You’re carefully taught
It’s a common enough appeal. Common sense. So why is common sense so uncommon? Invoking common sense is often intended to quash inquiry, not stimulate it. Common sense. Game over.
Earth is flat. It’s common sense. You have to produce an ID to get on an airplane. You should have to present one to vote. Remember when it was common, if not common sense, under Jim Crow to ask Black people to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar or recite the Preamble to the Constitution before they could vote?
It’s always something (Bolts Magazine):
In late May, the GOP-controlled New Hampshire legislature adopted a bill that would require people to present their birth certificate, passport, or naturalization papers proving their U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote, with no exceptions. That would be a major departure from longstanding New Hampshire law that allows people to sign sworn affidavits as a substitute if they don’t have proof of citizenship when they register to vote.
It’s already a crime to register if you are ineligible. It’s already a crime to vote if you are ineligible. But we need to make it crimier. Common sense.
Under current New Hampshire law, voters are asked to provide proof of identity and age (usually a driver’s license), proof that they live where they want to vote, and proof of citizenship (either a birth certificate or a passport) in order to be able to register and vote. Less than half of Americans have a passport, and a new study by the Brennan Center found that nine percent of Americans don’t have any proof of citizenship readily available. The current law in New Hampshire allows people to sign a sworn affidavit attesting that they’re telling the truth about their citizenship and residency. Roughly 6,000 people used affidavits in the 2016 election cycle.
A wave of such bills are in legislative pipelines across the country ever since Donald Trump claimed he lost the popular vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton because noncitizens (Mexicans in California) were voting by the millions. The truth is that noncitizen voting is “vanishingly rare.” But Trump could not have lost. Common sense said others must have cheated.
I suppose it was a string of tweets that inspired the “common sense” question.
Users replied with this clip, others replied with memes.
For some reason, I woke up on Wednesday with “You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught” from South Pacific playing in my head.
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