Joe Manchin Can’t Have It Both Ways
Democrats did not like the Fifteenth Amendment.
In the late 1860s, as Congress debated the proposal to bar disenfranchisement on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” Democratic senators and representatives charged Republicans with imposing a vile despotism on the southern states by enfranchising Black men.
“I now come to this point to say that to deprive any citizen of the right of suffrage is a violation of the principles of our Government as it was ordained, and is a blow direct at the Government itself,” the Republican Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas said. “Who gave any class the right to monopolize the elective franchise?”
“You are now indulging a dream of power as did Belshazzar before the inscription appeared upon the wall of his palace,” the Democrat . “Tyranny
