The issue of why taxpayers won’t pay doctors to deliver children is orthogonal to the point I’m making. If taxpayers in California or New York want to do that, they should do it.

That ship sailed over the horizon a long time ago, like at the latest with the adoption of the 14th Amendment nearly 150 years ago. When you took the oath to become a lawyer, you didn't swear allegiance to whatever state you happened to be living in at the time. And sociologically, I'd venture that most U.S. citizens think of themselves as Americans, not as Marylanders or Texans (OK, granted, a lot of Texans think of themselves as Texans first, which isn't a good thing).

My New York bar oath says: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York." You don't swear loyalty to the constitution of a mere administrative subdivision.

> And sociologically, I'd venture that most U.S. citizens think of themselves as Americans, not as Marylanders or Texans (OK, granted, a lot of Texans think of themselves as Texans first, which isn't a good thing).

I think that depends on the context of the question. If you ask people in the abstract, I agree most people identify as American first. But people have very well-developed affinities and prejudices about their states versus neighboring states that verge on nationalistic sentiment. Texans do, of course, which is something I find charming. But so do Oregonians. Having spent much of my adult life in Georgia, I can tell you exactly what I think about Floridians, Alabamans, South Carolinians, Mississippians, etc. (A lot of these sentiments play out through college football, the way they play out through soccer in Europe.) My wife, being a fifth generation Oregonian, would not move to California to save her life. Having relocated to Maryland, we have both cultivated an active dislike of Virginians (what the heck are they doing here, with their license plates?)

Note the order.

The relevant text of the 14th Amendment here is its opening declaration: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States ...." [0] (Emphasis added.)

In other words: Under the 14th Amendment, United States citizenship takes precedence over state citizenship — kind of like the old boast, civis romanus sum: I'm a Roman citizen. (The implication was: fuck with me at your peril.) Cf. Act 22:25: "As they stretched him out to flog him, Paul said to the centurion standing there, 'Is it legal for you to flog a Roman citizen who hasn’t even been found guilty?'"

To be sure, there are Lost-Cause diehards who claim that the 14th Amendment never actually came into effect because the Southern states refused to ratify it and so it didn't get the necessary 3/4 of states; courts have consistently rejected that claim [1]. If anything, the former Confederate states should be grateful that they didn't get the treatment that the Allies meted out to the Germans and Japanese in 1945 and afterwards — one recent commentator, remarking on the outrages perpetrated in and by the post-Civil War South, tweeted that "Sherman should've mowed the deep south like a lawn, making multiple passes." [2]

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv

[1] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...

[2] https://twitter.com/pptsapper/status/1313470161974947843

You(ABA/Federal Gov't) claim us as subjects to your federal state. Notice the COVID bailouts going to the highest cost of living states with the largest state income taxes and budget deficits/debts? I don't really give a fuck about equal protection for states when the administrators are wholly removed from accountability. Notice the gun laws in DC and NY - the political and financial centers? Weird how the powerful in those states aren't accountable for their failures, always a bailout at the expense of labor for their financial and political quandries. How many times in the last couple decades have the financiers revealed themselves as liars while paying no personal cost for their lies and deceits?

In an above comment -

" > My New York bar oath says: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the State of New York."

Note the order. "

The 14th Amendment is a fraud not because Southern states didn't ratify it while not apart of the Union. It's a fraud in the lack of enforcement against the power structures that initially enacted it.

I don't believe you'd see it my way, I'm thinking because it's a bit - to quote Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

If you'd done even a bit of homework about me, you'd see that your underlying premise is flawed.

Again, the 14th Amendment says we're all equal before the law but I don't see a lot of boards / c-suite scumbags going to jail or having the previous decades of 'earnings' clawed back. And definitely not seeing any corporate death penalties. As far as I can tell, you're one of the dudes that helps them achieve a superior legal status to mere flash and blood humans like myself.

This is how it works in the EU as well, and per the GGP commenter, the prescription was for the US to be more like the EU, which is how it was set up in the first place anyway per the GP comment.

> Don’t get me started on how it makes any sense that we don’t leverage the power of the government for something as crucial as life. Why in the god damn fuck is giving birth in this country not free?

Except there are several different viable ways of providing universal healthcare. You can have a single payer system like Canada/Denmark/American Medicare, you can have a single provider system like the UK/Veterans Administration, you can have a purely private non-employer funded system like Switzerland or the Netherlands, you can have a public-private mix like Germany, or only universal catastrophic coverage like in Singapore. Each approach has its own trade-offs, and those trade-offs are political in nature, where some States might prefer one set of trade-offs and others may not.

This is exactly how Canada's single payer healthcare came about. Saskatchewan was the first Province to offer single payer in 1947, followed by Alberta in 1951, etc. By 1961, all Provinces had some form of a single payer healthcare system. To this day, Canada's single-payer system is Provincial, not Federal. The Federal government provides supplemental funding, but that only happened after each Province independently developed its own system, and only after all Provinces unanimously agreed to the Federal health transfer. As of 2020, Federal transfer payments in Canada only amount to 22% (https://www.cmaj.ca/content/192/45/E1408).

Because people get paid to do those jobs, and the government mandating that they do it for free, or for some reduced price is theft of labor. We've already fought that war.