Return of ‘Three-Fifths’ of a Person

[marmar]

from Consortium News:


Return of ‘Three-Fifths’ of a Person
January 26, 2013

Exclusive: Stung by back-to-back defeats to Barack Obama, the Republican Party is undertaking a national strategy to devalue the votes of blacks and other minorities, a partial revival of the infamous clause in the U.S. Constitution rating African-American slaves as “Three-Fifths” of a person, says Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry


Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Old Confederacy, is a fitting place for the neo-Confederates who now control the Republican Party to reinstate a version of the slave-era provision counting African-Americans as “Three-Fifths” of a person for the purpose of representation.

This revival of the infamous “Three-Fifths” clause of the U.S. Constitution is part of a Republican scheme to give lesser value to the votes of African-Americans and other minorities who tend to cluster in cities than to the votes of whites in rural, more GOP-friendly areas. The goal is to give future Republican presidential candidates a thumb-on-the-scale advantage in seeking the White House, as well as to assure continued Republican control of the House of Representatives.

The scheme is a direct Republican response to the emergence of Barack Obama’s coalition, which pulled together the votes of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and young urban whites (who are more comfortable with a multi-cultural future for the United States).

The racist and right-wing white males, who now dominate the Republican Party, have seemingly concluded that they can only continue to dominate American politics if they can devalue the votes of Americans who are inside this Obama coalition. If the Republican schemes prevail, those votes may well be worth even less than three-fifths of the vote of a rural white. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/01/26/return-of-three-fifths-of-a-person/

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[ProfessionalLeftist]

2. They would revert completely back to slavery if they could...

...for African Americans and women (reproductive & sexual slavery via elimination of contraception and safe abortion + sanctioning of rape).

They seem to be viciously working towards it.

[uriel1972]

3. I had this argument with my dad the other night

He was talking along the lines that people would never do "something like that" the "that" being The New Mexico's Gov. move to outlaw abortions as tampering the evidence, that "Surely a certificate of abortion would be sufficient proof" yada yada yada.

I told him that it wasn't and that his problem was he was seeing the world like a sane reasonable person and these people were far from sane and reasonable. He would still be surprised by this. I would not.

THESE ARE PEOPLE WHO ARE FAR, FAR, FAR FROM SANE AND REASONABLE.

[santamargarita]

4. These racists bastards aren't even one fifth human!

[pscot]

5. You overestimate what it means

to be human, and underestimate the broad appeal of what these primitives are up to.

[MrMickeysMom]

6. Geez...

I'm getting the feeling that the ONLY agenda of the Republican party is to return to antebellum Civil War, Georgia, complete with bull-whips.

I'm seeing bills in Pennsylvania being introduced of the same ilk the same way.

Wasn't there a post on DU this last week indicating that had Obama's election been decided by this new math, then rather than the electoral college, he would only have won 4 our of the 13 states? Since Obama won over 51 percent of the popular vote, this same new math would have relegated every African American's vote to three fifths? No shit.

Tell me this is another ALEC initiative. All the Republican run states are running with these senseless Acts in their General Assemblies.

[SunSeeker]

7. Sometimes, the more things change the more they stay the same.

And the miscreants who are today's Republican party have not changed since they were on the losing side of the Civil War.

[uriel1972]

8. Party of Lincoln,

Somehow they got lost on the way.

[oldandhappy]

9. too bad about the 15th amendment!

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

[greymattermom]

10. all this assumes that folks don't move

but I see changes everywhere. New housing is being built closer to cities, and poor folks are slowly shifting to close in suburbs. What will the populations of these oddly drawn districts really be in a few years?