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Mr. Mystal will trot out every single leftist talking point in a vain effort to make a cogent argument. In fact, she's not making an argument at all, she's bomb throwing.
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Utah Senator Mike Lee, a raving hypocrite who abandoned his stated principles to play lackey to Donald Trump, is fond of saying, “We’re not a democracy.” Lee thinks that’s a good thing. He’s written: “Democracy isn’t the objective: liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are.” When Lee says these things, he’s not merely playing the role of an overzealous high school social studies teacher trying to use “cool facts” to deflect the hail of spitballs. He’s also channeling the deepest fears of the slavers and colonists who wrote the Constitution. Those guys understood, as Lee does, that a true democracy, in which everybody gets to vote and participate in self-government, would be a threat to white male hegemony in the New World. (This is the pink unicorn dream world the Left lives in. The founders, who articulated a vision of liberty for all, who spoke of inalienable rights, who purposefully and deliberately laid the groundwork for the eventual end of slavery, supposedly rejected democracy to preserve slavery. That doesn't even pass the smell test.
Utah Senator Mike Lee, a raving hypocrite who abandoned his stated principles to play lackey to Donald Trump, is fond of saying, “We’re not a democracy.” Lee thinks that’s a good thing. He’s written: “Democracy isn’t the objective: liberty, peace, and prospefity [sic] are.” When Lee says these things, he’s not merely playing the role of an overzealous high school social studies teacher trying to use “cool facts” to deflect the hail of spitballs. He’s also channeling the deepest fears of the slavers and colonists who wrote the Constitution. Those guys understood, as Lee does, that a true democracy, in which everybody gets to vote and participate in self-government, would be a threat to white male hegemony in the New World. (This is the pink unicorn dream world the Left lives in. The founders, who articulated a vision of liberty for all, who spoke of inalienable rights, who purposefully and deliberately laid the groundwork for the eventual end of slavery, supposedly rejected democracy to preserve slavery. That doesn't even pass the smell test.
The founders themselves, as well as the whole of America, were under the thumb of the King of England. In essence, they were themselves slaves revolting against the abuse and inhumanity of the Crown. They knew and experienced oppression.
So what did the founders actually believe regarding slavery?
George Washington: "there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do, to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it."
—Letter to Morris, April 12, 1786, in George Washington, A Collection, ed. W.B. Allen (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1989), 319.
John Adams: "Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States…. I have, through my whole life, held the practice of slavery in …abhorrence."
—Letter to Evans, June 8, 1819, in Selected Writings of John and John Quincy Adams ed. Adrienne Koch et al. (New York: Knopf, 1946), 209-10.
Benjamin Franklin: "Slavery is …an atrocious debasement of human nature."
—"An Address to the Public from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery" (1789), Benjamin Franklin, Writings ed. J.A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 1154.
Alexander Hamilton: "The laws of certain states …give an ownership in the service of negroes as personal property…. But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty—and when the captor in war …thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable."
—Philo Camillus no. 2 (1795), in Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961-), 19:101-2.
James Madison: "We have seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man."
—Speech at Constitutional Convention, June 6, 1787, in Max Farrand, ed., Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937), 1:135.
Mr. Mystal seems to think that democracy was and is the remedy. He does not document that claim, but simply asserts it. The founders refute him. They clearly articulated why democracy is not the solution, and their reasons are still true today.
John Adams: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
James Madison: "Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death."
Alexander Hamilton: "It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.'
John Marshall: "Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos."
They’re not wrong. The founders and Lee and Jefferson Davis and Ron DeSantis—and all the other white guys who have stood against the right to vote throughout American history—are correct in their assessment that universal suffrage and equal representation are the surest ways to end white male political supremacy. (Mr. Mystal is either ignorant or intentionally deceiving us. So far he hasn't gotten a single thing right. Let's review what the founders believed about voting:
Samuel Adams: "Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote...that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country."That is why the “right to vote” is not spelled out in the Constitution, (Sigh. Again and again Mr. Mystal demonstrates his ignorance. We are astounded. He doesn't seem to understand the most basic facts of our system of governance.
Noah Webster: "If the citizens neglect their duty and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted . . . . If a republican government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the Divine commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the laws."
John Adams: "We electors have an important constitutional power placed in our hands; we have a check upon two branches of the legislature."
The Constitution creates, defines, and limits government. That is its purpose. It does not spell out rights or even mention them, because the document deals with government, not The People.
Amendments 14, 15, 19, 24, and 26 all deal with the right to vote. Why? Because the government was interfering with the peoples' pre-existent right to vote! These amendments were requited to restrain government abuse. And, nearly every amendment has this purpose.
In fact, the Bill of Rights specifically states its purpose in the preamble:
THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution.
The purpose of these ten amendments was to further restrict government.
Further, voting is most certainly presumed by the Constitution. Article One, Section 2:
The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States...
Section 4:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof...
It is appalling that someone could be so misinformed, or devious, as to state falsehood after falsehood in pursuit of an agenda.)
and why voting rights are under near-constant attack by conservative forces. It’s almost certainly why Lee thought that HR 1, the bill designed to restore and secure voting rights, was “written in hell by the devil himself.” ("Almost certainly?" Why not ask him, Mr. Mystal? He would certainly want to explain the truth to you.)
It’s no accident that the current assault on voting rights (There is no assault on voting rights.)
It’s no accident that the current assault on voting rights (There is no assault on voting rights.)
started not with the failed reelection of Donald Trump but with the successful election of Barack Obama. After the 2010 midterm elections and the new US census that followed, Republicans promptly used the gains they’d made to go on a gerrymandering rampage. (Mr. Mystal doesn't like it when Republicans use the same tactics as Democrats. Democrats have been gerrymandering for decades, and look to do even more.)
Their allies on the Supreme Court then used two cases—Shelby County v. Holder (2013) and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021)—to effectively neuter the Voting Rights Act.
Those moves set the stage for the legislative attacks on democracy that white conservatives have launched this year. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, (A partisan think tank with only three people of color in leadership. Hmm.)
Those moves set the stage for the legislative attacks on democracy that white conservatives have launched this year. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, (A partisan think tank with only three people of color in leadership. Hmm.)
17 states have enacted 28 new laws to restrict voting access. A total of 48 states have proposed a staggering 389 voter restriction bills, which run the gamut from obtuse (requiring notaries to sign absentee ballots), (Ho boy. We now understand that this screed is not to inform or express an opinion, it is simply agitprop. It is Political rhetoric designed to achieve a desired result by any means possible. Everything Mr. Mystal has written up to this point has been false. Such a record regarding the truth can only be deliberate.
So, regarding notarization, Only 12 states - Alaska, California, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia - have notary requirements. Oklahoma allows voters to include a copy of their ID with the ballot instead. California, Maine, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are blue states, so Republicans aren't the problem there.)
to cruel (denying water to voters waiting in line),(Again, false. The law prevents electioneering but does not ban water to voters.)
to downright racist (excluding from early voting the times Black people get out of church). (What time, exactly, do black people get out of church? Do all black people go to church? Do black people vote on Sunday after church? Whhaaat?)
The GOP’s current eruption of voter suppression is unrelenting and ferocious, but it’s not a new phenomenon and should not have been unexpected. Everybody knows that voting rights were initially restricted to wealthy white males and only grudgingly doled out to additional humans after war, outrage, or mass grassroots movements. (Mr. Mystal begins recycling previous points. We note again that government was the violator, and the amendments specifically reeled in government abuses. The government was and is the abuser.)
The solution to these cyclical outbursts has never been incremental change. Radical legislative interventions (the Voting Rights Act), new constitutional protections (the 15th and 19th amendments), and a judiciary willing to uphold them (Earl Warren protected the voting rights John Roberts is now destroying) have been some of the ways people have fought to limit the antidemocratic instincts of the white men in power.
But the current Democratic Party can’t take such bold action. Even though the mass of the party’s Congress members are willing to do whatever it takes, including nuking the filibuster, to ensure that Jim Crow–style voter restrictions never come back, they are all too easily hamstrung by a few timid white senators who seem to think that full and equal access to the rights of citizenship is just one option among many and that basic democratic rights should be put on the bargaining block in the name of bipartisanship. (He keeps going on and on. We are wearying of responding to every undocumented assertion and idiotic talking point parroted by Mr. Mystral. We have yet to see an original thought.)
There are too many people who seem to be willing to give the Biden administration and the national Democratic party a pass if it can’t convince Joe Manchin (and the cabal of spineless Democratic Senators he speaks for) to do the right thing. Given the stakes—the existence of democratic self-government—I don’t think the president can just throw up his hands and say “Welp, I tried.” Nobody looks back on Rutherford B. Hayes, who presided over the end of Reconstruction and the institution of Jim Crow, and says “good effort.” Texas Democrats are fleeing their state in an ultimately futile effort to stop new voter suppression laws; I think it’s fair to expect more than a speech (not even in prime time from the Oval Office but on a random afternoon) from President Biden.
In this speech, Biden was reduced to making a moral appeal to the bigots in the minority. “We will be asking my Republican friends—in Congress, in states, in cities, in counties—to stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our elections and the sacred right to vote,” Biden said, adding: “Have you no shame?”
If that’s all he’s got, we’re going to lose. Because conservative white people have no shame. They’ve never had any. Throughout American history, they have shamelessly regarded the right to vote as the ultimate white privilege.
We are not a democracy. The question has always been whether enough white people even want one.
The GOP’s current eruption of voter suppression is unrelenting and ferocious, but it’s not a new phenomenon and should not have been unexpected. Everybody knows that voting rights were initially restricted to wealthy white males and only grudgingly doled out to additional humans after war, outrage, or mass grassroots movements. (Mr. Mystal begins recycling previous points. We note again that government was the violator, and the amendments specifically reeled in government abuses. The government was and is the abuser.)
The solution to these cyclical outbursts has never been incremental change. Radical legislative interventions (the Voting Rights Act), new constitutional protections (the 15th and 19th amendments), and a judiciary willing to uphold them (Earl Warren protected the voting rights John Roberts is now destroying) have been some of the ways people have fought to limit the antidemocratic instincts of the white men in power.
But the current Democratic Party can’t take such bold action. Even though the mass of the party’s Congress members are willing to do whatever it takes, including nuking the filibuster, to ensure that Jim Crow–style voter restrictions never come back, they are all too easily hamstrung by a few timid white senators who seem to think that full and equal access to the rights of citizenship is just one option among many and that basic democratic rights should be put on the bargaining block in the name of bipartisanship. (He keeps going on and on. We are wearying of responding to every undocumented assertion and idiotic talking point parroted by Mr. Mystral. We have yet to see an original thought.)
There are too many people who seem to be willing to give the Biden administration and the national Democratic party a pass if it can’t convince Joe Manchin (and the cabal of spineless Democratic Senators he speaks for) to do the right thing. Given the stakes—the existence of democratic self-government—I don’t think the president can just throw up his hands and say “Welp, I tried.” Nobody looks back on Rutherford B. Hayes, who presided over the end of Reconstruction and the institution of Jim Crow, and says “good effort.” Texas Democrats are fleeing their state in an ultimately futile effort to stop new voter suppression laws; I think it’s fair to expect more than a speech (not even in prime time from the Oval Office but on a random afternoon) from President Biden.
In this speech, Biden was reduced to making a moral appeal to the bigots in the minority. “We will be asking my Republican friends—in Congress, in states, in cities, in counties—to stand up, for God’s sake, and help prevent this concerted effort to undermine our elections and the sacred right to vote,” Biden said, adding: “Have you no shame?”
If that’s all he’s got, we’re going to lose. Because conservative white people have no shame. They’ve never had any. Throughout American history, they have shamelessly regarded the right to vote as the ultimate white privilege.
We are not a democracy. The question has always been whether enough white people even want one.
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