Civil and Human Rights

Our Birthday Wish: A Lincolnian Agenda for the Obama Administration

Today , as Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) joins America in celebrating the 200th anniversary of Abe Lincoln’s birth, we offer a snapshot of our work to fulfill the promise of Lincoln’s “New Birth of Freedom” under the new Obama Administration.

In November, CAC published the first in an important series of narratives aimed at revealing and reviving the lost history of our country’s progressive Constitution. Our first report, The Gem of the Constitution, highlights the text and history of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the provision of the Reconstruction Amendments that was most directly intended to guarantee fundamental rights and liberties for all Americans. In recent weeks, we have published a series of posts highlighting this report and the Privileges or Immunities Clause, in part to spell out a constitutional agenda for the new Administration that will complete what we call “the road from Lincoln to Obama.” For those readers unfamiliar with our work on the Fourteenth Amendment, we invite you to learn more:

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