One of the ironies of history is that an argument that got black men the vote is now an instrument for taking it away. Americans barred from voting because of their criminal record now total more than five million, a number that includes an estimated 13 percent of African-American men, according to the Sentencing Project.

Advocates looking to reduce or eradicate criminal disenfranchisement often home in on an obscure section of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868), one of the three civil rights amendments ratified during Reconstruction. They claim that incorrect or overly broad interpretations of the provision have unjustly denied voting rights to many Americans. Richard M. Re and Christopher M. Re, recent graduates of Yale Law School and Stanford Law School, respectively, argue that they’re wrong. The Fourteenth Amendment was explicitly intended to authorize criminal disenfranchisement, albeit only for serious crimes.

The Fourteenth Amendment extended citizenship and equal protection under the law to former slaves. Drafted when there was insufficient political support for explicit constitutional affirmation of black male suffrage, the amendment requires that states lose congressional representation in proportion to the number of eligible men they bar from voting. Yet it allows states to disenfranchise men guilty of “rebellion, or other crime.” Those words were the work of the radical Republicans who dominated Congress, the authors write.

“I resist the devil, and often it is with a fart that I chase him away.” The fragrant author of this boast? Martin Luther (1483–1546), who ushered in the Protestant Reformation by railing against the sale of indulgences and other practices of the Catholic Church in his famous Ninety-Five Theses (1519).

One would naturally assume that the German monk was a stern and proper man, but Luther was actually rather earthy. That quality reflected an integral part of his understanding of Christianity, argues Eric W. Gritsch, emeritus professor of church history at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. “The promise of Christ’s imminent return made Luther serene and saved him from being dead serious about his own self,” Gritsch says.

Luther was exceptionally pious early in life. As a Catholic priest, he struggled mightily with guilt and the spiritual hierarchies of the church. While poring over Scripture at the University of Wittenberg, Luther grew convinced that the heart of Christian life was faith in God, rather than virtuous deeds, as Catholic doctrine held. “We do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person, or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive,” he wrote (emphasis Luther’s).

What followed for Luther was that people’s lives on earth had relatively little effect on whether they would

In April, the Pew Research Center reported that the net number of people migrating from Mexico to the United States had fallen to zero, and might even have entered negative territory, largely thanks to the evaporation of job prospects in the United States. This finding coincides with the end of a four-decade trend that saw the Hispanic population of the United States rise from 10 million in 1970 to 50 million in 2010. What caused the upsurge? An ill-conceived immigration reform law in 1965 and decades of harsh enforcement policies that backfired, contend Princeton sociologist Douglas S. Massey and Karen A. Pren, manager of Princeton’s Mexican Migration Project.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was intended to open a new era for U.S. immigration policy. The sweeping legislation did away with retrograde quotas on select nationalities, replacing them with quotas that prioritized immigrants’ skills and family connections. Lawmakers also ended the Bracero program, a guest worker scheme for Latin Americans that critics put “on a par with Southern sharecropping.”

The new law made countries in the Western Hemisphere subject to quotas for the first time, however, and the allotments for visas for Latin Americans were woefully insufficient. Mexicans, the largest Latin American migrant group, had previously enjoyed access to unlimited resident visas and about 450,000 guest worker visas through the Bracero program. By the late 1970s, the only