Today, we celebrate the legacy of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.  And appropriately, later this month, we will see one of his successors, the Reverend Raphael Warnock sworn in as a United States Senator from Georgia.

But there is a lot of work still to be done.  And while I could probably write a much longer essay on the full civil rights agenda, I am going to limit this post to a very key symbolic part of the agenda.  Voting Rights was a key part of the King agenda.  And, while other parts of the voting rights agenda are important, today — over 4 million Americans are being denied the most basic of rights, voting representation in the House and the Senate.

At the time of the framing, the United States had vast, mostly unsettled territories.  Even in the states, the settlements were mostly limited to the coasts.  However, between 1784 and 1787, the original Congress under the Articles of Confederation adopted a series of ordinances related to the Northwest Territories (what are currently the states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin) that governed the settlement of those territories and their ultimate admission to statehood.  Under those ordinances, a territory was eligible for statehood when it had population in excess of sixty thousand people. Continue Reading...