by Ruth A. Sheets
September 17th was Constitution Day. On this day 234 years ago, the Constitutional Convention approved the document they had come up with as a framework for our new nation’s government.
As any student of history and government can tell you, our Constitution was not perfect and it reflected the hopes, fears, and prejudices of those who put it together. It was, however, unique in the world at the time. It pulled together disparate states under a central government while leaving each state with numerous powers of its own. Instead of a king, emperor, czar or some other hereditary ruler, an elected president and congress would hold down the central government while states could configure their own governments. The founders didn’t want political parties at all because somehow, the people of the United States would work together with the same values and recognition of the same needs of the people. We the People are all one.
I honor the men who tried to hammer out a workable government but recognize they probably could not have done better as for the most part, they were products of their time. They could not see 5 years into the future let alone 234 years. The amendment process was supposed to take care of necessary changes and they thought there would be a lot of adaptive changes over time. As a condition of approval by several of the states, a “Bill of Rights” would have to be compiled on the order of the ?British Bill of Rights of a century before.
So, here we are 234 years down the road and as at other times along the way, we are facing a political crisis, and it revolves around voting. Voting has come to be seen as an act that ties together all citizens, one person one vote. It took a long time to get us here. Now, one political party has now decided the Constitution is only of value when it allows them to do what they want to do. When it doesn’t, they don’t see a problem with just ignoring it. Their craving for power is so intense, they will go state by state to subvert the vote of the people.
This is not new. It was a feature of voting nearly from the beginning when women’s right to vote was eliminated in the few states where they had been able to vote if landowners, before the new government took over. No one but white men were able to vote for the first 80 years or so and then again in parts of the country for nearly a century longer due to Jim Crow laws and terrorism perpetrated on Black Americans. Native Americans, Chinese persons, and many immigrants couldn’t even be seen as citizens until well into the 20th century, so naturally, voting was off limits to them.
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 codified that every American citizen age 21 or older had the right to vote. Some states said “no” to people in prison voting and some even refused them the vote after they had served their time, but for the most part, states could not keep citizens from voting. This was a very well-respected law until it wasn’t. In 2013, the Supreme Court decided despite the nearly unanimous vote in Congress to reaffirm the Voting Rights Act, to gut its most important sections. In the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a district needed to get permission from the Federal government to change voting procedures if it had a history of discrimination or voter suppression. I still don’t understand how the Court came to dismiss this provision in the law. Even before the ruling, it was clear that people of color would suffer most from the new voter suppression laws that the Court already knew were in the pipeline. Chief Justice Roberts led the charge with a pathetic explanation.
Since that appalling decision, the states that already had a history of discrimination as well as some others have been chipping away at the right to vote. Laws are being carefully crafted to try to look like racism, ableism and ageism aren’t motivators along with Republicans wanting to make it between really hard and impossible for anyone who does not support them to vote, the goal being to keep Republicans in power. Has the Court stepped up to correct this insanity? Why no! They have added to it by approving some of the suppression moves like making it harder to register voters and to hand in ballots in rural areas like Indigenous Reservations where districts cover huge areas and people do not have transportation.
In Arizona, a completely inept organization was “hired” to do the recount in the largest county in the state to check for paper from China and other supposed irregularities. They tampered with the machines so they cannot be used again and have dragged ballots all over the country, given private voter information to unknown actors in this farce and nothing is done to stop it. The people of Arizona are going to be paying a fortune to incompetent unnecessary fools on behalf of anti-Constitution fools. They have found nothing so far and will find nothing they have not themselves planted.
The next phase is the Pennsylvania Republicans in the state Senate demanding (subpoenaing) a lot of personal information for everyone who voted in Pennsylvania in the 2020 election. That includes: names, addresses, license numbers, and the last 4 numbers of Social Security numbers. That is a major invasion of privacy. They have made up excuses for this demand for information because there is no evidence whatsoever of any voter fraud. So, it appears this is to be used as intimidation. My guess is Republicans want people not to trust a system that would invade their privacy. That distrust, they hope will be most effective in communities of color and among young people who don’t tend to vote Republican. To me, that is simply criminal no matter how Republicans try to justify it. The question, who can stop them?
It seems Republicans have been working on a variety of schemes to undermine our democracy for a long time and we the people were looking at other things and were distracted. We paid too much attention to presidential elections while Republicans were packing the courts. We were trying to stop our nation from getting into never-ending wars while they were setting off fires all over the world so we would have a hard time keeping track. We were working to include LGBTQ persons and their rights while republicans were downsizing the IRS so the rich people and corporations could get so big and rich no one could stop them, too big to fail, even though they put our nation and most of the world in a near depression in 2007-08. Democrats worked hard to register voters while Republicans crafted a variety of ways to get around the Constitution including getting private citizens to report women who had constitutionally permitted abortions and anyone who helped them for a$10,000 bounty paid by the person accused.
We got over 150 million people to vote in the 2020 election while Republicans were laying the groundwork to challenge every vote that was not for Donald Trump, the incompetent barely functioning figurehead they had put in power and wanted to keep in power so they could manipulate him to bring about the systemic changes they wanted. They even staged an insurrection at our Capitol on January 6, 2021 that they are trying to dismiss as just some tourists hanging around, nothing serious, you know, forgetting we have it all on tape, mostly provided by the insurrectionists themselves.
Republicans are out of control!
They are like child-men and child-women who want something they know they are not entitled to. They do a small infraction and when they are not stopped by Mommy or Daddy (the courts), they go to the next level and see how much more they can get away with. Eventually Mommy and Daddy have lost all influence. The kids run the household but have absolutely no idea what to do once in power except work to get more power.
Maybe the trick is to be the kind but stern parents who tell their wayward children no and give them a time out (vote them out of office), maybe a month for every year of their lives. We also need to expand the Supreme Court with justices who actually care about the people of this nation and what they need more than their own personal biases. Most of all, we have to work around all the voter suppression the children are putting in place and get people to find ways to vote anyway, armed with good information about the poorly behaving children who are trying so hard to take away their rights. Maybe we need to portray voting as highly patriotic and in people’s best interest. Oh yes, we can also run for office to actually work for the people. Let’s get started! We have no time left to play around. Republicans have already had at least a forty-year head start on tripping up our democracy. We need to catch up and set our democracy on its feet so we can save our nation and our planet.
