FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

**A Citizen Puts the Supreme Court on Notice:

Has the Court Drifted from the Civil Rights Act of 1866?**

Ted Hayes, longtime civil rights activist known as “Mr. Citizen Patriot,” has issued a formal letter, affidavit, and Notice & Demand to Justices Clarence Thomas, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the full Supreme Court of the United States, calling for constitutional reconsideration of the original remedial purpose of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment.

Los Angeles, California — In a bold and unusual act of civic and constitutional protest, Ted Hayes, veteran homelessness activist, public witness, and self-described “Guardian of the Republic,” has formally placed the Supreme Court on notice over what he describes as a long pattern of constitutional drift away from the original remedial purpose of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

At the center of Hayes’s submission is a blunt charge: that the great post-Civil War promise made to the formerly enslaved was not merely weakened by politics, but gradually blurred by judicial interpretation. In Hayes’s view, the problem is not simply bad policy or public confusion. The problem is a failure of execution—from Andrew Johnson’s resistance to the 1866 Act, to what Hayes argues has become a historic drift within the Court itself.

“This is not just a legal question,” Hayes said. “It is a moral and constitutional reckoning. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was born from blood, bondage, and broken covenant. The question is whether the Supreme Court has remained faithful to the remedy that Congress intended, or whether that remedy has been interpreted into something so broad that its original beneficiaries have been lost in the fog.”

Hayes’s submission specifically highlights the relationship between the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment, arguing that the Amendment was meant to secure and constitutionalize the Act—not sever it from its historical foundation. His materials call particular attention to the arc from the Johnson veto to later Supreme Court doctrine, raising the question of whether the Court’s own jurisprudence helped loosen the original anchor of federal citizenship.

In sending the package to Justices Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson, while copying the remaining members of the Court, Hayes says he is not attempting to harass or theatrically provoke the Justices, but to place before them a matter that history itself will judge. “This is a notice to the Court,” he said, “but it is also a notice to the country. We cannot keep speaking of citizenship, equality, and constitutional order while ignoring the historical remedial core of the very law that gave federal citizenship real substance after slavery.”

The package includes a formal letter, a sworn affidavit, and a Notice & Demand for Constitutional Consideration. Hayes intends the release to reach legal media, law schools, civil rights organizations, Black media, clergy, constitutional scholars, and the broader public.

Hayes, whose public work has long focused on homelessness, moral accountability, and the unfinished business of American democracy, says this latest action is part of a wider effort to force public attention back onto Reconstruction, federal citizenship, and the true constitutional meaning of remedy. “If the Court has drifted,” he said, “then the people have a duty to say so. Respectfully. Firmly. Publicly.”

Media Contact

Ted Hayes
Mr. Citizen Patriot
Guardian of the Republic
Los Angeles, California