By Kerwin Holmes, Jr.

What is necessary now to admit is that there is not any one singular interpretation for interpreting the nation’s laws in the United States. This has long been the case. But I do not think that many of us appreciate the gravity of this reality.

Before I begin by example, let me once again address my sparse posting. I am currently doing a great amount of research in my professional work. This means putting a lot of time and effort into tracking down documents, from ancient times through to modern times, deciphering texts written in languages other than English, brushing up on old philosophical concepts, parsing through and uncovering elements of Church history, et cetera. It’s pretty exciting stuff, and stuff that I am passionate about–especially evidenced in my current arrangements. But I have something that I believe is worth pointing out, and which I believe is appropriate for The Reasoner’s Corner.

To get back to what I was saying about there being no single method for interpreting our nation’s laws (assuming that you are a citizen of the United States of America, and this principle still stands if you are not), I begin by example. Say that in the present time a law is passed that determines that before one may drive a vehicle, one must pass a state licensure examination and provide proof of a fully functional vehicle. This law, though intrinsic upon state customs, is passed at the Federal level with the required representation necessary from the bicameral federal legislature of state-by-state representatives.

This means that though any singular state resident did not vote for this law, the states’ representatives for each state (that is, however many state representatives are allocated to the state per her population in the House of Representatives and the two Senators allocated to each state without exception in the Senate) did represent their states in the Federal level.

Because of this, as the United States functions as a representative government, it’s Federal legislators representing their states voted to make this law binding upon their states by the required majority in both houses of Congress (the House of Representatives and then the Senate). Now, such a law could have had naysayers. But once the required number of votes for both houses were passed, the bill moved forward to the Office of the President for signature to begin its enforcement (to give the bill the legitimacy of teeth).

Lawsuits could have arisen from states themselves in order to appeal to the Supreme Court of the particular state (each state has its own Supreme Court), which then forwarded the lawsuit to the Supreme Court of the United States (the Supreme Court that stands as the third and weakest Branch of the Federal Government) to consolidate the cases into a singular appeal in order to create a ruling. This caused no fuss, as the cases were few in number and never even made it past any singular state’s Supreme Court. And so the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) was not bothered at all.

The president then signed the bill into law. And so, it became law that those who desired to drive a vehicle legally in any of the 50 states and in any of the territories of the United States of America needed to not only pass their respective state (or territory’s) licensure exam, but also needed to provide proof of being in possession of a fully functional vehicle. The law said possession as opposed to ownership because most teenagers beginning to drive do not effectively nor legally own any of the vehicles that they drive…those typically being owned by their parents or guardians who allow them to use their vehicles. This is also true for many commercial drivers earning their “commercial driver’s licenses” (CDLs for short) where the vehicle is often owned by the company of employment rather than the individual worker.

Now, the story behind the law and its circumstances of promotion can be whatever. For this purpose, let’s just say that this was another law meant to ensure that people were being safe while driving. Now, thinking for more than about 10 minutes on this law would, for most people I would hope, show that this law would not do much to affect that desired outcome. If anything, it would create more bureaucratic headache for those wishing to simply get a driver’s license for anything practical in this nation, including going to open a banking account to deposit your income within or to see an R-rated movies in theatres…or even buying alcohol, such as wine, at a grocery store for an Italian dinner. You need state ID’s for those things, and a state-issued driver’s license would suffice.

[If by now you are too bored to continue, but you have learned or have been reminded about any one facet of how the government of the United States works, I challenge you to suffer a bit more to the end for your own general welfare and benefit of wisdom.]

Now, let’s say that 6 months after this bill was passed, someone denies a license to a group of people. Let’s make it fun. Let’s say that this is a rogue DMV agency in the state of Massachusetts that denied licenses to people who are driving diesel vehicles. The point is that though these vehicles are fully functional, they date to the 1950s and do not have the previously government-mandated “kill switches” installed, and therefore the drivers can pose a risk to other road commuters. For this reason, a “fully functional” vehicle excludes their vehicles, in the opinion of this agency.

Now, as per the original intention of the law written in clear language, and over and against the circumstances that gave rise to the law, this ought to be a non-issue. At the writing of the law, the kill-switches were not yet implemented. And so, this backwards-reading of the law’s intention would either have the law upon its initial enactment thereby guaranteeing that basically most US-American drivers were banned from operating vehicles upon their own streets, or it would be a law without any practical effect given that it only ruled over vehicles with said “kill switch” driving mechanisms built into their systems. Anything made from about 2021 prior (giving a random guess on what would pass the stipulations of Section 24220) would be either an “illegal” or “unaffected” vehicle.

But, let’s just say that on account of personal bias for seeing more vehicles with this technology, a big company like Ford and another like Honda, which began implementing this technology into their vehicles and see a means by which to corner the vehicular market, begin lobbying in favor of the rogue Massachusetts agency. Let’s say that punditry from both sides align along self-selected slogans. Suddenly cries of “You killed our cars” for those against to “You killed our children” for those in support of the rogue Massachusetts DMV agency become the rallying cries for this new law’s adjudication.

Suddenly, this has very little to do with the original writing and legal binding of the law itself. It has little to do even with the original circumstances, at least as they were publicly represented, which gave rise to the law.

Suddenly this has a lot do with partisan playbooks, corporatist interest, environmental activism, and opportunism for dopamine-rushed people on social media (replete with foreign actors posing as Americans and their bots using translation technology and anyone’s basic access to the, ahem, WORLDWIDE web) to give their two-cents’ worth of a one-cent opinion.

That is much of what you see here in this recent ruling by SCOTUS and the 14th Amendment.

The circumstances that gave rise to the 14th Amendment are very visceral to me because they involved many of my ancestors. I am many things ethnically. I have openly talked about that in several places. Just use the search engine in the “three-bar” main menu at the top right of this page and do a search on “ethnicity” and you can see what I mean. Part of my roots is descending from “black Americans.” I put that into quotation marks because many of my ancestors identified with that moniker were not simply “black Americans” alone. Many of them came from more than one root themselves, to say nothing of the motley of African peoples/ethnicities they comprised in their individual persons. But, that is its own story.

Suffice it to say that when the 13th Amendment freed the slaves (those enslaved by law) in the United States, many of my ancestors were the beneficiaries. On my dad’s side, our family still owns, for the time being, land granted to our ancestors by their former master upon emancipation. I wrote a master’s-level thesis, while still an undergraduate, on the stances on slavery held by Christians in the US American South in the period of the Second Great Awakening three decades leading up to the American Civil War (1830-1861). I also did my own family history to the extent of my abilities during that time in part to see what my family was up to during that time.

The 13th Amendment had nothing to do with modern-day refugees from Sierra Leone and Veracruz, Mexico coming into the United States.

So it was with the 14th Amendment.

That amendment, the 14th Amendment, was given to guarantee my ancestors their status as US-American citizens, man and woman. They were born subject to the laws of the United States, even as slaves, and they were now entitled to living under the protections of its jurisdictions. They were not subject to the laws of any foreign government, but were bound up from birth in the legal exercises of jurisprudence of the United States as their national sovereign. They were not tourists, nor were they temporary residents, but their number actually was used in constituting the numbers of representatives that their states received based upon compromise (and a very intelligent one, the Three-Fifths Compromise) between the anti-slavery Founders (who were a sizable number) and the proslavery Founders, without whom the effort of national independence from Britain would have been impossible.
Citizenship merely meant (and continues to mean) being protected by and being forced under penalties of law to abide by the legal requirements of said protections by the Federal government. That was it. It did not guarantee a right to vote. Indeed, in the nation’s very founding, vast swaths of white men who fought in the American Revolution (of whom, my family research showed me to be descended from two, as it happens) also could not vote in the states they had just liberated from the tyrannical British Crown.

Because of that lack of voting rights, the 15th Amendment was passed to guarantee that black US-American males of eligible age had the right to vote.

That is the trifecta of legal laws guaranteed to my people, my ancestors, in this nation after a hard-fought Civil War: the 13th, the 14th, and the 15th Amendments.

Note that modern-day residents of Afghanistan and Guatemala do not have that same history and hence neither the same buy-in. They are excluded from that history and from its intentions. I can keep randomizing the nations here and it would not ever effect the truth of the matter if the nation is not “the United States of America.”

While you are a visitor in this nation, naturally, you must abide by the laws as they apply to you. Being a non-citizen means that you do not have the citizen’s right to vote. This means that laws governing how to vote are null and void to you since you do not even have the ability to exercise the voting right. It is the same as the way that our imaginary licensing law would not apply to Italians since Italians have their own nation called Italy and Italy is not the United States of America. And it is logically congruent with our imaginary law not applying to toddlers. You know…because toddlers cannot exercise the ability to drive a vehicle requiring a state-issued license.

The United States of America is our own nation with our own history with our own cultural buy-in. That will always be the truth.

And it was expected so from the beginning.

Case in point:

Senator Jacob Howard, one of the draftees (meaning he helped to write the original wording) of the 14th Amendment is on record explicitly stating that, in concurrence with the language of the US Constitution, Indians on reservations of their own nations not taxed, meaning indigenous American Indians born within the bounds of the United States yet living on reservations and territories of their own nations as such, were EXCLUDED from the 14th Amendment. Here is the documentation for that (shout out to the team at Louder with Crowder for at least providing sources to their shows with consistency; you don’t have to agree to respect their effort in the citation game, just make sure that you’re on page 2895).

Fun fact (thanks to a US-historian friend of mine pointing it out to me): page 2890 in the middle section has Senator Howard explicitly stating that the amendment was not intended for “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons.”

[UPDATE, July 1, 2026: I am posting an image of the passage that my friend informed me about for those of whom clicking hyperlinks for information proves too onerous (though, per my custom, the image itself is a hyperlink to the original document)]:

I should also mention that I severely miss these days of seeing these lengthy 19th-century newspapers that documented with almost autistic detail the court proceedings within the chambers of Congress, back when their speech as more meaningful and not for Tik-Tok bytes, for our nation’s procedures and programs. It made researching the same relative time period so rewarding and eye-opening. You will find the pertinent text in that link in the bottom-center paragraph of the page.

Historian’s Note:
And if your eyes hurt looking at that, just keep in mind that the average attention span of readers was expected to be at this level. The Grey Lady (the New York Times) and virtually every other publication once looked like this.
Ever had to sift through three decades of microfilm of newspapers from a single publication with each page looking like this?
I have.
Trust: I earned that masters-level thesis that I wrote over a decade ago and the eye-opening education that it provided.

That even said, SCOTUS decided in the landmark case of Elk v. Wilkins (1884) that even though an American Indian of the Winnebago people, John Elk, was born within the territory of the United States and eventually moved off reservation to reside in Omaha, Nebraska, then a state within the Union, and renounced his tribal affiliations and allegedly was taxed by the state, he was not a US Citizen by virtue of claiming “birthright citizenship.” Though John Elk was noted to have paid taxes, he himself was not subjected exclusively to the laws of the United States. This harkened back to even the language original to the US Constitution in that Indians (American Indians) still operated in their own separate bands and nations. As such, they were not considered part of the government of the United States. Since they could not be obligated to suffer the yolk of citizenship, that being taxes and other legal demands by the privileges of citizenship, they were not granted the rights of citizenship…you know…because they were not citizens. In their own nations they had their own laws and territories, especially at the founding when we were just 13 colonies still learning to cooperate. In fact, the US Constitution was our second national government when our first national government constructed by the Articles of Confederation proved insufficient a binding agent for the United States as a national entity.

This was an American Indian man whose ancestors, similar to my own American Indian ancestors, predated the colonists themselves. And even he was not granted “birthright citizenship” based upon the original spirit of the law. Eventually Congress themselves would pass a law to which they proved capable of passing that granted American Indians the right to be counted as, and therefore subject to the legal demands of the privileges of being, US-American citizens. That would be the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 also known as the Snyder Act. Yes. Of 1924. It was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge, one of the coolest presidents to have ever held the office in my opinion.

SCOTUS wafted and waivered on what constituted a “citizen” in the United States from time to time. For instance, in 1898, just 6 years after the Elk v. Wilkins case that remained precedent for indigenous American Indians until 1924, SCOTUS ruled in the United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) that Wong Kim Ark, though having Chinese parents who were not citizens (nor ever granted citizenship by the ruling, nor a pathway for citizenship by special case) by virtue of being born in the territory of the United States (in this case, San Francisco, California) to parents not employed as diplomatic agents, could be counted as a legal citizen.

So, somehow SCOTUS granted “birthright citizenship” to a Chinese man whose family had never experienced an iota of the history of my black American ancestors, when my American Indian cousins born in the territory of this nation, some for a little over a century at that point (the United States was officially independent from war with Great Britain in 1783 and the Wong Kim Ark ruling came down in 1898, about 115 years later) still did not have “birthright citizenship” on the grounds that neither the original Constitutional language nor the language of the 14th Amendment meant to include them.

You can hopefully now see how the mess began in line with our imaginary court case of the imagined car license law. Some activist judges decided to make an exception for Wong Kim Ark, and that led to the legal precedent being set for favoritism. And, history being as messy as it is, no, you would not expect a simple appeal to a “white supremacist carte blanche” society to grant this favor to a Chinese man while continuing to exclude the same to American Indians.

History, like the people who make it, is messy. Always will be.

And SCOTUS has a history of stepping on the proverbial rake. Much to the chagrin, and horror, of both sides of the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) case (yes, the train company was in on it and wanted to end segregation on the train cars), SCOTUS made the infamous “separate but equal” measure in a case meant by civil rights litigators and the East Louisiana Railroad itself to undo the segregationist Separate Car Act that challenged the 13th and 14th Amendments. It was not until the genius of Charles Hamilton Houston and his generation’s-long slow build of litigators mostly stemming from Howard University’s School of Law that this ruling was overturned in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education rulings in 1954 and 1955. Note that a critical part of this landmark case was that black American citizens paid taxes that funded the publicly-funded state colleges and universities that also barred them from entry while being provided subpar and undeniably lower educational accommodations.

But do keep in mind that since Congress had to pass the Indian Citizenship Act aka the Snyder Act in 1924, SCOTUS continued to speak out of both of the sides of their mouth, or with forked-tongue, regarding what constituted a “citizen” between 1898 and 1924.

But the original intention of the law was very clear even from the Plessy v. Ferguson case. Note that the case was about 2 years before the Wong Kim Ark case. The same SCOTUS that stepped on a rake and is decried by moderns as irrefutably backwards is the same group of individuals who comprised SCOTUS back in the day who were behind the case that they now say created the benchmark for interpreting the 14th Amendment.

Unreal.

The sole justice who ruled consistently in both cases, rejecting the Plessy decision and also rejecting the Wong Kim Ark decision on the grounds of consistently interpreting the 14th Amendment in context for “citizenship,” was Justice John Marshall Harlan who serves as proof that, yes, an understanding of the original texts of law was not only possible back then in both cases but present. Go figure.

History, as we historians know, is messy.

We now come to the recent ruling by SCOTUS in our own day which upholds that anyone who so happens to have a child in the territories of the United States has just granted that child, regardless of where they spend their childrearing days and which nation gets to propagandize them, the right to securely vote in our elections and to rule over us as any of our duly elected officers of sovereign republicanism.

This would include the hundreds of Chinese billionaire babies currently being ordered and produced inhumanely for the purpose of controlling more US-American wealth and assets for foreign interests (with China being our foremost international rival, China having a long many-millennia historical drive of forcing the rest of the world to see them as the center of humanity’s universe and the pinnacle of the human race).This would also include the estimated millions of Chinese birth tourists who are currently being raised abroad outside of our national history and buy-in to be used by any Chinese foreign entity’s purposes.

You now know about this. But you should realize that every single justice on the Supreme Court has been apprised of this situation in making their respective decisions.

Keep in mind with estimates of about 20,000 such births every year, that is the rough equivalent of the disenfranchisement of a small, historical US-American town every year by enfranchising individuals who have no inherent loyalties, and in many cases even living memories, to our nation.

In the small town that I grew up in, which has grown considerably in the last decade, this means that a year and two months of this birth-tourism would undo the voting power of my entire hometown. I don’t have to like everyone in my hometown to be aware that this is evil.
In fact, my likes and dislikes be damned.
A country is a country is a country.

The recent ruling (Trump v. Barbara (2026)) was truly a 5-4 decision, with Justices Barrett and Roberts joining the majority of Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson. Kavanaugh did not join the majority and agreed with the minority’s originalist interpretation of the 14th Amendment. But he disagreed that POTUS has the ability to upend legal precedent by executive order fiat. If I may be forthright in my own blog post, and I give myself permission to do so, that is a noble disagreement. Kavanaugh instead stated that Congress itself should amend the law to be clear so as to produce a wholesale and consistent definition of the bounds of citizenship into law. Such a ruling is a constitutional and procedural gift to our republic, should we take advantage of it. The separation of powers between the Three Branches of the Federal Government exists for great and inherently Christian reasons.

Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissented, with Justice Thomas writing his own opinion, which Gorsuch concurred with. Even so, Gorsuch wrote his own opinion, as did Alito. I leave you to the SCOTUS hyperlink above to peruse these openly accessible documents and statements. But I concur and sympathize with their takes in pure consideration of historical circumstance of the 14th Amendment and its legal intention when ratified.

Waitasec. Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Barrett were Trump-appointed justices. Kavanaugh, even so, was the subject of the (sham)ing ritual of a mock trial for sexual assault which turned out to be a total hoax (with no legal investigation for the possibility of prosecution for the false accuser, as should have occurred if our system were godly). Were not these the justices who would usher us into a SCOTUS totally dominated by the will and machinations of Trump? Huh. Funny how that did not turn out.
Projection is surely an ugly thing to witness.

But, now I can approach this in two different ways given my own ethnicity and, in part, my own religion.

Firstly, there are some who recently pointed out that Pastor Charlie Dates, a pastor who I was recommended by my pastor at the time when I was in Chicago for two years (I and my congregation), recently “opened his mouth to remove all doubt.” He, for whatever reason, is under the media illusion that Justice Clarence Thomas is on a mission to return “chocolate people” to “making bricks without straw.” Now, I’m also Jewish (Ashkenazic to be exact, through my mother’s own mixed American heritage). I’m also, as you can definitely tell now, a historian trained in US American history. I am also, by profession currently, an ancient historian of Church history who reads the Biblical languages as a profession and pastime (as evidenced in some of these blog posts).

Charlie Dates was an idiot in this clip.

Full stop.

The people chanting and clapping like seals: also idiots, historically and ethically speaking. Full stop. Clarence Thomas, by virtue of his upbringing (he is Geechee or Gullah, whichever you prefer, and was raised by sharecropping grandparents off the secluded islands of South Carolina) is more “African,” culturally speaking, than either Charlie Dates or me. Unless Charlie Dates also has a time machine hidden behind that pulpit (which he ought to first use to revise his sermon notes from this moment of his life) and can undo Thomas’s family origins and cultural upbringing, he should do the wise thing and meditate on the benefits of Proverbs 17:28 when this particular opinion of his concerning Thomas arises in his head.

As we have now seen, Clarence Thomas has done more in his opinion to safeguard the original intent and legacy of the 14th Amendment than any African-descended SCOTUS justice before him. And if you read his opinion, you will see that in his by-the-book reading Justice Thomas is very keenly aware of the historical legacy of the trifecta of amendments 13-15.

Every human being has a right to their own political opinion. And I am not one for thinking that just because someone shares similar ancestry to me that they are obligated to think as I do. That is controlling a person by way of their appearance: the very inherent goals of racism, as I have discussed before with yet another racial ideologue. Interestingly, even when Charlie Dates was being promoted to me and my fellow congregants, I instinctively held back my enthusiasm. My panoply of life experience so far has taught me to refrain support from anyone who allows themselves to be championed as a voice for “X” people, whatever that “X” turns out to be.

I am certainly not comfortable at all being used as a voice for “black” people. To Hell with that. If anything, let me be a beacon for more folks to become informed in their opinions and to not be afraid to voice them. To reason humbly before God who is ever-present and ever-watching is my life’s goal to emulate.

Any person proud and arrogant enough to stand in that “voice of ‘X’ people” role can have that loser charade of a position. It is one for charlatans.

And though many focused upon the jeers and acclamations that the crowd gave to Charlie Dates in this stunning display of intellectual stupidity that only the educated can produce, I was heartened by something not really highlighted. For virtually every standing ovation that Charlie Dates received in that crowd, there were people, perhaps even slightly more in some parts of the crowd, actually, seated comfortably with their arms folded or their hands on their laps not saying a word.
Not a word.
Many different generations from both sexes were silently giving their displeasure at what was being said about Justice Clarence Thomas, a Roman Catholic and practicing Christian, by the man behind the cruciform pulpit.

That, my dear readers, is something to hope for. Seeing that is something that I am very glad to see in this year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-six.

For another, since many who advocate for foreign nationals and illegal migrants like to piggy-back upon the legacies of my ancestors, I would like to turn your attention to the dispelling of several myths concerning the American Indian.

For one, does anyone ever mention what Geronimo, who by no means was a heroic and moral character, but a popular hero for those of American Indian independence (though…the tribe they belong to may affect just how much that affinity stretches)…does anyone ever mention what Geronimo was known to do should he happen across any Mexican family or individual in his travels after 1851? It is worth looking into, especially as to why he would do what he would do. He never hated US-Americans in the same way.

Again, Geronimo is not one of the figures of history that I would hold as a moral paradigm for my future (God-willing) progeny.

But when people point to Mexicans as the rightful descendants of anything related to “indigenous” Americans, I have pause. Great amounts of pause enough to fill the Rio Grande. First off, just how does Mexico treat its own Indians? Secondly, Geronimo and company certainly had opinions on Mexicans. Thirdly, Mexico is Mexico. It has its own land and republic. Let Mexico be for the Mexicans. We, US-Americans, have our own country, US-American American Indians included.

But American Indians are very much aware of the legacy of land, including the right of territory and the benefits of national sovereignty (duh). To that aim, some use their services to help the efforts of the immigration law enforcement, such as the “Shadow Wolves” unit assigned to Homeland Security who work in tandem with ICE. You will note the lack of an overtly hostile partisan tone in that 2003 hyperlinked article from the Smithsonian…simpler times, perhaps.

The blood of the enslaved African and the American Indian flows in my veins. I know what the 14th Amendment is for. And I believe that this decision has given us ample opportunity to correct our misinterpretations and, in the efforts, to safeguard our nation for the posterity of the peoples to whom it is principally owed in principle.

The road to becoming a US-American has an inherent buy-in. Every nation and culture has their own buy-in. My ancestors paid that over and in full by their own blood for my nation and culture. The road is still difficult, and yet immensely easier and legally simpler today. Let those who wish pursue membership in this body politic the right way.

What we know now is that there is merit in learning our actual history. There is also merit in honoring the original language and legacies of laws that were passed. That is truly why we have things such as “legal precedent,” and why we have the amendment process to which Justice Kavanaugh rightly appeals.

And for this, we can only hope that our Republic rediscovers its identity well enough this sesquicentennial and in the upcoming years to defend itself on that basis. That won’t happen if we lose our history and surrender to indifference.

[P.S. There are a lot of hyperlinks in this post. That is by design for documentation purposes. Please do feel free and at your liberty to click on them to diver deeper into the history presented in this post and also to fact-check me. I encourage you to become as educated as you are willing.]