"The Constitution was born in compromise and survived a civil war when compromise broke down only by radically changing itself. It had relied on the Great Compromise between the small and big states and on a second, “rotten” compromise between the free North and the slaveholding South. In return for empowering the federal government over trade and commerce, the future of slavery was left aside, although slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of apportioning representation. Legally, the “rotten” compromise between North and South was abandoned with the abolition of slavery and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, a constitutional passkey for establishing personal and corporate rights in federal and, increasingly, in state law. The passkey became a liberal tool, used first by right-wing liberals to enfranchise business from the claims of labor and later by left-wing liberals to free citizens from the moral interferences of law on their private conduct."
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Original Language: English
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Edmund Fawcett, Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition (2020), p. 36
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution
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United States Constitution
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