Posted on 01/06/2011 1:51:21 PM PST by Dominic01
WASHINGTON – Lawmakers took turns reading the Constitution on the House floor Thursday, a nod to tea partiers who put Republicans in power. Even the nation's founding text got caught in political tussling: Democrats questioned omitting amended sections that reflect how the document has changed over time, such as one that classified slaves as three-fifths of a person...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
What is their point — other than they don’t like America.
Blacks were 3/5 ths of a person as a compromise with Democrats that didn’t want to count them at all. Stinking puke Demotwats.
Why is the reading of the Constitution a problem? All our political institutions are still founded on this document.
Democrats have always supported slavery.
Only the day before the freshmen Congressmen swore an oath on entering into high office to perserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies foreign and domestic.
What more fitting way to follow up than to read that cherished document, as it now stands and as they are pledged to follow.
These DEMS didn’t know their Constitution and that led to some awful law and their colleague’s defeat at the polls.
Smarten up.
Actually, neither black people nor any other race are mentioned. Not all slaves were black, and not all slaveholders were white.
The democrats mostly walked out.
What a bunch of evil totalitarian pr*cks.
Did I hear right that some Dem pulled a parliamentary protest that the document was not submitted 72 hours prior to being read? It was in another thread I thing.
Please tell me it was a joke; I did not watch the reading.
Did I hear right that some Dem pulled a parliamentary protest that the document was not submitted 72 hours prior to being read? It was in another thread I thing.
Please tell me it was a joke; I did not watch the reading.
“Not all slaves were black, and not all slaveholders were white.”
WHAT ARE YOU AN IDIOT?
Did any Democrats participate in the reading?
Actually, I just learned that this was an effort by the northern anti-slavery crowd to diminish the South’s representation in congress when it came to apportioning seats. It seems that the South was willing to count slaves as people when it came to seats but at no other time. Normally, 30,000 people would result in a seat. Due to this measure, it took 50,000 slaves to gain a seat thus lessening the power of the South.
The three-fifths counting of slaves was not one of value but of representation. Free citizens (black, white and otherwise) were each counted as one for the purpose of determining the number of representatives from each state, whereas it took 25 slaves to count as 15 citizens for the same purpose.
If that had not been the case, the southern states would have had proportionately more representatives and we might still have slavery.
The Democrat Party did not exist at the time, nor any other.
States with more slaves wanted them to be counted fully, as this would mean more representation for that state in the House and Electoral College. States most opposed to slavery didn't want them counted at all, for the opposite reason. BTW, at the time almost all the states had at least some slaves.
3/5 was the compromise arrived at, but the story behind it is almost exactly the opposite of what is commonly thought.
Rush Limbaugh spent a lot of time on his show today talking about this.
It was indeed a compromise, but you have the sides in the compromise backwards: the political forebearers of the Democrats—the slaveholders in the South—wanted slaves to count as full persons so that slaveholding states would have more seats in Congress. It was the anti-slavery North that didn’t want to count slaves at all so that slaveholders would not get extra representation on the basis of persons they held as property who were not allowed to vote.
Okay, you guys got me. I stand corrected.
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