It’s 1788 and you just
read about a new vision for your government.
It starts with “We the People.”
In a world ruled by kings, queens, emperors, popes, sultans, tsars, and
dictators, a group of colonies decided they could rule themselves. That’s heady stuff. That grand experiment’s survival is in
jeopardy; too much power in the hands of too few.
Fareed Zakaria
recently wrote about the decline of democracy around the world.[i] He
observed that most Americans don’t believe it can happen here. We are not Poland or Hungary after all where
democracy wanes. Yet, we do see signs of
it deteriorating here at home.
History
demonstrates that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.[ii] Cliché aside, corruption festers when those in
power are emboldened to take away the rights of the minority. How does this happen?
Let’s look at
three of many causes: too much money in the system, too many levels of
government ruled by one party and too much suppression of voting rights. One follows the other. Each deserves in-depth analysis at some
point.
Money has always
been the mother’s milk of politics, but the Supreme Court opened the spigot to
a full gush in its ruling in Citizens United.
Now, a few unnamed individuals and corporations can create Super-PACs to
buy off candidates for Congress, state legislatures and local governments
without revealing who they are. Vast
amounts of money target candidates who, when elected, will do the bidding of
the donor. When you consider that the
moneyed oligarchs own 90% of the nation’s wealth, you know who controls the government: it’s not the
majority, but the few.
Thirty-five
state governors are Republicans. Their
party controls 32 state legislatures with veto-proof majorities in 17 of
them. The people elected these
majorities. It says that the Democratic
Party wasn’t in tune with the people of those states. Super majorities aren’t healthy for the
nation, no matter which party is in the lead.
When either party has too much power, we know corruption is on the
doorstep.
Once a group
gets control of the system, it wants to keep control. The party in power can pass laws that make it
difficult to register to vote, and difficult to actually cast a ballot. We saw this, particularly in the South, when
laws prohibited African-Americans from voting, when Poll Taxes were imposed to
keep the poor and opposition from voting. Suppression continues today in many states
with laws and regulations that discourage people from registering, and
voting. Gerrymandering, the process of
designing congressional and state legislative districts to favor one party over
another is a favorite
voter suppression technique. It is so
commonplace and so egregious that two State Supreme Courts have overturned the
laws recently, requiring new voting districts that are balanced. Why does it matter?
Zakaria reminded us of Emerson’s notion
that “Institutions
are collections of rules and norms agreed upon by human beings. If leaders attack, denigrate, and abuse them,
they will be weakened, and this, in turn, will weaken the character and quality
of democracy.”[iii] When political leaders attack and abuse our right to vote
they weaken democracy at its core. When
we lose the right to vote we blur the vision of our Founding Fathers.
Any citizen over the age of 18 should
be able to register to vote, and to vote with no constraints other
than showing that they live in a state and local town or district. My state, California, for example, has automatic registration. If you are a citizen, the
state automatically adds you to the rolls when you apply for a driver’s license
or state issued identification card. If you are too young to vote, they add your name to the rolls when you turn 18. When you change an address or other information on your license or ID, it
edits the election rolls. You can decline voter registration if
you wish. This year our county is experimenting with vote-by-mail. At the next election, in June, every
registered voter will receive a ballot in the mail; they can fill out the
ballot at home, put it in a sealed envelope and mail it back to the county
election office or take it to a drop-off ballot box. How easy is that? Three states already do this.[iv]
It’s easy for states to suppress voter participation: no automatic
registration, no same-day registration, no pre-registration if under 18, no online registration, no early voting,
and no vote by mail, no absentee voting, and restrictive documentation
for registration and restrictive identification requirements to actually
vote. Go to www.rockthevote.org to see how your state stacks up.
The
right-to-vote is not an exciting topic for discussion, unless you lose it. Too many
states thwart
the right of people to
vote. Imagine election districts drawn to give
both parties 50% of the electorate, 50% of ethnic or racial groups, or held closely to city or county boundaries. Imagine what it would be like if “We the People” all had an equal voice in government. It would be easy to register to vote and it
would be easy to vote in every state.
The amount of money that controls campaigns and the candidates is an abuse of democracy and that democracy will wither. Legislatures
that gerrymander
election districts blur the vision of our Founding Fathers and we become just another country, but without character. We become just another people wondering what happened, another people wondering who let the dream die. We will wonder how it could
happen here.
[i]Fareed
Zakaria – Washington Post column – February 23, 2018
[ii]John
Dalberg-Acton - Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton,
April 5, 1887 - published in Historical
Essays and Studies,
edited by J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1907
[iii]Ralph
Waldo Emerson – Essays – Self Reliance - 1841
