It's Not Looking Too Good for Government of the People, by the People and for the People

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Jennifer N. Victor
@jennifernvictor
"it is possible for a narrow faction of ideologues to weaponize the counter-majoritarian features of our system against the “republican principle.” Re-upping this @jbouie piece bc it's so good. [Article ungated]
Just another day at the store.
nytimes.com
Opinion | It’s Not Looking Too Good for Government of the People, by the People and for the People
The filibuster is only one part of the larger problem of the capture of America’s political institutions by an unrepresentative minority.
8:49 AM · Jun 2, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/27/opinion/uvalde-senate-gun-control.html

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https://archive.ph/hzjbK

The antislavery politicians of the 1840s and 1850s did not speak with a single voice.

Some opposed slavery for moral and religious reasons and hoped to wipe its terrible mark from the body politic of the United States. Some opposed slavery but denied that the federal government had any right to interfere with the institution in the 15 states where it persisted. They were committed to “free soil” in the West more than abolition in the South. Still others weren’t concerned with slavery per se as much as they were fiercely opposed to Black migration from the South. They opposed slavery, and supported colonization, because it was the way to ensure that the United States would remain a “white man’s democracy.”

What tied the antislavery factions of American politics to one another wasn’t a single view of slavery or Black Americans but a shared view of the crisis facing the American republic. That crisis, they said in unison, was the “slave power.”

The “slave power” thesis was the belief that a slaveholding oligarchy ran the United States for its own benefit. It had ruled the nation for decades, went the argument, and now intended to expand slavery across the continent and even further into the North.

The “slave power” thesis was also a claim about the structure of American government itself. As these antislavery politicians saw it, “the real underpinnings of southern power were regional unity, parity in the Senate, and the three-fifths clause of the Constitution,” the historian Leonard L. Richards writes in “The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780 to 1860.” Together, this gave the slaveholding oligarchs of the South a virtual lock on much of the federal government, including the Supreme Court. “Between Washington’s election and Lincoln’s,” Richards points out, “nineteen of the thirty-four Supreme Court appointees were slaveholders.”

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