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Then, there’s the Post’s ritual repeating of the falsehood that the Founders viewed black people as “three-fifths of a person.” That is a wholly tendentious misreading of the Three-Fifths Clause. Don Fehrenbacher is a leading authority on this. In his penetrating study, The Slaveholding Republic, he writes: “[The] fraction ‘three-fifths’ had no racial meaning. It did not represent a perception of blacks as three-fifths human…” It was a compromise on methods of levying taxes and apportioning representation in Congress.

Further, the Three-Fifths Compromise reduced the power in Congress of slaveholding states while giving an electoral bonus to any state that voluntarily emancipated its slaves. When seven of the original thirteen states abolished slavery, they were allowed to count free black people in the census for purposes of representation in Congress.

It is especially galling to have liberals attack Republicans on these matters. They forget that it was Republicans who gave us the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments — those great guarantees of civil rights. Every vote cast against those amendments was cast by a Democrat. It was Republicans who passed the first anti-lynching bill in the House — in 1922. Those bills were routinely killed by Senate Democrats until 1957.

The Democratic Party did much to overcome its legacy. Starting in 1948, with Mayor Hubert Humphrey’s powerful call for civil rights at the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia, right up to Lyndon Johnson signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act that had first been offered by President Kennedy, the Democrats deserve credit.

But in all that time, they were competing with a Republican Party whose civil rights credentials were solid and understood. Without Sen. Everett Dirksen’s solid phalanx of Republicans, the Democrats’ filibuster against the Civil Rights Act could not have been broken.

Let’s rejoice that we have come this far. Let’s not use the reading of the Constitution as an occasion for scoring cheap — and false — political points. Let’s proceed as Lincoln proceeded: With malice toward none.

Ken Blackwell and Bob Morrison are Senior Fellows with the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C.