Answering Questions Before Continuing On

I was asked two things, one "why do you hate Hamilton" the other, "why are you going over that stuff".  The answer to the first is that the hagiographic mythology of "Hamilton" is indoctinating a new generation into a fictitious cult of the benevolent "Founders," though, for a change, a Northerner who is widely believed to have not owned slaves - he did, through his wife and her family, some of those in New York who held the most people in slavery - and who is presented as an opponent of slavery when he was as involved in its continuation as anyone else.  Beware a writer of musicals who has read ONE biography of someone like Hamilton.  Especially one hagiographic biography.* The second is as plain as the voter-suppression, the imposition of Trump through the slavery-empowering Electoral College and so many other things that are happening right now.

The reason that it's important to go over the actual record of what James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, etc. said were their motives in constructing the United States Constitution the way it was, to investigate how many of the features it was given by them and their colleagues, both those which allegedly disappeared with the Civil War and the abolition and emancipation amendment of the 1860s and others, later and those who no one denies were retained were put there to prevent egalitarian democracy, justice, equality of access to the necessities of life, and to allow the theft of peoples labor, the product of their labor, their basic civil rights and the ability of the oligarchs to do that and to wield control and power over The People is and has been ever present in the United States Constitution and, except in the rarest of cases, courts and, especially, the Supreme Court has acted in ways that damage instead of protect egalitarian democracy, civil rights of minorities, economic justice, etc.

Saturday's short passage from that pseudo-hero of abolitionism - as seen on Broadway - Alexander Hamilton quoted him as explaining why New Yorkers who were opposed to slavery should accept the slave-power enhancing corruptions inserted by such people as James Madison and other slave masters into the Constitution so as to prevent the larger number of voters in states where the opposition to slavery was already building from abolishing the crime in the country.  He put it in terms of the slave power never agreeing to form a union with the other states AND HE PUT IT IN THE CRUDEST TERMS OF THE SELF-INTEREST OF THE WEALTHY IN NORTHERN STATES, IN TERMS OF INDIGO, TOBACCO AND OTHER VALUABLE COMMODITIES PRODUCED IN SLAVE ECONOMIES BY THE STOLEN LABOR OF SLAVES.  The specific corruption so supported by Hamilton and embedded into the Constitution was the notorious 3/5ths rule which, for purposes of apportioning Congressional representation, electoral votes, the distribution of money and other benefits, counted slaves who were not only not allowed to vote but against whom that excess of power given to the slave owners would be used.

You might think that's something that disappeared with the Civil War amendments to the Constitution but the reimposition of de facto slavery and the Jim Crow system which prevented Black People and others from voting was an effective extension of the 3/5ths provision that has found a newer form in the tide of Republican voter suppression which the Supreme Court is allowing to do exactly the same thing, now.  It is the kind of thing that on a state level was used by the Republican-fascist government of Michigan to annul the rights of mostly Black voters in a number of places and which resulted directly in such things as selling off publicly held assets for the profit of Republican's supporters and the poisoning of the population of Flint. 

If you're waiting for the Roberts Court to admit that's what's going on, the disenfranchisement by Republicans - controlled by neo-Confederates and with an actual traitor to a foreign despot in the White House - putting like minded fascists such as Neil Gorsuch on the court - you are living a fools dream, one which is promoted by the media who have normalized this under other provisions put into the Constitution as interpreted by the cream of Ivy League privilege on past and the current Courts.

The observations of Wendell Phillips, of William Lloyd Garrison, of Congressman John Quincy Adams (Not to be confused with the John Quincy Adams before his own disastrous time as president, the result of a corrupt deal which he spent the rest of his public life repenting of.) are as relevant today as they were when they railed against the corrupt Constitution because all that changed were a few words and legalistic postures.  The same malignancy that afflicted the country in the 1840s is still there, the same sources of that pathology are there, embedded in the Constitution just where they were installed in the 1780s and retained as Congresses, administrations, state legislatures and more than any, Courts, under the force of corruption, themselves, have done nothing to hurt and much to enhance those corruptions.

*  I don't recall who it was who pointed out that in the multi-volume and, at its time considered authoritative, biography of Columbus by Samuel Eliot Morrison pretty much brushed off the genocide of Native Americans that he started, he being an especially brutal, cruel and murderous murderer of them.  One thing is certain, no one who valued the lives and rights of the people Columbus oppressed and murdered would have done that, so many of those trained in academic history and biography and, most of all, the law, don't care about such people and they're the ones who write the articles and books and publish them and review them.  You often have to go back and fact check their critics to get a full picture of an historical figure.  Anyone who believes they're going to get the real Hamilton and an appreciation of how his Constitution still works from watching a stupid Broadway musical is both stupid and dangerous.