State's Rights All Righty or Almighty?

I've lived in Florida for a long time and this is the classic "hoisted with your own petard" of "state's rights.  Voting has always been something that states have been in charge of.  Each state makes their own rules and that is the way it has been.  Virtually all of the court challenges to the results of the election have been dismissed. 

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed discrimination in voting on the basis of race.  Florida was subject to the various aspects of the 1965 law because of its systematic discrimination and circumvention of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments passed after the end of the civil war, the failure of reconstruction, and the "compromise of 1877" which seated Rutherford B. Hayes as the next president and the start of Jim Crow laws.

It's 2021 and the current president has been complaining that he lost the election because of wide spread voter fraud in Georgia, a state he won narrowly in 2016  because democratic and other minority turnout did not match the turnout that elected President Obama in 2008 and 2012.  Once again the President lost the popular vote, this time by almost seven million votes but this time, while small Democratic victories in Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona gave Joe Biden an Electoral College victory.

Critics of the Voting Rights Act said that the law was a unique intrusion by the federal government on states rights to determine laws regarding voting and that because registration levels are now similar in percentages racially the law is no longer justified.

And now a minority of Republicans in the Senate and House of Representatives will make a last ditch effort to overturn the results of the election citing rules violations in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.  These state voted narrowly for Joe Biden in 2020. after voting for Trump in 2016.  Why should one state tell another how to run its elections when the state in question has certified its own results?  How is it possible that the current president of the United States of America can ask the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" 11,780 votes needed to "change" the results of the 2020 presidential election?

Changes are happening.  Why should the States of Florida, Texas, and California be hamstrung with only six United States Senators and almost a third of the country's population?

The country is deeply divided on many issues but should be relieved that President Trump lost his bid for a second term and his efforts to subvert the 2020 election results will ultimately fail.

Comments

  1. John AsgeirsonJanuary 6, 2021 at 3:34 PM

    I may have spoken too soon but I still believe the efforts of Trump and the folks that still support him after this afternoon's riot will fail in their effort to derail democracy.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two Months and Eight Days

Early voting and mail in voting will take place before November 5, 2024. And on a related front I hope people will notice that it does not take four years of partisan snark and sniping for the voting public to make a decision about who the next president will be.  I voted  in the Florida primary for the November Election on August 20, 2024. Locally, the mood of the electorate in Miami has changed.  A few weeks ago I just couldn't imagine a person born in 1942 running for reelection as president or a person with as much baggage as an ex-president running for office, who could legitimately be understood to be running for office as a strategy for not going to prison.  Assuming he would win, he could, stop any prosecutions and if he lost he could further question what democracy is.  And it is no surprise that the former president has started complaining about an election that hasn't happened and claiming that the opposition will have stolen the election if he does n...
Read more

Internet Dust Ups

 A high school classmate shared on FB, something from a 64 year old commercial pilot who had passed a exam to fly on of the latest jets in their fleet of aircraft.  I was also aware of an FAA rule about retirement at age 65 for commercial pilots.    In the U.S.,  there are no  FAA  age limits for pilots except for commercial airline pilots employed by airlines certificated under 14 CFR Part 121 . These airlines cannot employ pilots after they reach the age of 65. However, these pilots may stay on with a Part 121 carrier in some other role, such as flight engineers. I then went on a digression about the retirement of folks in professions like law or accounting.  From my own experience 30 years at a job or working for an employer is a very good time to start serious planning for the next chapter in your life.   And for my efforts at explaining my work history, working with folks who lost their jobs through no fault of their own.  I wa...
Read more

What Is Official These Days?

 I would guess most people would understand what Official means.  Just because a person holds a public office doesn't mean everything he might do is official and everything he might not do is official as well. “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness". from J. Kenneth Galbraith interview. And oh, by the way, moral justification at times isn't much more than a fig leaf, you can bet someone got screwed or got the proverbial get out of jail free card.
Read more