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Abridged too far

Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today

If experience is any guide, the same people who insist “We are not a democracy” (Sen. Mike Lee, Republican of Utah) are the sorts to preach that voting is a privilege, not a right. That, despite this “privilege” being referenced five times as a right in the Constitution in language such as “shall not be denied or abridged.”

Pew Research found recently that the right vs. privilege debate breaks down on predictable partisan lines:

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents overwhelmingly say voting is a fundamental right that should not be restricted in any way – 78% hold this view, while fewer than a quarter (21%) say it is a privilege. Two-thirds of Republicans and Republican leaners say voting is a privilege that can be limited if requirements are not met, compared with about half as many (32%) who say it is a fundamental right.

Joshua A. Douglas, a professor of election law and civil procedure at the University of Kentucky College of Law, adds that there is a clear racial divide in the Pew data.

Douglas writes at Washington Monthly:

We can take some comfort that 57 percent of those surveyed acknowledged that voting is a right and not a privilege. But the 42 percent who disagreed represent a troublingly large minority.

The belief that voting is a “privilege” suggests that it’s somehow better to have fewer voters—which of course just means voters who agree with a certain ideology, with predictable racial and other demographic effects on who can more easily satisfy restrictive voting rules. The solution to the concern about so-called ignorant voters isn’t to shut them out of the process but to improve civics education. Moreover, this myopic view of democratic participation ignores the value of voting to our system of government, the lessons of history, and the proper understanding of our Constitution.

The Supreme Court explained as early as 1886 that voting is “regarded as a fundamental political right, because preservative of all rights.” Voting protects all other rights: we can’t enact legislation until we elect representatives to serve in legislatures. If we dislike government policies, then the way to fix them is to “throw the bums out” and vote in someone else.

To be sure, the Court in that long-ago case also said the right to vote is “not regarded strictly as a natural right, but as a privilege merely conceded by society, according to its will, under certain conditions.” But it followed that statement directly with the one noting that the right to vote is a “fundamental political right” [italics mine]. As the Court put it in 1964, “The right to vote freely for the candidate of one’s choice is of the essence of a democratic society, and any restrictions on that right strike at the heart of representative government.” The Court reasserted the “fundamental nature” of the right to vote in Bush v. Gore, which essentially decided the 2000 presidential election—though the Court did not actually protect the right to vote robustly in that case.

The frenzied effort on the right to add new restrictions to voting in state after state; the moves to allow state legislatures to overrule the electoral votes of the majority of their citizens; and the aborted conspiracy to limit the census count to citizens only; grow from this stark divide between Americans who believe in democratic self-governance as fundamental to freedom and those who loudly celebrate freedom in rhetoric, symbols, and song but fundamentally do not believe in any democracy under which Republicans can lose.

The nativism of the American right today resembles “the right-wing politics of contemporary Europe” and echoes the reactionary politics of the 1920s, historian Rick Perlstein wrote in 2017. It is “a tradition, heretofore judged foreign to American politics, called “herrenvolk republicanism,” that reserved social democracy solely for the white majority.” Pew’s data measuring who considers voting a privilege, not a right, supports that assessment.

Batocchio wrote in these pages the Sunday before the 2020 election:

Conservative policies are completely awful on the merits. But conservatives also want an unfair power structure. These two factors are deeply interwoven – conservatives lie and cheat because they’re unlikely to win in an honest discussion of competing policies. But they’d be especially unlikely to succeed in convincing the general public of their core dogma that they should always win; they should always rule; they should always get their own way. Conservative arguments such as Mike Lee’s ahistorical claims against democracy, Cheney and Addington’s unitary executive theorythe sovereign citizen movementAmmon Bundy‘s claims that he can seize public lands and not pay taxes, the theocrats claiming United States was founded as a Christian nationMitch McConnell’s fabricated and shifting rules for judicial appointments, and hollering that it’s unconstitutional to be asked to wear a mask – all of these claims are counterfactual and complete bullshit, but in addition to that, the common thread is the underlying tenet: we can do whatever the hell we want, with no accountability.

[…]

One of the most telling statements about American conservatism was made in 2019 by a woman who was negatively affected by Trump and the Republican Party shutting down the government for political leverage: “I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this. . . . I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.” She said the quiet part out loud. The conservative base, authoritarian conservatives, punishment conservatives, are driven by spite, and this sums up their toxic mix of entitlement and resentment – they want to see their many perceived enemies hurt or put in their place.

Limiting the franchise in every way they can think of is on the legislative agenda in state after Republican-controlled state. Last week, Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Ohio, author J.D. Vance, offered another not-well-thought-out way to privilege some Americans over others in a trolling dig at the “childless left“:

Specifically, Vance said, “When you go to the polls in this country as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our Democratic republic, than people who don’t have kids.”

Move over, poll tax. Stand aside, white, male property owners. Out of the way, “one dollar, one vote.” Adults with children should have bonus political power. Those without lack literal skin in the game, Vance believes.

The pattern is clear, and as clear and present a danger to the survival of the republic as the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.

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