Accountability Center

In the current age of Tea Party nostalgia for our "original" Constitution, coupled with calls for state secession and nullification of federal laws, our nation's history in the immediate pre-civil War period is a useful reminder of the "more perfect union" we live in today. No one should "celebrate" a war that took such a horrible toll in American lives. But as the nation marks the sesquicentennial of beginning of that War, we should remember what the Civil War was all about.

The decision by Senate Republicans to place freshman Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) on the Senate Judiciary Committee, breaking their own rule against two Republicans from the same state serving on the same committee (Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is a long-serving member of the Committee), raises the following question: do serious conservatives really want to affiliate themselves with Mike Lee’s wacky views of the Constitution?

By David H. Gans, Human and Civil Rights Director

This is the third installment of Constitutional Accountability Center’s new series, ‘Strange Brew: The Constitution According to the Tea Party,’ exploring the Tea Party’s erroneous claims about the Constitution’s text and history.  Click here to view previous posts from this series.
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by David Gans, Director of the Human Rights, Civil Rights & Citizenship Program, Constitutional Accountability Center