I consider it nothing less than a journalistic scandal that this piece was (1) a cover story, (2) written by their Managing Editor, (3) who serves in an organization dedicated to teaching other journalists about the Constitution, and yet it is rife with factual errors, including many that are obvious simply by reading the Constitution.
Also? ENOUGH with the “slaves were 3/5ths human” crap:
This is one of the most shameless lies peddled by the liberal intelligentsia. The Constitution does not classify people according to race. While the Constitution does compromise with slave-holding interests, free blacks in the North and the South were counted on par with whites for purposes of apportionment and black citizens were voting in five of the original 13 states at the time of the Founding.
As for enslaved blacks, it was the Southern states that wanted to count them as full persons, thereby inflating pro-slavery representation in the House.
The three-fifths compromise was aimed at preventing Southern states from magnifying their own political power. (…)
[The author of the TIME article] is the managing editor of the country’s largest news magazine and, hold your breath, the former president and chief executive officer of the National Constitution Center, where he launched the Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution to “help both professional journalists and students interested in journalism understand constitutional issues more deeply.” He has no excuse for knowing so little about the Constitution.
