THE ATTACKS ON THE VOTING RIGHTS ACT by the Roberts Court working with state governments under Republican-fascist control are reinstating a 3/5th provision in the Constitution which was, first and foremost about those states benefiting while denying the full person hood of Black People. The Roberts Court, the six Republican-fascists on that court, are dedicated to making as many Black People, other People of Color, others who may vote for Democrats if they vote into 3/5ths people, the states getting to count people they prevent from voting and being full persons under the Constitution while benefiting from counting them in the census, gaining members of the House and votes in the Electoral College for the White Republican-fascist population to press their interests and desires while denying people they manage to stop voting from having representation. That's what that long description from Barbara Jordan documented, her experience of being made a 3/5ths human for almost a century after the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th and 14th Amendments became, allegedly, the law of the land.
The system of Jim Crow which Republicans and the Roberts Court are well in the process of reviving was a real life reality in which de facto slavery and the putrid 3/5th provision actually were fully in place and active. The Warren Court in the gerrymandering cases wouldn't have ever been necessary if other methods of doing the same thing through drawing Congressional and state legislative districts weren't an actual, real life reality of doing what the slave-holders at the Constitutional Convention and the Northern financial interests who dickered with them created for their mutual gain.
The past is, indeed, not even over. It's being recreated in Supreme Court lying-legal blather by those robed thugs who are the power most remote from any kind of democracy in our government. As Louis Boudin conclusively proves, it was the Dred Scott Court created power that has allowed them to recreate as much of antebellum life in the United States as they can, so far, manage. That, in this case it is the perhaps less racist financial power that tried to harness America's indigenous form of fascism, white supremacy to gain the power to enhance their wealth, really what the Northern "founders" who to almost a person where primarily interested in their wealth did with the slave power of Virginia, and, especially South Carolina and Georgia who were constantly blackmailing them over the issue of slavery.
And, it should never be forgotten that as things like the New Jersey Plan, the Virginia plan etc. which ended up with us having the putrid anti-democratic Senate, all of the Northern States were slave States, except Pennsylvania which abolished it by statute and Massachusetts which had done so by legal ruling.*
Women, of course, were also subject to something like the 3/5th rule which was so habitual and so accustomed that it didn't make it into the Constitution or the discussion. As we are seeing the same people, the same Court, the same line of legal jabber which is considered thinking is coming down hard on the gains that women made to do things so basic is controlling their own bodies. I think we have lost a lot by not including things like that in the discussion of the defects of the Constitution which is held to be sacrosanct and a thing of worship instead of what it is, a constant source of problems and a tool of those intent on preventing equality and democracy.
What they are doing in their ecclesiastical drag and their obscure and opaque legal blather is not unlike what Putin wants to do in Ukraine, abolish rights hard won and wrongly considered safe. That is what Putin did in Russia far faster and, considering we had his puppet, Trump, in office - facilitated as the Roberts Court opened us up for direct foreign gangster political influence in the Citizens United Case - none of us should imagine it can't happen here because it is happening here.
* In her fine and, so far unique study of slavery in Maine, Lives of Consequences, about the history of slavery in Maine, the historian Patricia Q. Wall said that she suspected that well after slavery was legally abolished in Maine (which was then a part of Massachusetts) that in many of the remote parts of the state where people had been kept in slavery, things just continued as they had. The law is largely a matter of what people can get away with under it and, though there is scant documentary evidence about the people who had been slaves here, I think she's probably right.
The history of the end of legal slavery in New England and the other Northern States is not exactly clear cut. Massachusetts and so Maine which was part of it, may have recorded no slaves in the 1790 Census but there were people kept in slavery, sometimes formally or informally held as indentured servants, others were still doing pretty much what they had been doing but getting wages. Why Massachusetts and, I would expect, other Northern States didn't get around to legally abolishing slavery until the 13th Amendment was adopted would make an interesting study in itself.
When Maine gained its independence from Massachusetts in 1820, its independence held up by the slave power until they could protect slavery under the Missouri Compromise, it did so as a "free state." I can't resist pointing out that as that happened slavery was still very much legal in New York State under the kind of "abolition" that was favored by the so dishonestly acclaimed Alexander Hamilton. Despite Lin Manuel Miranda's status quo favoring musical sensation, Hamilton was a staunch and steady advocate of, legalized slavery which didn't end for almost a decade after 1820 and, as pointed out in the fine lecture by Ms. Wall linked to above, that didn't mean people were not held in bondage, for decades after that, until the time of the Civil War, former slaves were probably still being held in indentured servitude or other forms of bondage all over the "free states." As I recall, Ms. Wall notes one Woman who had been held in slavery lived till the 1860s, still a "servant.' Though in that case she is the only former slave for whom she could find an actual grave stone with her full name on it. Other's who had held people in slavery were noted in later census as having "other free people" in their households, certainly among those people they had previously been documented as having held in slavery.
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