The Moral Universe Arc is Long B/c Political Parties Bend and Extend Justice Around and Beyond the Pale.

Photo by Silas Hao on Unsplash

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The legislative process, where ideas to improve society and democracy go to die.

The political process is necessary, but insufficient. Our democratic institutions are restrained and compromised for various reasons. Some of the restraints made more sense when our Constitution was initially developed. However, our democracy was undermined and compromised by slavery. The southern slave states got more than our future bargained for.

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The enslavement of millions created the byproduct of states’ rights, an individual-rights constraining aberration, and abomination. Although the separate states do provide some vital restraints on the federal government, it is hard to disentangle their benefits from the exaggerated value put on them by slavery, and the many internecine disruptions states’ rights loosed on our future.

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The Civil War was a terrible event, and states’ rights was the catalytic converter that made it possible. Its inflated value is a leftover remnant of the Articles of Confederation, and its sovereign, nation-states compact. During the 1787 constitutional convention, the Southern states demanded additional electoral power because of their peculiar institution, and its millions of extra nonvoters, a.k.a. slaves.

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The results of this power struggle were the Three-Fifths Clause that inflated slave state representation in the House, and gave each state two senators, no matter the state’s population, or lack thereof. Those two elements nearly guaranteed many things would not change fast enough, i.e. it preordained our civil war.

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It was only after the war ended, 1865, that any amendments were added having a substantial or positive effect on Black Americans and others,(13th, 14th, 15th & 24th), women (19th), the destitute, and working poor (16th). Besides the 27th Amendment, about congressional salaries, we have not ratified a new one since 1971. Therefore, amendments are clearly a very inefficient tool for changing the power dynamic.

Of our 27 amendments, not mentioned above, the first ten…