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  3. The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868

游客2025-04-22  26
问题     The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868, prohibits state governments from denying citizens the "equal protection of the laws". Although precisely what the framers of the amendment meant by this equal protection clause remains unclear, all interpreters agree that the framers’ immediate objective was to provide a constitutional warrant for the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed the citizenship of all persons born in the United States and subject to United States jurisdiction. This declaration, which was echoed in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, was designed primarily to counter the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford that Black people in the United States could be denied citizenship. The act was vetoed by President An- drew Johnson, who argued that the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, did not provide Congress with authority, to extend citizenship and equal protection the freed slaves. Although Congress promptly overrode Johnson’s veto, supporters of the act sought to ensure its constitutional foundations with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.
    The broad language of the amendment strongly suggests that its framers were proposing to write into the Constitution not a laundry list of specific civil rights but a principle of equal citizenship that forbids organized society from treating any individual as a member of an inferior class. Yet for the first eight decades of the amendment’s existence, the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the amendment betrayed this ideal of equality. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, for example, the Court in- vented the "state action" limitation, which asserts that "private" decisions by owners of public accommodations and other commercial businesses to segregate their facilities are insulated from file reach of the Fourteenth Amendment’ s guarantee of equal protection under the law. After the Second World War, a judicial climate more hospitable to equal protection claims culminated in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown V. Broad of Education that racially segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. [br] The author implies that the Fourteenth Amendment might not have been enacted if ______.
选项 A、Congress’ authority with regard to legislating civil rights had not been challenged
B、the framers had anticipated the Supreme Court is ruling in Brown v. Board of Education
C、the framers had believed that it would be used in deciding cases of discrimination involving non-racial groups
D、most state governments had been willing to protect citizens’ civil fights
答案 D
解析 从文章第一段制定Fourteenth Amendment，prohibits state governments from denying citizens the“equal protection of the laws"可以推断如果地方政府能够保证公民合法权益得到保障的话，就不会有Fourteenth Amendment的产生。
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