> That protects established injustices as much as it protects established freedoms. Perhaps more, since the fundamental structure incorporates a number of injustices.
Not really. The legislature had to pass a law creating slavery, the executive had to sign it, the courts had to uphold it. Any of them could have said no. The same was true of laws prohibiting women from working, or Jim Crow laws, or laws excluding same sex marriage, etc. To enforce any of these things required broad assent, as designed, and they mostly fell to individual branches having enough. Lincoln unilaterally ended slavery, the courts struck down laws against same sex marriage, etc.
There is only a very thin range of things checks and balances actually prevent. First it has to be something the government has to act to prevent rather than merely cease to prop up, which as injustices go is pretty rare in its own right. Then you need at the same time enough support to prohibit it in a simple majority system but not enough support to prohibit it in a system of checks and balances, which crosses off all the most egregious ones -- there is >80% support for laws requiring schools to accept black students, so checks and balances don't prevent those laws from existing, and they do.
What you're left with is the things with 50%+1 support but not e.g. 67% support. But that's what checks and balances are supposed to do -- prevent you from passing laws against things nearly half the country doesn't support having a law against. If you want that law then you need to convince more people first. Is that really so bad?
> Not really. The legislature had to pass a law creating slavery, the executive had to sign it, the courts had to uphold it
Um, no. They didn't have to do that under the system established by the US Constitution. Because slavery predated that system, and was protected by it.
What would have taken positive action under the Constitution was abolishing slavery. But not only were there explicit protections for slavery in the Constitution (the first clause of Article I, Section 9; the next to last clause of Article V), but indirect protection against abolition was also provided by the mechanism the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives (where having slaves gave extra representation), by the allocation of seats in the Senate (equal per State representation gave disproportionate power to the enfranchised citizens of slave states (who chose the government that chose the Senators, prior to direct election of Senators), and the electoral college (which as well enfranchised citizens in any state that disenfranchised any people through indirect election, blended the apportionment systems of the Senate and House, both of which favored slave states.)
> Lincoln unilaterally ended slavery
No, he didn't; slavery was ended (as a matter of law, and aside from penal slavery) by the 13th Amendment, which not only wasn't a unilateral Presidential act, but it wasn't even an act in which the President has a formal role.
And the abolition of slavery didn't abolish all of the structural injustices put in place to protect it.
> What you're left with is the things with 50%+1 support but not e.g. 67% support. But that's what checks and balances are supposed to do -- prevent you from passing laws against things nearly half the country doesn't support having a law against. If
The system the US has allows control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency without majority support of the voting population, especially easily if the geographic distribution of your support favors small states. So not only does it not require supermajority and not prevent laws which have a mere majority support, it actually facilitates laws with minority support as long as it is the structurally favored minority. And it creates a very high bar which requires broad active support by the strucurally favored minority to reverse that arrangements, as it requires a Constitutional Amendment, a process in which the disapprobation of citizens of smaller states is even stronger than their disproportionate power in choosing the political branches of the federal government, and thus setting federal legislation.
> Um, no. They didn't have to do that under the system established by the US Constitution. Because slavery predated that system, and was protected by it.
Predating the constitution doesn't preclude violating it. Lese majeste laws predate the constitution but have been clearly unconstitutional since at least the Bill of Rights, arguably even before (since enacting them was not an enumerated power of the government). Moreover, it still only takes one branch to knock it out. The courts can refuse to uphold it, the executive can refuse to enforce it, and a sufficient majority in the legislature can repeal it even over a veto.
The executive branch can also do so by not enforcing the law, as was often the case with the Fugitive Slave Act. The governments commonly spent no resources looking for runaway slaves in Northern states.
But what one executive branch administration does the next can undo. What the 13th Amendment did was to make it stick.
> And the abolition of slavery didn't abolish all of the structural injustices put in place to protect it.
Because now you're talking about racism rather than slavery, which isn't a single problem, it's many separate ones. But we've been chipping away at them for more than a century now, making progress, and mostly as a result of individual branches -- Brown v. Board of Education in the courts, the Civil Rights Act in Congress, the ouster of mayors and governors who turned firehouses on protestors in favor of those who now don't, etc.
And the remainder of your objections are not about gridlock or checks and balances but about apportionment of representation. Those are reasonable complaints, but you could still have three branches of government and plenty of gridlock even if the President was elected by popular vote and each Senator's vote was in proportion to the number of constituents represented.
No he didn't; The Emancipation Proclamation did not abolish slavery.
> Because now you're talking about racism rather than slavery,
No, I'm talking about the distorted structures I listed that are features of the design of our political system that were placed in the Constitution to protect slavery. The ones that directly dealt with slavery were removed; the ones which were put in to tilt the balance of political power to resistance abolition were not, even after abolition, which is why our federal political system is still heavily tilted toward voters in less populated slates and still heavily rewards the remaining voters in states which effectively disenfranchise other citizens (though, to be fair, the last part was in theory directly addressed by provisions in the 14th Amendment directly calling for loss of representation for doing that, which would counteract that effect, but those provisions have never been enforced even against the most blatant systematic disenfranchisement, leaving the old imbalance fully in effect.)
Racism is a different problem (though one that frequently is involved in leveraging those systematic imbalances.)
Not really. The legislature had to pass a law creating slavery, the executive had to sign it, the courts had to uphold it. Any of them could have said no. The same was true of laws prohibiting women from working, or Jim Crow laws, or laws excluding same sex marriage, etc. To enforce any of these things required broad assent, as designed, and they mostly fell to individual branches having enough. Lincoln unilaterally ended slavery, the courts struck down laws against same sex marriage, etc.
There is only a very thin range of things checks and balances actually prevent. First it has to be something the government has to act to prevent rather than merely cease to prop up, which as injustices go is pretty rare in its own right. Then you need at the same time enough support to prohibit it in a simple majority system but not enough support to prohibit it in a system of checks and balances, which crosses off all the most egregious ones -- there is >80% support for laws requiring schools to accept black students, so checks and balances don't prevent those laws from existing, and they do.
What you're left with is the things with 50%+1 support but not e.g. 67% support. But that's what checks and balances are supposed to do -- prevent you from passing laws against things nearly half the country doesn't support having a law against. If you want that law then you need to convince more people first. Is that really so bad?