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As the wording of the amendment evolved during the Congressional debate, the principle of the debt's inviolability became a general proposition, applicable not just to the Civil War debt but to all future accrued debts of the United States. The Republican Senate leader, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, declared that by placing the debt "under the guardianship of the Constitution," investors would be spared from being "subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress." Two years later, on the verge of the amendment's ratification, its champions inside the Republican Party made their intentions absolutely clear, proclaiming in their 1868 party platform that "national honor requires the payment of the public indebtedness in the utmost good faith to all creditors at home and abroad," and pronouncing any repudiation of the debt "a national crime." More than three generations later, in 1935, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, ruling in the case of Perry v. the United States, revisited the amendment and affirmed the "fundamental principle" that Congress may not "alter or destroy" debts already incurred. As the wording of the amendment evolved during the Congressional debate, the principle of the debt's inviolability became a general proposition, applicable not just to the Civil War debt but to all future accrued debts of the United States. The Republican Senate leader, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, declared that by placing the debt "under the guardianship of the Constitution," investors would be spared from being "subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress." Two years later, on the verge of the amendment's ratification, its champions inside the Republican Party made their intentions absolutely clear, proclaiming in their 1868 party platform that "national honor requires the payment of the public indebtedness in the utmost good faith to all creditors at home and abroad," and pronouncing any repu

Matt Beynon Rees (former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time mag) writesprovocative mysteries set in today's Palestinian territories - adopting a humanist perspective focused on ordinary people. A modest protagonist, an aging schoolteacher Omar Yussef, is no one's idea of a hero. But he proves his courage by daring to keep an open mind in a closed society.

'That undercurrent of violence I felt when I was 6 was there again, present in the easy devaluation of the word "nigger." I knew that it was that very history of violence - my dead great-great-grandfather's ghost and all the young black men who died at the hands of people who thought they were lesser - that was the subtext. This was why I felt so threatened, so overwhelmed, why I was often silenced when people said these things to me. [Violence] in fact exerted a strong undertow in the present. That it could take my great-great-grandfather, but also take young men like Oscar Grant III, shot to death by a transit officer in Oakland in 2009, like Trayvon Martin, like my only brother, killed by a hit-and-run drunken driver who was charged with leaving the scene of an accident but never with the crime of my brother's death. That it could assert they were less in life and deny them justice after death as well. That living in a country where one group of people owned another group of people for some 250 years yielded a culture where one life was worth less than another. Again and again. Then and now.... There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it. And in confronting it, we rob it of some of its dark pull. Its senseless, cold drag. When we speak, we assert our human dignity. That is the worth of a word.'