To my knowledge it has never been seriously argued--the argument certainly was not made by the Supreme Court--that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment intended to alter the Constitutional scheme with regard to education. Indeed, in the famous school integration decision, _Brown v. Board of Education_ (1954), the Supreme Court justices expressly acknowledged that they were not being guided by the intentions of the amendment’s authors. “_In approaching this problem_,” Chief Justice Warren said “_we cannot turn the clock back to 1868 when the amendment was adopted.... We must consider public education in the light of its full development and in its present place in American life throughout the nation._” In effect, the Court said that what matters is not the ideas of the men who wrote the Constitution, but the _Court’s_ ideas. It was only by engrafting its own views onto the established law of the land that the Court was able to reach the decision it did. The intentions of the Fourteenth Amendment’s authors are perfectly clear. Consider these facts. 1. During the entire congressional debate on the Fourteenth Amendment it was never once suggested by any proponent of the amendment that it would outlaw segregated schools. 2. At the same time that it approved the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress established schools in Washington in Georgetown “for the sole use of ... colored children.” 3. In all the debates on the amendment by the State Legislatures there was only one legislator, a man in Indiana, who thought the amendment would affect schools. 4. The great majority of the States that approved the amendment permitted or required segregated schools at the very time they approved the amendment. There is not room here for exhaustive treatment of this evidence, but the facts are well documented, and they are all we have to know about the Fourteenth Amendment’s bearing on this problem. The amendment was not intended to, and therefore it did not outlaw racially separate schools. It was not intended to, and therefore it did not, authorize _any_ federal intervention in the field of education. I am therefore not impressed by the claim that the Supreme Court’s decision on school integration is the law of the land. _The Constitution, and the laws “made in pursuance thereof,” are the “supreme law of the land”_. The Constitution is what its authors intended it to be and said it was--not what the Supreme Court says it is. If we condone the practice of substituting our own intentions for those of the Constitution’s framers, we reject, in effect, the principle of Constitutional Government: we endorse a rule of men, not of laws.