Over at HNN,
David Brian Robertson, the Curator's Distinguished Teaching Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis,
has a post that’s inspired by his new book,
The Original Compromise: What the Constitution’s Framers were Really Thinking (Oxford University Press, 2013). The post commences:
Practical politicians – like the very human politicians portrayed in the movie Lincoln – wrote the U.S. Constitution. Deep mistrust and bitter disagreements divided these politicians, as they did in the Civil War era and as they do now, in the fight over sequestration and the budget deficit. They negotiated their way through these differences; compromise produced the Constitution, as it later produced the Thirteenth Amendment and the other landmark measures of American government. Their own compromises left us a government that cannot work without compromise.
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