The right to vote is one of the most misunderstood rights in American law.
I remember some years ago on a television broadcast, Ann Coulter said that she would gladly surrender her right to vote in exchange for the repeal of the 19th Amendment. That amendment to the Constitution reads as follows:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
This is known as the Women’s Suffrage Law, which gave to women the right to vote.
The problem is, there is no such right. There is only permission.
Women’s suffrage required an amendment, because the original Constitution did not recognize any right of women to vote. It did, however, permit each state to decide for itself whether its female citizens could vote — and many did, as far back as 1869.
What the 19th did was to remove from states the right to decide who could vote by making conditions that apply to all the states.
Previous to the 19th, the 15th Amendment prohibited voting discrimination based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude (slavery). Black men could vote, even where white women could not.
It must be noted that the Constitution does not prohibit all restrictions on voting rights. Sex and race are the big ones, but at one time, states did restrict the right to vote to property owners. This gradually vanished, until today, the right to vote is popularly considered a human right, endowed to us by our Creator. It is not in the founding documents, however.
In too many cases, allowing incompetent people to vote amounts to giving matches to small children — matches and dynamite. The stakes are too high, the accountability too low. Voters are not required to know anything except how to cast their vote, period, if even that. They need apply no criteria, no reason, no facts to their decision. For all too many, their only criterion is to vote Democrat, or less commonly Republican, regardless of other factors.
Voting is not one of the God-given rights on which our nation is founded. Therefore, what arguments can be made, for or against, allowing women to vote?
Ann Coulter, and others of late, say that women, as a group, seek security rather than risk, in government policies. As a result, so the case goes, they are more likely to favor a welfare state than the rough-and-tumble of a competitive free market, on which our republic depends for economic survival. In international affairs, according to some, they tend to be more pacifist than men, even in the face of a foreign aggressor.
But is the problem really with women? Would that we could have had a President Margaret Thatcher rather than a Joe Biden!
The problem is that all too many voters, men and women, know little or nothing about American history and therefore have little respect for American values. Few Americans could pass the basic test required of law-abiding immigrants seeking citizenship. Worse yet, they have been propagandized in schools to disparage our history and to despise our values.
Add to that the potentially vast numbers of illegal aliens and their birthright-citizen offspring, and we are creating a class of voters who hate us but demand that we provide cradle-to-grave amenities to them, even while our disabled veterans and widows of killed-in-combat soldiers languish in poverty.
It is long past time to rethink the entire issue of voting. Unfortunately, that horse seems to have escaped the barn. Only an unpredictable event can correct matters.
If every voter would vote as I presume Ann Coulter does, I would gladly surrender my white-male-privilege right to vote to bring that about.
Image: cagdesign via Pixabay, Pixabay License.