If you read what I wrote, it was the South that wanted their slaves counted as full persons for purposes of increasing their power in the House of Representatives. Those who pushed for the 3/5 clause, despite what the Left likes to believe, didn’t view slaves as 3/5 of a person. But thank you for repeating my point.

And as I am sure you know, slaves weren’t considered citizens, nor could they vote. It was not that the South considered slaves whole persons and the north considered them 3/5 persons, making the South more supportive of equality for slaves. It was that the South wanted slaves to count toward the population that representation in congress would be based on, thus giving southern voters more representation per voter than Northern voters.

It was definitely not the case that the South thought more highly of slaves than did the North, and thought of them as complete persons while the North considered them partial persons. It was not out of any good and worthy motives that the South wanted slaves counted as full persons.

Thanks for pointing out the 3/5 clause — as I’m sure you know, the southern delegates to the Constitutional Convention wanted their slaves counted as whole persons so they could increase their power in the House of Representatives. It was the anti-slavery Northern delegates who didn’t want them counted at all .. thus the 3/5 compromise. I know folks on the Left love to cite this as an example of the evil nature of the founders and the Constitution they drafted, which makes for great popular history but is of course innaccurate.

You and Justice Roger Taney apparently believe the Constitution sanctioned slavery and Jim Crow.

BTW, are you going to claim that “the will of the popular majority” didn’t support slavery and Jim Crow, at the time?

At no point did I say I liked the compromise that the Founders came up with to form the United States, allowing slavery. But it’s quite clear that they did.

Micha –
More importantly, try to take in what Bork is saying: An originalist approach to the 14th Amendment supports both apartheid and court-ordered integration. This, according to Michael McConnell of the University of Utah, a far more serious originalist than Bork, “is more typical of the constitutional methodology Bork criticizes than it is of his own professed originalist methodology.”

You committed the same error as Sen. Biden and Sen. Kennedy did during Judge Bork’s confirmation hearings after he was nominated for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court by President Reagan. Get the transcript and read how Judge Bork politely but resolutely schooled them.

What language in the Constitution supported Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson? Do you mean the language sanctioning slavery — where is that exactly? Could you point us to that clause? Separate but equal — where is that clause? You and Justice Roger Taney apparently believe the Constitution sanctioned slavery and Jim Crow. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King disagreed. I’ll throw my lot in with them over you.

I would suggest that he believed that judges ought be restrained instead by following the law. And this is why he advocated for interpreting the U.S. Constitution according to its original understanding, that being the only rational and defensible substitute to having judges making decisions based largely on what just seems right to them at the time.

(Rest in peace, Judge Bork.)