What is Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment?
About this video
The video explains Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, which gives Congress the power to enforce the amendment through appropriate legislation. Section 1 is self-executing, so people can sue in court, but lawsuits don't always fix widespread violations, so Congress can make violations federal crimes and let federal courts and prosecutors act.
You'll be able to
- explain what it means that Section 1 is self-executing.
- explain why lawsuits alone may not fix widespread violations.
- describe what Section 5 allows Congress to do.
Key words
- Section 5
- The part of the 14th Amendment giving Congress power to enforce it through appropriate legislation.
- self-executing
- Working on its own, without Congress needing to pass a law first.
- prosecution
- A case brought by the government against someone accused of a crime.
- federal crime
- A crime under national law, which federal prosecutors can pursue.
Transcript
Section 5 of the 14th Amendment gives Congress the power to enforce the remaining sections through appropriate legislation. Now, to be clear, especially if we look at Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, Congress doesn't have to do anything to enforce that. It is self executing. If a state has denied you protection of law, has deprived you of due process of law, has enacted some law that abridges the privileges and immunities of citizens, you can file a lawsuit in state court and state courts have to follow federal law too, claiming that there is this constitutional violation. However, that is not always the best solution to large national problems. Not everyone can easily sue in court, not everybody has the financial ability to sue in court, and sometimes there can be widespread violations of the Constitution, and having a few court cases here and there does not remedy that violation in a widespread way.
What Section 5 does is it says, Congress can step in and pass laws to enforce the requirements. In other words, Congress can pass a law that says, it is now a federal crime to deny someone protection of law or deprive someone of due process for a state to do so or a state officer to do so. It can make it a federal crime, and it can allow you to sue in federal courts and it can allow federal executive branch, the president, and the United States attorneys, to bring prosecutions.
In other words, you don't personally have to sue if your rights are violated. The national government can come in and prosecute those violations on your behalf, that is what Section 5 effectively allows the national government to do.
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