Outside of the fact that politics is always important for everything, this is crucially about a "hack" in the 13th amendment, that allowed a backdoor so that slavery could continue, ostensibly "smoothed out", rather than a true abolishment as often portrayed.
The guidelines for Hacker News indicate that anything basically intellectually interesting can potentially qualify, though the relevance of "politics" becomes a thorny issue that gets argued about. There seems to be no clear cut definition for what is too political here to be on topic. My suspicion is that it has a lot to do with framing.
The framing of this piece may not go over well due to coming across like the whole point is to slam the Clintons. But I am reading it and finding it interesting. I recently wrote about my negative opinions of prison in America today and this fits nicely with that.
http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2017/06/prison-food-...