Read the following passage regarding American constitutional law.
The jurisprudential legacy of the 1873 *Slaughter-House Cases* has profoundly distorted American constitutional law, primarily through Justice Miller's narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause. By artificially bifurcating citizenship into distinct state and national categories, Miller's majority opinion effectively neutered the clause, limiting its protection solely to a handful of esoteric national rights—such as the right to navigate interstate waterways and the right to protection on the high seas. Consequently, subsequent generations of jurists were forced to rely on the conceptually awkward doctrine of "substantive due process" to apply the Bill of Rights to the states, a workaround that has drawn criticism from across the ideological spectrum for lacking a firm textual anchor.
In recent decades, a vibrant revivalist movement has emerged among legal scholars, advocating for the overturning of *Slaughter-House* and the restoration of the Privileges or Immunities Clause to its intended function. These revivalists construct their case on several evidentiary pillars. First, they point to the exhaustive congressional debates of 1866, particularly the floor speeches of Representative John Bingham and Senator Jacob Howard, arguing that the legislative history explicitly proves the clause was designed to make the first eight amendments binding upon the states. Second, they highlight the immediate post-war context, asserting that the clause was a direct congressional response to the Southern "Black Codes" that sought to disarm and disenfranchise newly freed slaves—a historical reality they claim Miller deliberately ignored. Finally, revivalists expose the logical fragility of Miller's state-national citizenship dichotomy, noting that it renders the clause practically redundant, as the Constitution's Supremacy Clause already protected the few national rights Miller identified.
Despite this robust scholarly consensus, the Supreme Court has demonstrated a profound reluctance to resurrect the clause, driven by an institutional aversion to discarding a 150-year-old precedent and a fear that reinvigorating the clause might destabilize the current, albeit messy, due process framework.
Based on the passage, the modern revivalist movement relies on all of the following arguments or pieces of evidence to support their position EXCEPT:
- The argument that the Fourteenth Amendment was fundamentally designed to guarantee a narrow subset of national privileges, such as the right to navigate interstate waterways.Answer
- BThe assertion that Justice Miller's bifurcated definition of citizenship deprived the Privileges or Immunities Clause of independent legal utility.
- CThe historical reality that Congress drafted the clause as a deliberate countermeasure against oppressive state laws targeting recently emancipated individuals.
- DThe verbatim floor speeches from key politicians during the 1866 congressional debates indicating a desire to apply the Bill of Rights to state governments.
- EThe observation that the specific rights safeguarded under Justice Miller's interpretation were already secured by the Constitution's Supremacy Clause.