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From NRO Editor Jonah Goldberg:
...this is a delicate issue, so I will try to be sensitive criminals tend to vote for Democrats. Moreover, some places where convicted criminals are barred from the rolls are key for Democratic chances to take back the White House. Florida tops that list. Hence, Hillary and the Democrats’ desire to make felon rights a federal issue. If you think this is too cynical, ask yourself why Democrats in 2000 were far more concerned with counting the votes of alleged felons than confirmed soldiers.
So naturally the intelligentsia on the Left is busy making up all kinds of highfalutin’, scholarly-sounding claims about why felons should be allowed to vote and how not letting them vote is all about oppressing minorities:
That Democrats do better in the ex-offender community undoubtedly has less to do with their simpatico outlook with thieves, robbers and rapists and more to do with the lamentable fact that the prison population is disproportionately made up of poor, underprivileged, nonwhite men. Not surprisingly, liberals are more than eager to turn the prison ballot into the race card. A Stanford Law Review article calls it “the new literacy test.” The New York Times’ Brent Staples asserts that “legal scholars attribute [felon disenfranchisement] to this country’s difficulties with race.” The president of the American Bar Assn. claims that the “origins of America’s felony disenfranchisement laws are linked to post-Civil War efforts to disenfranchise former slaves, a sad racial legacy that manifests itself today in the fact that people of color make up more than 60% of our nation’s prison population.”
However, it’s just another phony claim from the Left:
An inconvenient problem is that this isn’t true. Even two of the chief advocates of felon re-enfranchisement Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project acknowledge in a joint publication that “disenfranchisement [of felons] in the U.S. is a heritage from ancient Greek and Roman traditions carried into Europe.” The basic idea is simple: Lawbreakers shouldn’t be lawmakers.
I’d just like to add that if felons become a voting bloc, it will become necessary for politicians to try to appeal to them, which will inevitably interfere with good legislation in this country.
Okay, so let’s recap. The Left has an absurd proposition, that convicted criminals should be permitted to help elect Presidents (and specifically Hillary.) Everybody knows this is a dumb idea. So in order to try to promote it, the Left tries this: they try to make us feel bad. They say, you rotten people like to oppress minorities, and not letting criminals vote is just another way of oppressing minorities. The interesting thing about this strategy is that people are so easily pushed around by it. It’s possible to make people feel bad just by saying rude things like this. Then sometimes a lot of people will get out of the way and stop opposing even the most preposterous things.
Conclusion: if someone tries to make you feel bad, check their facts.
As applied to this specific instance: the facts alleged by the Left are not accurate. Not letting criminals vote is a practice of the ancient Greeks and Romans which was subsequently carried out in Europe and inherited by the U.S., and is unrelated to the oppression of minorities. There is no reason for anybody to feel bad and the absurd argument of the Left, in favor of letting convicted criminals help to elect Presidents, should be rejected.
To be more clear: The practice has been used to oppress minorities in this country, no matter how it was originally used in Greece or any place else.
#3Hi Bellman,
Quoting from the link you provided:
Many states, north and south, passed such laws (or constitutional provisions authorizing such laws) long before the Civil War and for reasons that had little or nothing to do with race. Connecticut did so in 1818, for example, as did New Jersey and Wisconsin in the 1840s. In some southern states, moreover, felon disfranchisement provisions were first enacted not by the racist redeemer governments that came to power in the 1870s, but by their predecessors: the Republican governments that supported black voting rights. By 1900, felon disfranchisement laws were in place in a majority of states, with widely varying ethnic and racial compositions (including even Vermont!)
This makes my point that felon disenfranchisement was enacted for reasons unrelated to the oppression of minorities.
Hey Vik,
Your point is made. My actual point (which I attempted to clarify in my second post) is that it is irrelevant why they were originally enacted. There is plenty of evidence of them being used for racist purposes.
If you want to honestly debate the policy, rather than uselessly debate the ancient origins of the practice, you need to either a) contest the fact that they were ever used for racist purposes in our history (and my article clearly states that they were), or b) contest that it still matters. You might have a case with "b," although I obviously think it still matters.
Pointing out that some guy incorrectly said that this practice was racist in its origins does not diminish the fact that the practice clearly has had systematic racist usage at certain point and certain places in our nations history.
#5Pointing out that some guy incorrectly said that this practice was racist in its origins does not diminish the fact that the practice clearly has had systematic racist usage at certain point and certain places in our nations history.
Well, sure, but lots of things have been misused. Almost everything's been misused by someone at some point in history. If we were going to throw out anything that had ever been misused we'd have to throw out the printing press, the internet, cars, and pretty much everything else.
Lots of great things have awful origins as well. You seem concerned about origins here, but not use. Both are in the past. At least we can point to the racist usage and argue about whether there is still institionalized racism or at least an effect of past institutionalized racism. I guess I feel like your last comment calls into question why you were concerned about the origins at all. Why bother even checking the guys facts if you believe the past doesn't matter?
#7Historically, the reason for excluding felons from voting has been, as Goldberg says, to prevent lawbreakers from being lawmakers. This benefit of felon disenfranchisement exists despite any misuse of felon disenfranchisement on past occasions.
#8The Constitution says "no taxation without representation". Correct? That means that if you are paying taxes you should be allowed to vote and be represented by your representatives in America's government. You cannot argue that elected officials are really representing prison inmates and ex-cons if they had no part in putting them in office. On the contrary, elected officials are representing only those to whom they are beholden for putting them in office. American voters. If prison inmates and ex-cons are paying taxes, it is a violation of their constitutionally guaranteed rights to not allow them to vote. There are three ways to rectify this situation. Allow prison inmates and ex-cons to vote, stop making them pay taxes, or revoke their US citizenship so the U.S. Constitution no longer applies to them. I await your rebuttal.
#9I truly question the motives of those Republicans who oppose enfranchising ex-convicts just like some here question the motives of Democrats who want them to be able to vote. Republicans obviously do not want ex-cons to vote because they would overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. Democrats obviously want ex-cons to vote for that very same reason. However, I do not think whether or not ex-cons should be allowed to vote should depend on partisan politics. Instead, it should depend on whether denying ex-cons the right to vote is constitutional (it is not),whether it makes Americans safer(I do not believe it does because Democrats too are devoted to dealing with crime in America),whether ex-cons would be well served by being able to vote(they would because it would help them to more so feel like a part of society again), and whether or not denying ex-cons the right to vote is racist in effect even if unintentionally so (it is because a disproportionate number of Blacks are disenfranchised by ex-cons not being allowed to vote). I will elaborate on whether or not denying ex-cons the right to vote makes Americans safer. Although some people criticize Democrats for allegedly being soft on criminals, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to support social programs that will keep people from becoming criminals in the first place. Does anyone dispute that? I await your rebuttal.
#10It appears that most of the arguments you are advancing were addressed in the original post.
CONCLUSION: Sometimes facts are ambiguous. Check out this article, which reject your simplitic conclusion at the same time as it rejects the simplistic claim you are reacting to. Money quote:
"To be sure, it is true that felon disfranchisement laws were utilized in the South in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a means of disfranchising African Americans. And some states, such as Alabama and Georgia, altered their laws over time in order to target African Americans and reduce their voting strength. Felon disfranchisement laws, especially in the South, did become part of the fabric of racial discrimination and exclusion.
But the idea of disfranchising felons and ex-felons did not originate in the post-Civil South, and most laws that disfranchised felons had complex and murky origins that still await thorough historical investigation."
So, in short, we don't KNOW how it started, but we KNOW how it was used in the South.