My Friends We Are In A Constitutional Crisis, We Have Been All Along

I will again recommend that if you haven't now, you should read The Constitution a Pro-Slavery Compact, or Excerpts From The Madison Papers, etc selected by Wendell Phillips because of what happened last night, which if Charles Pierce and many other erudite, astute observers are right, could lead us all into serfdom for generations.   And what happened is a direct result of the compromise that the commercial aristocrats of the northern states (or in late 18th century usage the "eastern states") made with the slave-holding aristocracy of the southern states, a series of threats, blackmail and overt bribes which is the real story of how the peculiar federal system of the United States was formed.  For example, the slave holders insisted on and got

- The disproportionate representation of small, slave-holding states in the undemocratically constituted Senate.

- The ability to count slaves for purposes of representation in the House of Representatives though the representatives so chosen would only represent the slave-owners.  The infamous 3/5th provision, adopted under explicit blackmail by the slave owners.  You might hear the argument made that that disappeared with the post-civil war amendments but as "free" Black People were disenfranchised under Jim Crow, the de facto slave power increased their representation by the 2/5th while making sure those representatives didn't represent the Black  residents of the state who they would never have to answer to.  That is something that is being made more general across the country, exacerbated in the form of Republican vote suppression laws.

- The electoral college which incorporates the disproportionate representation contained in the two previous items and which grants a grotesque share of voting power to the residents of the smallest states while diminishing the voting power of the largest states.   It has also produced two presidents who took office with a minority of the popular vote in the last 17 years, resulting in Trump.

- The various parts of the Bill of Rights - drastically altered from the original proposal of George Mason and set in such generalized and vague 18th century rhetoric that Supreme Courts, either through malicious intent or the starry-eyed stupidity of impractical idealists, has handed the politically effective media over to the oligarchs on whose behalf the Republicans in Congress acted even while their own constituents opposed what they were doing.  In many cases even as the provisions in the putrid bill was padded to further enrich the members of the House and Senate who voted for it and the Trump regime  .

The bleats of the media about an allegedly impending "constitutional crisis" which is almost certain to arise as the Trumpian fascists and their supporters in the government, the courts and the media, try to make the gangster traitor into an absolute ruler are way too late.  The constitutional crisis has been an ongoing feature of life in the United States since the day the Constitution was adopted.   It was a crisis for Black slaves, for free Black People, for the Native inhabitants of North America, for various disenfranchised White People - you should read how the "founders" considered allegedly "free" White residents of the north in terms not much different from the ones they regarded the overt slaves of the slave states (including those in the North.   For poor people, for members of minority groups, for workers, for the unemployed, etc. we are in a crisis that is the direct result of the Constitution of the United States and the government and courts that operate under its corruptions.

The Constitution of the United States is what generated this catastrophe for egalitarian democracy because the "founders" almost all hated equality, they preferred their own privilege, they disdained "The Common Man".   That is apparent in just about every page of James Madison's and the other "founders" own writing as the great abolitionist Wendell Phillips documented.

I have mentioned before that with Trump, a Putin crime family asset as President of the United States and the corrupt Republican Party which will certainly do what they can to keep the known traitor and babbling, incompetent crook in office - and if not him than the equally treasonous and criminal Pence, we are already in the gravest crisis this country has faced since the slave-power started the Civil War.   The start to reform the corrupt slave-power Constitution made after the Civil War was quickly ended by the Electoral College and the corrupt bargain that put Rutherford Hayes in the presidency, who allowed the slave owners to reimpose a de facto continuation of the antebellum regime and continued with the florid corruption that had already started under the presidency of Ulysses Grant.  The same northern commercial interests were not really interested in reforming such a useful vehicle that was producing the corruptions of the gilded-age that Pierce believes a revival of is the goal of the Paul Ryans of the Republican-fascists.   That we have not managed to get rid of even at least the Electoral College, at the very least quarantining the anti-democratic features the slave power insisted on in the Congress is definitive evidence that it cannot continue.   The Trump regime proves that we cannot continue this way.

If the only answer to getting rid of the vestiges of slave power which the Republicans-fascists have used to bring us to the crisis we're in is for parts of the country unwilling to live with it to leave, it might be the only way to save egalitarian democracy in some of the states.  I hate "states rights" with all the passion I have against the slave-apartheid ideology that invented the slogan.  This isn't "states rights" it's salvaging democracy from the ruins left from the ripping off of the various, partial patches that have been being put on the Constitution since the 19th century reform movements, the abolition movement and that for Women's suffrage, foremost.  That is what the Republicans are doing, dismantling anything that made living under the corrupt Constitution tolerable for a week, never mind decades and lifetimes.