1. You could spend all day on the slanted & misleading history in this @jbouie column why Mitch McConnell is...the new John C. Calhoun? To start with, search the column for mention of Harry Reid, Robert Byrd, or Lyndon Johnson. You won't find them.https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/republicans-racism-african-americans.html …
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11. The federal system, including the provision of a written & amendable constitution, ultimately allows large or lasting majorities to override all opposition. Calhoun clung to a pre-1787, anti-originalist view that the concurrent systems had an absolute veto.
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12. To belabor the obvious, Calhoun was also bad on the merits - he also turned away from the Founders' view of slavery & embraced it as a positive good.
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13. Antebellum South Carolina was also uniquely bad. Bouie describes it as "the paradigmatic slave state" but it was more the extreme example. From 1828-60 it was the only state that held no popular vote for POTUS. Its state government was likewise out of step w/even the South.
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14. Anyway, there are deeper issues w/transporting Calhounism to the modern GOP while totally whitewashing the entire history of the Democratic Party outside the South & the modern progressive posture towards popular sovereignty & constitutional government, but you get the idea.
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