Tag: democracy

Fear & Its Peddlers

“We’re facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War,” President Joe Biden hyperbolically orated on Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

“That’s not hyperbole,” he insisted, repeating, for emphasis, “Since the Civil War.”

Referring to state legislation passed or proposed by Republicans regarding various election procedures, Mr. Biden must remember the Jim Crow Era with its “literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems, and eventually whites-only Democratic Party primaries to exclude black voters,” since he also smeared these current Republican polices as a “21st-century Jim Crow assault.”*

President Joe painted a picture of “unprecedented voter suppression” and “raw and sustained election subversion” and more.

Somehow, the media chorus line just repeats this nonsense.

Ignore the years of prominent Democrats’ straight-faced berating of Republican support for voter ID laws as nothing more than a purposely racist suppression tactic … immediately followed the Democrats’ recent about-face claim that they had always supported voter ID.

Even as they continue to push federal legislation that would effectively obliterate such ID laws in 35 states.**

Then contrast the bill passed in Georgia or being considered in Texas with the process in Biden’s home state of Delaware, which “doesn’t allow 24-hour or no-excuse drive-through voting,” as Karl Rove explains in The Wall Street Journal.

“It won’t begin early voting until 2022 and then for … fewer days than Texas,” which has had early voting for more than three decades.

Somehow, Mr. Biden has never denigrated Delaware for Jim Crow-ism.

Yet he may be right that “bullies and merchants of fear and peddlers of lies are threatening the very foundation of our country.”

Peddler of lies, know thyself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Not to mention that a certain “Biden crime bill” passed decades ago may have led to more disenfranchisement of voters — especially voters of color — than any single piece of legislation since … the Civil War.

** This HR1 would also allow partisan control of the Federal Election Commission, for the first time ever — the most potentially speech-suppressing provision of any state or federal legislation.

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Tags democracy, fear, Joe Biden, panic

ballot access initiative, referendum, and recall

Amazing Vanished Rights

Suppose you have the right to walk across a room.

Yet you’re legally chained to a chair.

By your rights, you may get up and walk across the room. But you can’t, because of the chains. You could if only you could. Why, there’s even a document specifying your right to do so. You physically can’t exercise this right; that’s the only problem.

But your right to walk across the room is enshrined and protected.

Or is it?

In fact, we have no right in the sense of a legal ability to do a certain thing if its exercise is, by law, thwarted.

Recently, Idaho lawmakers passed and Governor Little signed a law making it almost impossible for citizens to place a question onto the ballot. Until now, Idaho required that 6 percent of registered voters in 18 of 35 legislative districts sign the petition to send a question to ballot. Gratuitously onerous, but at least possible to comply with.

That possibility was a big problem for opponents of citizen initiative rights, however. Hence the new law, requiring signatures from 6 percent of registered voters in each of 35 districts.

Reclaim Idaho challenged the law. The Idaho Supreme Court is currently hearing the case.

According to Reclaim Idaho co-founder Luke Mayville: “If you claim that the people ought to have a right to put something on the ballot [but] make it impossible to exercise that right, it’s not really much of a right at all.”

Do justice, justices.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Brad Little, democracy, governor, initiative

ballot access national politics & policies

Hypocrisy ID’d

“Prominent Democrats have increasingly softened their opposition to voter identification requirements in recent days,” informs The Washington Post, “signaling a new openness to measures that activists have long vilified as an insidious method of keeping minorities from the ballot box.”

Yesterday, when Republicans backed the idea, it was racist and supposedly so were they for supporting it. Not anymore. Now, Democrats favor Voter ID.

What changed?

Not racism. And certainly not racially exploitative demagoguery.

The catalyst may be a new Monmouth University poll showing fully 80 percent of Americans favor a photo ID requirement for voting, with support “at 62% among Democrats, 87% among independents, and 91% among Republicans.”

These progressive mutations take place as Senate Bill 1, the companion to H.R. 1, the so-called “For the People Act,” failed to break the GOP filibuster yesterday, blocked 50 votes to 50 votes along strictly partisan lines.

While Democrats scramble for a way out, some — Stacy Abrams, notably — suggest they have always been for voter ID.

Funny, the Democrats’ legislation would have effectively gutted the 35 state voter ID laws now on the books. “But HR‑1 does not ‘ban’ voter identification laws,” lectures Newsweek’s fact-checker. “Instead, it offers a workaround” — that does not require showing an ID.

Just the sort of requirement Democrats now insist upon?

Hypocrisy notwithstanding, the real problem with Democrats dictating election policy from Washington is the rottenness of those policies, which include:

Partisan capture of the Federal Election Commission by Democrats through 2027*
Taxpayer financing of congressional campaigns
Increased regulation of speech aimed at influencing congressmen (i.e. mobilizing citizens)

Congressional Democrats have plenty more bad policies where those came from.

And a legislative majority.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* If you can’t pack the Supreme Court, packing the FEC is the next best thing.

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Tags democracy, race, voter ID, voting

term limits

Senatorial Senility

“We have the oldest Senate in American history,” Roxanne Roberts writes in The Washington Post.

Roberts rattles off the five octogenarians — Sen. Diane Feinstein (D‑Calif.), age 88; Sen. Charles Grassley (R‑Iowa), age 87; Richard Shelby (R‑Ala.), age 87; Sen. James Inhofe (R‑Okla.), age 86; and Sen. Pat Leahy (D‑Vt.), age 81 — and tells us that “Twenty-three members of the Senate are in their 70s,” noting that “only one is under 40.”

That fledgling 34-year-old whippersnapper is newly elected Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff. But being 30 years younger than the current Senate average doesn’t make him better, that’s for sure.

Age isn’t the problem. Not exactly.

My issue with octogenarian Senators Feinstein, Grassley, Shelby, Inhofe and Leahy is that they’ve been politicians in Washington for the last 28, 40, 43, 34, and 46 years, respectively.

That’s way too long. They stop being one of us, representing us. And, left, right or in-between, we know it.

“Senior senators often stay for decades,” Roberts argues, “because voters are reluctant to give up the perks of incumbency: Seniority, committee chairmanships and all the money poured into their states.”

Ha! The idea that actual voters are unwilling to “give up the perks of incumbency” is laughable. It’s the incumbents themselves who leverage their votes in Congress to dramatically out-fundraise their challengers.

Voters rarely get much choice.

No wonder, then, that when people got a chance to vote to term-limit their own congressmen — they did so enthusiastically.

President Truman once quipped that legislative term limits would help “cure senility, and seniority — both terrible legislative diseases.” He understood that the Senate’s age problem is not time on the planet. It is the time in office.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Another example was the late Sen. Thad Cochran, who thankfully decided to step down in 2018 — at 80 years of age after 44 years in Congress — none too soon.

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Tags corruption, democracy, power, term limits

general freedom international affairs

June 4: Tiananmen 32

Will truth ever be bought-off or beaten-down enough to satisfy Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Butchers of Beijing?

The ‘Butchers’ nickname came 32 years ago today — from the clearing of Tiananmen Square by soldiers and tanks in the early morning hours of June 4th, and in opening fire on and murdering thousands of Chinese citizens outside the square.

Someone may object that Xi, the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 2012, can’t be blamed. He wasn’t in charge back in 1989.

Xi didn’t give the order for troops to kill the unarmed students and workers who filled Tiananmen Square for weeks with as many as a million people protesting for freedom and democracy. Nor did he have thousands more arrested and imprisoned after the massacre. In fact, Xi’s father “condemned the use of force against protesters during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests,” informs U.S. News.

But Xi cannot escape the taint of Tiananmen. Not only does Human Rights Watch charge that government repression under his unlimited rule is “at its worst level since the Tiananmen Square massacre,” Xi and today’s CCP are on a mission to memory-hole Tiananmen.

How?

By massacring any public memorial of the massacre.

While the truth about Tiananmen has always been verboten in China, freer folks in Hong Kong held massive memorials each year. “Last year’s vigil was banned for the first time because of the coronavirus,” Yahoo News explains, “but thousands defied police and rallied anyway.”

This year, however, the new national security law threatens five years in prison for attending an unauthorized rally. Chanting “Democracy for China!” could land a Hongkonger in prison for life.*

Thankfully, in America today we have the freedom to condemn the Chinazis.

And remember June 4.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* And it has already begun: “Hong Kong cracks down on Tiananmen commemorations, arrests vigil organiser.”

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Tags China, democracy, freedom, protests, Tiananmen Square

initiative, referendum, and recall term limits

You’re Sued!

Firing politicians is what democracy’s all about.

But politicians don’t like being fired. Even when “You’re fired!” is a signature line. It definitely explains why incumbents tend to oppose term limits.

As shown in the long history of term limits in my home state, Arkansas.

In 1992, an all-volunteer petition drive placed the initiative on the ballot and a grassroots campaign beat the Good Ole Boy network and their $500,000 in paid media warnings of “outsiders.”

The victory sent shockwaves through the Arkansas political establishment; term limits received more YES votes than President-Elect Bill Clinton had garnered in his home state.

Arkansas pols have been at war with term limits ever since. The latest assault came in April, when legislators passed an “emergency” measure now known as Act 951.

The Act bans people found guilty of minor misdemeanors (trespassing, vandalism, any violation of drug laws) at any time in their lives — even many decades ago — from working as paid petitioners. The new law also limits the pool of petitioners to state residents, something not done for any other political job, or for those carrying Arkansas’s candidate petitions.*

That’s why Arkansas Term Limits, Liberty Initiative Fund, U.S. Term Limits, et al., filed a complaint in the federal Eastern District of Arkansas alleging constitutional rights violations under the legislature’s Act 951.

“I was never a supporter of term limits until this bunch got in office,” offered Arkansas Times editor Max Brantley in response to our lawsuit, “and gave themselves essentially unlimited terms and set about running roughshod over human rights.”

Cries of “You’re fired!” are coming soon. But first, to pry back petition rights in Arkansas, the catchphrase is, “You’re sued!”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* In recent years, similar residency requirements have been unanimously struck down in rulings of the 4th, 6th, 7th, 9th and 10th federal Circuit Courts of Appeal. Earlier this year, a federal judge enjoined enforcement of Maine’s similar law.

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meter / JG

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