And legal systems of any nation are more than just the constitution.
So the idea that you can just read one clause in the constitution and therefore clearly know what is allowed and isn't (also, even the interpretation of that clause is not as easy as you are portraying here) is absolutely false.
In any case when a legal system clashes with the wording of the constitution it is that legal system that is wrong. That's what "highest law in the land" means. That is the entire purpose of having a constitution.
Experts love to hide behind "it's complicated!" but in this case they have nowhere to hide.
Pull over a guy, take the paper cash out of his wallet without charging him with a crime. No amount of wordplay can make that constitutional in a reasonable persons mind.
What we are talking about here is just taking the cash, sending you on your way and spending it, sidestepping your legal rights like access to a court provided attorney or a jury trial. It probably doesn't do much to prevent crime even, the fentanyl runners would much prefer you just take the cash they have on them and let them go.
"Shall not be infringed" is a super common refrain among the 2A crowd but taken hyper literally you couldn't take guns away from criminals actively in prison.
I think civil forfeiture is far outside the bounds of what could be condoned under the Bill of Rights but my interpretation only matters at a distance of influencing representatives to pass laws or the SC to rule differently.
If you prefer a criminal matter, swap it out for fraud.
Could you give an example of this?
It's a little hard to reconcile slavery with, say, the Fifth Amendment's prohibition on being "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law".
You would've granted slave owners more votes? You feel they were under represented? If I lived in a state alone with a enough slaves I should have been able to dictate policy for the entire nation?
I would have not had slaves.
The alternative here was the articles of confederation or nothing and the states go their own ways as countries, not some fantasy in which the southern states torpedoed their own economies out of some love of the nation.
The constitution and the included 3/5ths compromise most certainly brought about the end of slavery much faster than taking a hard line circa 1790, or anything else that tipped the scales away from the united states forming a national identity would have.
You can't pretend it's not contradictory, though, in a document talking about rights and liberty, and that was the question posed.
That is what amendments do - they change things, and those ones came at no small price. So what is the point about complaining about a problem that six hundred thousand people already lost their lives in a successful attempt to resolve? Slavery has been illegal in this country for a century and a half.
No argument against your point, but a similar[0] Constitutional issue persists today:
Residents of Wyoming are established as 3.23 people for Congressional representation.
Residents of California are about 4/5ths of a person.
[0] Nothing is similar to slavery, and specifically here the fact that the voting power of these 3/5ths allocations was given to people who did not represent the interests of the humans that comprised the allocations in the first place!
> No argument against your point, but a similar Constitutional issue persists today:
Yes, a very similar issue does exist, but the one you are pointing to is not similar.
> Residents of Wyoming are established as 3.23 people for Congressional representation.
The unequal weighting of population for representation in (in descending order of distortion) the Senate, Electoral College, and House as a whole is not really similar to the awarding of extra weight to those who are permitted by the State to vote specifically for people denied liberty as was done in the 3/5 compromise.
The fact that those disenfranchised by felony disqualification are counted—and as whole persons, not 3/5—especially given the way targeted criminalization and penal servitude directly replaced chattel slavery, is, OTOH, a very similar issue.
In addition to felons (permanently disenfranchised in most states), you have temporarily-disenfranchised prisoners, and prison-based population distortions that favor some districts over others.
You could probably make an even greater comparison between the voting powers of:
- a Californian living in a district with high noncitizen population
- a Wyomingian living in a district with a large penitentiary