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No Voting Rights for Felons: Unfair, Anti-Democratic, and, Yes, “Nonsensical”

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RGBStock.com Vote Pencil

In late January, US District Judge Mark Walker struck down Florida’s rules for restoring the voting rights of former convicts, finding those rules not just unconstitutional (on First and Fourteenth Amendment grounds) but “nonsensical.”

Why nonsensical? Because “disenfranchised citizens must kowtow before a panel of high-level government officials over which Florida’s governor has absolute veto authority. ”

If a panel of  appointed bureaucrats (or the governor) doesn’t like you, you don’t get to vote. Maybe they don’t believe you’ve truly “reformed.” Maybe they don’t like your perceived partisan affiliation. Maybe they just don’t like your skin color.

In fact, the system would be “nonsensical” even if it didn’t leave the decision in the hands of partisan hacks. If the Declaration of Independence is to be taken even a little bit seriously, that system is completely out of line with American values.

Only four states  (Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia) fail to automatically restore the vote to convicts at the ends of their sentences. Maine, Vermont, and the US territory of Puerto Rico don’t just restore voting rights at end of sentence — they allow prisoners to vote.

The Declaration of Independence lays out a clear bottom line standard for the legitimacy of government: The consent of the governed.

We could argue about what consent really means, but where democracy is the form of government, the vote is traditionally deemed the instrument of that consent, and in America expanding the franchise — to former slaves, then to women, then to all citizens down to the age of 18 — has been the trend for 150 years.

Prisoners are certainly “governed,” and to a far greater degree than most of us. They live in cages. They’re told when to get up, when to go to sleep, and what to do in between, with draconian punishments for disobedience.  Once their sentences are completed, they’ve supposedly “paid their debt to society” (would that our justice system emphasized restitution to real victims rather than the myth that “society” is or can be owed anything, but that’s a subject for another column). On what grounds can former — or, for that matter, current — be legitimately forbidden the vote if “consent of the governed” is truly the standard and the vote is truly its expression?

Florida’s existing voters will have an opportunity this November to pass a constitutional amendment ending their state’s “nonsensical” system and restoring voting rights automatically to felons who complete their sentences.

That’s a good first step.

Next, how about a federal voting rights suit on behalf of  all those who are governed but forbidden the legal ability to supposedly consent?

And, finally, how about a dramatic reduction in the scope and severity of government power that we supposedly consent TO?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Op-Eds

A Korean Spring after the Winter Olympics is Unlikely. Here’s Why.

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Korean War armistice agreement 1953
UN delegate Lieut. Gen. William K. Harrison, Jr. (seated left), and Korean People’s Army and Chinese People’s Volunteers delegate Gen. Nam Il (seated right) signing the Korean War armistice agreement at P’anmunjŏm, Korea, July 27, 1953. [U.S. Department of Defense (F. Kazukaitis. U.S. Navy); via Wikipedia]
 

Peace between the Republic of Korea (South Korea) the the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) suddenly seems closer than ever as the 2018 Winter Olympics open in Pyeongchang on February 9. The North is contributing athletes to a bi-national team with the South, and also sending a delegation that includes its head of state (Kim Yong Nam) and the first ever official visitor to the South from its ruling dynasty (Kim Yo Jong, sister of Kim Jong Un).

The two Koreas have been in “ceasefire,” but still formally at war and with occasional outbreaks of violence, since 1953. Could this Olympic thaw result in permanently improved relations, a peace treaty, perhaps even reunification?

Don’t get your hopes up. Many powerful forces are  predisposed against such an outcome. All of those forces can be summed up in one word: Inertia. After seven decades, any status quo is difficult to shatter.

In the North, continued rule by the Kim family and its Workers’ Party depends largely on positioning the regime as guardians against an external threat posed by the South and by the US military presence along the ceasefire line. Reunification under any circumstance, peaceful or otherwise, would result in the end of that regime, because …

… The South’s population is twice that of the North, its GDP 50 times as large. They’re not going to peacefully submit to rule by the North’s government. Even if the North could militarily conquer the South’s territory, it would be assimilated by, not assimilate, that larger and wealthier  population.

The South’s government, on the other hand, has seen what happens when a larger, wealthier state welcomes back a still comparatively large, but much poorer, population. Reunified Germany (West Germany’s population as of reunification in 1990 was 78 million, East Germany’s 16 million) is still dealing with the economic, cultural, and political fallout nearly two decades later. And like the North’s, the South’s government has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, because tens of thousands of US troops, and lots and lots of money, subsidize the South’s defense costs and artificially boost its economy.

The US government, in turn, is happy with that situation because it’s part of American government’s raisson d’etre since World War Two, which is to perpetually funnel wealth from the pockets of American workers into the bank accounts and budgets of the military industrial complex in the name of “defense.”

As for the Chinese government, it regards North Korea as a “buffer zone” keeping those US troops far away from its border (the last time US forces neared the Yalu River, China intervened and drove them back to the 38th Parallel, resulting in the current stalemate).

Some of those players are going to have to make bigger moves to break the ice.

A good start would be for the US to notify South Korea’s Moon Jae-In of a date certain — say, five years — for complete US military withdrawal from the Korean peninsula. But that would threaten the bloated US “defense” budget. So don’t bet on it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

The Census for Dummies (Including the US Department of Justice)

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RGBStock.com Vote Pencil

“Uncertainly is swirling over whether the Census Bureau will be able to get an accurate population count for the 2020 census,” The Hill reports.  The Department of Justice wants the bureau to ask respondents about their citizenship status, which could result in people avoiding the census altogether.

There’s a simple solution to the “problem,” and that is for the Census Bureau to slim its questionnaire down to the only question it can legally ask:

“How many people live here?”

The authority for the decennial federal census is found in Article I, Section 2 of the US Constitution:

“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers …. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct.”

While the Constitution specifies citizenship requirements for serving in Congress, it makes no such distinction when it comes to the “enumeration” — the census.

The purpose of the census is to count noses, period, end of story.

Not what citizenship the noses hold.

Not what color the noses are.

Not what direction the noses are pointed in for purposes of prayer.

Not what language the mouth beneath the nose speaks.

Not whether the nose in question is attached to a male, female, transgender, gay, straight, bisexual, or differently abled body.

Number of noses. That’s it. That’s all.

Anything else, and anything done at any other time, such as the “American Community Survey” done between legitimate census periods, exceeds the Census Bureau’s constitutional brief. Which means, per the 10th Amendment, that it is unconstitutional. And, therefore, illegal.

Yes, US courts have held otherwise. Those same courts also held that people of color had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” (Dred Scott v. Sanford) and then later that “equal but separate” treatment under law sufficiently respected those newly discovered rights (Plessy v. Ferguson), and still later that separate was inherently unequal (Brown v. Board of Education).

No amount of jiggery-pokery from the bench can obscure the plain meaning and obvious intent of Article I, Section 2. The Census Bureau shouldn’t be asking, nor should anyone consider himself or herself under any obligation whatsoever to answer, anything more or other  than:

“How many people live here?”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY