# Quote — Thom Hartmann, Unequal Protection

> It's a bit difficult for some people to get their minds around the possibility that the Republican Party started out as a reform party that for nearly seventy years... had a strong progressive wing. But it did.

- Author: [Thom Hartmann](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thom-hartmann.md)
- Book: [Unequal Protection](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thom-hartmann/unequal-protection.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thom_Hartmann#Unequal_Protection_(2018)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/thom-hartmann/unequal-protection/its-a-bit

## More from this book

> This legal situation is not only bizarre but also quite the opposite of the vision for this country held by the Founders of the nation and the Framers of the Constitution. They were sufficiently worried about corporate power that they didn't even include in the Constititution the word corporation, intending instead that the states tightly regulate corporate behavior (which the states did quite well until just after the Civil War). The American Revolution... was in fact provoked by the misbehavior of a British corporation; our nation was founded in an anti-corporate-power fury.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thom-hartmann/unequal-protection/this-legal-situation.md)

> The Thirteenth Amendment explicitly abolishes slavery... The Fifteenth Amendment explicitly forbids any government within the United States to prevent Blacks from voting... The main goal of the Fourteenth Amendment was to reverse the 1857 Dred Scott... decision, which had excluded African Americans from access to the protections of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights... Given all this context and history, a reasonable person would probably conclude that the ... were designed to grant rights exclusively to human beings. There's no discussion at all of corporations in the Amendment... and nobody in that day would have dared propose that the Civil War was fought to "free" the corporations.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thom-hartmann/unequal-protection/the-thirteenth-amendment.md)

> American constitutional law is, in many ways, grounded in British common law... [where] there are two types of "persons": "natural persons," like you and me, and "artificial persons," which include governments, churches (and other nonprofits), and for-profit corporations... necessary so that the law (and taxes) could reach them. ...Knowing this, most laws having to do with just human beings used the phrase "natural persons"... The Fourteenth Amendment, however, does not draw any distinction... and twenty years later, corporate lawyers would seize upon that... [S]uch sweeping ramifications never occurred to Thaddeus Stevens or his colleagues who drafted the... Amendment. ...But fate and time and the conspiracies of great wealth and power often have a way of turning common sense and logic on its head...

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/thom-hartmann/unequal-protection/american-constitutional-law.md)