Interestingly enough, each of the three Constitutions of the USSR–1924, 1936, and 1977–explicitly guaranteed the right of the constituent Union Republics (SSRs) to secede from the Soviet Union. Even the '36 “Stalin Constitution”. Of course I think they were about as sincere about this as they were about guaranteeing the rights of Soviet citizens to “freedom of religious worship”, “freedom of speech”, “freedom of the press”, “freedom of assembly, including the holding of mass meetings” and “freedom of street processions and demonstrations”.
And I’m trying to recall what the Official SDMB definition of “government cheese” is.
I’ll wipe and move on …
Exactly. And America will be around longer. Nations are not, perhaps, immortal, but they can be very long-lived; regimes and constitutions and political systems are mayflies in comparison.
Nitpick: Representation was never meant to be based on a state’s population of voters. Many white men could not vote at the time the Constitution was ratified; and women and children, who could not vote, were included in the population estimates. Also – a point often forgotten whenever anybody spouts the phrase “three-fifths human” – that clause draws a distinction between the slave and the free, not between the black and the white. There were free blacks (not voters, but free) in every slave state (at first) and each was counted as one full person for representative purposes.
Sure, but my point is that those non-voting slaves inflated the strength of the voters in those slave-holding states, in a way that the voters in non-slave holding states did not have. People in the non-slaveholding states who didn’t have the franchise (e.g. - because they didn’t meet a property qualification) could always hope someday to obtain the franchise; that wasn’t the case for the slaves. Perversely, the way slaves were counted strengthened the voting powers of their masters, to help their masters maintain the slavery system.