As most of us learned at school, the U.S. Constitution requires a supermajority of three-fourths of the states to ratify any amendment.

Article 5 has stood us in good stead since the nation’s founding.

Now the nation’s chief executive claims he has the authority to amend it on his own — without Congress, without the states, but perhaps with the approval of a Supreme Court, most of whose members owe their seats to him.

That’s a power no president in our nation’s history has claimed. The Constitution doesn’t give the chief executive the authority. They knew it. But this administration, keen to remove 13 million undocumented immigrants from the country as fast as it can, has carved out an exception for the president.

What sticks in the president’s craw in this instance is a key section of the 14th Amendment, approved by the states and ratified in 1868, that extended “birthright citizenship” to every person born or naturalized in the U.S. The purpose was to ensure civil rights for freed Black people during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.

In so doing, the 14th Amendment overturned the Dred Scott decision that had denied citizenship to Black people. As Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote in 1857: “The black man has no rights a white man is bound to respect.”

Thus, the 14th Amendment requires states to provide equal protection under the law to all persons within their jurisdiction, preventing discriminatory laws, and forbidding states from depriving individuals of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

Section 3 disqualifies individuals who have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the United States from holding federal or state office. Less known is that it addresses representation in Congress, the validity of the public debt, and prohibits states from assuming or paying debts incurred in aid of insurrection.

Yet, there are exceptions to birthright citizenship, including the children of foreign diplomats, who are born on American soil.

As such, the 14th Amendment is considered a cornerstone of civil rights law in the United States, providing a constitutional basis for various legal protections and advancements. This amendment has been subject to extensive judicial interpretation, shaping its application to various issues, ranging from racial discrimination to individual liberties, and has stood the tests of time.

As the president’s lawyers advance novel theories to make his case, chief among them that the 14th Amendment has been misinterpreted all these years and was never intended to apply to anyone but freed Blacks, supporters of this administration — self-proclaimed patriots — cheer the president on.

My concern is not directed at the merits of the arguments, but for the broader issue: whether, given our system of checks and balances that divides power among the congressional, the executive and the judiciary branches, this move represents a dangerous attempt to concentrate too much power in one branch of the government.

I believe it does.

Here’s what’s at stake if the president gets his way: Freedom of religion, speech, the press, the right to assemble peaceably and to petition the government to redress grievances; the right to bear arms; protection from illegal search and seizure; the right to a grand jury, the prohibition against double jeopardy, the right not to incriminate one self, due process; the right to a speedy trial by jury, with witnesses and counsel; the right to a jury trial in civil lawsuits, protection from cruel and unusual punishment; and the people’s retention of non-enumerated rights.

In other words, the whole shebang.

The amendments outlined above are collectively known as the Bill of Rights.

Moving on, the 12th Amendment lays out the process to elect the president and vice president, the 13th Amendment freed abolished slavery, the 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race, the 19th Amendment gave women the vote, the 22nd Amendment a forbade poll tax, and the 26th Amendment gave people the right to vote at age 18.

The implications of granting any president authority to reach in and muck with the Constitution are profound. That is, if the Supreme Court greenlights the president, and it may, what then is to stop him or any other president that follows, from gutting the Constitution, both the document itself and its 27 amendments?

If a president, any president, is allowed to do whatever he wants with any part of the Constitution he does not like, bypassing Congress and the states, this nation would lose everything that has made it what it has been for nearly 250 years.

And that should scare the hell out of Americans on both sides of the political aisle.

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Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.