Politics & Power Quote by Barbara Boxer

Boxer’s line is built to turn a procedural debate into a moral emergency. She starts with a modest concession - “no document is perfect” - a disarming nod to constitutional fallibility that signals she’s not a zealot. Then she tightens the screws: amendment is framed as a one-way ratchet toward inclusion. That’s not neutral constitutional theory; it’s a strategic claim about American progress itself, one that treats rights-expansion as the Constitution’s proper genre and rights-restriction as a kind of category error.

The phrase “decent, loyal Americans” is doing more work than it admits. It borrows the language of wartime belonging and civic virtue to pre-empt the oldest argument against minority rights: that some groups are too alien, too threatening, too morally suspect to deserve full membership. Boxer flips that script. If the people at stake are “loyal,” then the real betrayal is committed by the majority that tries to write them down.

“Permanent second-class citizens” is the rhetorical kill shot. It drags the debate out of the abstraction of federalism and into the shadow of segregation - not by naming Jim Crow, but by invoking its architecture: permanence, legal hierarchy, state-sanctioned inferiority. The subtext is clear: constitutional amendments that restrict rights don’t just reflect public opinion; they launder prejudice into founding text, making discrimination harder to undo and easier to normalize.

Contextually, this fits Boxer’s era of Senate fights over amendments like the Federal Marriage Amendment and other culture-war efforts to constitutionalize exclusion. She’s arguing that the Constitution should be a shield for the unpopular, not a weapon sharpened by the popular.