> would counter that our reverence for the founders and their documents has papered over a lot of fucked up shit baked into our governance (the fact that a Wyom

> would counter that our reverence for the founders and their documents has papered over a lot of fucked up shit baked into our governance (the fact that a Wyoming vote is 50x more valuable than a California vote is hard to get past). I'm glad you brought this up, because it, to me, exposes the core of the problem. The fact that Wyoming's vote is 50x more valuable than California's isn’t unique to the US, and is the case in many Federations that grant co-sovereignty. In Switzerland, the upper house is set up in exactly the same way; the number of people represented by a single seat in their upper house varies by a factor of 45.8, due to the equal representation as opposed to proportional representation. The same is true of the European Union, whose upper house also grants equal representation to Malta and Germany, with a veto power. Ditto Australia. That's exactly what you want if you're trying to balance the needs of a decentralized and heterogenous federation, and that's how the US was set up. This doesn't allow the minority to rule against the majority, but it does allow the minority to protect itself from the majority with a veto power on Federal legislation (but absolutely not for State legislation). Appealing to anti-slavery is a poor argument against this aspect of Switzerland's system, as is the case for America. Bringing up the Founders' alleged hypocrisy vis-a-vis slavery strikes me as a game of misdirection to poorly argue against the merits of building anti-majoritarian checks that allow minorities to protect themselves from majorities from passing new laws onto them. If you really think that the US should be structured as a weaker Federation (or perhaps even a unitary republic), as opposed to the more strong Federal republic of the status quo, you can argue that on the merits (and to be sure, it's certainly debatable!) without conflating it with slavery, or ad hominem attacks against the Founders. It would be tantamount to attacking the merits of having a strong central bank by appealing to Alexander Hamilton's philandering adultery. I’d also add that appealing to slavery hypocrisy is a particularly poor line of attack on a strong Federal system with a Senate-like institution, because the U.S. Senate was proposed by the Free States (New Jersey Plan, Connecticut Compromise), not the more populous slave States, which wanted a purely proportionally apportioned legislature (Virginia Plan). > I don't think reasonable people can disagree about Jefferson being a hypocrite. Reasonable people can absolutely disagree about whether Jefferson's hypocrisy was justifiable, given the morals of the time. And further, reasonable people can support the "fucked up shit baked into our governance" as features and not bugs, and appeal to Jefferson (and Madison) in doing so.