Other things the writers purposely intended but we abandoned because it was eventually obviously heinous:

Woman can't vote. People who aren't wealthy can't vote. Black people can't vote, but they ARE used to apportion voting power in Congress. No standardized system of "who takes over if someone murders the president?". A massive lame duck period when the president gets voted out.

It's only recently that congress has decided that we can't amend the constitution, despite that being such an important and essential part of how the constitution was supposed to work, that the founders put together a bunch of amendments before the constitution was even ratified. They 100% intend for the constitution to change with the times.

> It's only recently that congress has decided that we can't amend the constitution, despite that being such an important and essential part of how the constitution was supposed to work, that the founders put together a bunch of amendments before the constitution was even ratified.

Congress hasn't decided this. It's just gotten so polarized and dysfunctional that getting the broad consensus needed for meaningful amendments is seen as not worth it, because it's a foregone conclusion that it will fail.

And that's why, instead of passing laws and amendments, we over-rely on the reinterpretation of existing laws using the judicial branch and give more powers to the executive branch when possible. It's to deal with perpetual gridlock. (I'm not saying this is good, BTW; IMO, we need to reduce gridlock in general).

> getting the broad consensus needed for meaningful amendments

I think we agree, but I want to highlight that making impossible to modify the constitution with only a 51% is a feature not a bug.

I'm not saying it's right or shouldn't change but calling it a loophole like it wasn't directly intended is strange.

Ok, call it an intentional backdoor?

Well, it's a front door. There's really nothing sneaky about this. The people who made this law were completely OK with prisoners being slaves and said so openly. And if I was to hazard a guess I would assume the prisoners slaves of their time had a much higher mortality rate than ours do.

I think most people mistakenly think slavery was outlawed in the USA, and don't realize that it is codified in the amended section of the Constitution.

The loophole is that you can make laws that specifically target populations that you want to enslave.