You read that right. During a 1993 speech honoring her mentor and late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Kagan spoke approvingly of Marshall's lament, expressed six years earlier to mark the 200th anniversary of the drafting of the Constitution:
[T]he government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today. When contemporary Americans cite "The Constitution," they invoke a concept that is vastly different from what the Framers barely began to construct two centuries ago.The Republican National Committee responded to that self-evident truth with a memo to reporters demanding to know:
"Does Kagan Still View Constitution 'As Originally Drafted And Conceived' As 'Defective'?"That, in a nutshell, captures the attitude of many conservatives toward the Civil War amendments. Only the most fervent practitioners of the GOP's Southern Strategy regret the 13th Amendment's abolition of slavery. But with its draconian voter ID laws, the modern Republican Party has made a mockery of the 15th Amendment's guarantee that the franchise will not be "denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
Yet it is the 14th Amendment that elicits the greatest and most visceral conservative scorn. After all, many on the right still seek to deny to African Americans, Latino Americans and gay Americans due process and equal protection of the laws promised to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States." Instead, as growing numbers of Republicans insist, those 14th Amendment rights are limited to corporations and fetuses, neither of which are an actual person at all.
Continue reading about the right wing's love-hate relationship with the 14th Amendment below.