What better way to celebrate America’s independence than trying to trivialize its founders? If it sounds odd, just know that that’s what ABC News did during its Fourth of July weekend coverage.
In a “This Week” piece regarding the Constitution and referencing the founders, ABC’s John Donvan made this curious statement:
The reality is that the framers – posed in paintings as though frozen on an American Olympus – they were not gods, they were guys – guys who didn’t give women the vote and let slavery stand for the time being and who, by the way, were trying to create at the time a stronger central government, of course not too strong, leaving to us a Constitution that we could fix, as needed, – sorry, make that amend – which we’ve now done 27 times.
And more…
What Donvan doesn’t seem to understand is that the founders were brilliant enough to create a document that could expand. That was the point. The amendment procedure was essential to the Constitution, and was utilized early on to create the Bill of Rights. And it was through that process that women were given the right to vote.
Donvan also doesn’t seem to understand the three-fifths compromise. Many try to use that section of the Constitution — which counted the slave population as three-fifths* — to show the founders were decidedly pro-slavery. But actually, the controversial segment was used to help defeat slavery. That’s because the slave states wanted to count the slaves as full people in order to gain more power. But if that happened, it could have had severe consequences in enshrining slavery in the country forever. So the “compromise” was reached to only count the entire slave population* as three-fifths, thus creating a more even balance of power.
