For days, Democrats have made clear their displeasure with the Republican leadership’s decision to begin the new House term with a reading of the U.S. Constitution. But Democrats’ specific grievance, immediately before the reading commenced, was a surprise: Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and others demanded a reading of portions of the Constitution that had been superseded by amendments — most notably, the “three-fifths” clause of the original 1787 Constitution, which denied slave states the ability to boost their representation in the House of Representatives by counting the total number of slaves as part of their population, while simultaneously excluding them from the body politic.

That provision, set forth in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the 1787 Constitution, was nullified in 1868 by the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 2. In fact, the Constitution published on the House’s web site includes an express annotation tying the two clauses together. And the Constitution published on the Senate’s web site makes this even clearer, marking the three-fifths clause in italics to denote that the clause has been “dropped from the Constitution.”