Comments Elsewhere

Bithead: Which has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Yes, it does.

If you’re trying to use the fact that people didn’t leave after the Constitution was ratified as evidence that they consented to the Constitution, then basic intellectual honesty requires you to at least abandon this argument when you’re discussing the couple of million people in the United States who did not have the option to leave, and were forced to stay where they were whether they approved of the new Constitution or not.

I think the argument is terrible even for those non-voting Americans who could leave without the threat of being hunted down and violently forced to return, for the reasons I’ve discussed above. But if you honestly want to try to defend an argument based on tacit consent, then you have a baseline obligation to concede that you haven’t proposed any meaningful criteria at all by which enslaved Blacks (just to take one prominent example) could be said to have consented to the authority of the federal Constitution.