Is there no end to the mendacity?
That is my first thought when I see the ad blitz for the campaign to defeat a constitutional amendment before Ohio voters in a special August vote. The ad claims gravely that the amendment will end the principle of one man, one vote, and is therefore, “Deadly to Democracy.”
The amendment is procedural. It wouldn’t ordinarily excite the kind of emotions that fund an ad blitz. It would change the current procedure for amending Ohio’s constitution, which, ever since the Progressive Era, can be amended by a single-vote majority in a referendum. (RELATED: The Question for Competent Populism)
Progressives then as now were interested in removing constitutional protections against concentrating political power. They felt then and feel now that experts should govern, and since they are so much better at it than anyone else, our constitutions should not be weighted down with unnecessary safeguards. Who needs to be safeguarded from those who know best? The political task of these superior folks is then to manipulate the people in the short term to turn over power to the elite, and anything standing in the way should be removed. With power in their hands, they will build all kinds of structures into law that will keep all the non-elites far away from any say in any matter of importance. (RELATED: “Progressive Conservatism”: A Winning Combination from Tories to Trump)
Safeguards, shmafeguards.
One such safeguard is the requirement of a supermajority to amend a constitution. So, in Ohio, the Progressives of that earlier time pushed through initiative and referendum powers, to undercut the work of legislative deliberation. They also pushed through an amendment making it possible to amend the constitution with only a simple majority of the voters, bypassing the legislature entirely.
What is the problem with a constitution being easily amendable?
Unlike statutes, constitutions lay out the basic compact between the government and the people. The people require the government to respect their own reserved rights. With that respect, the people consent to grant the government authority to make laws they will obey even if they don’t like them.
Why would anyone grant authority to a government to restrict their freedom? People realize that chaos results from no governing structure just as tyranny results from a government granted too much power. The near-anarchy that ruled America during the Articles of Confederation period persuaded the nation to empower a more functional government. But only the addition of a specific Bill of Rights persuaded the people that the government accepted that it would not consolidate power in their own hands beyond what the people desire.
One of the fears of the people, justified by the many historic failures of democracies, was that once elected, the majority would trample on the rights of the minority. Since in a working democracy, everyone will be in the minority sometimes, it seemed clear to our Framers that the Constitution had to give all citizens the confidence that while the majority might legitimately make laws, there would always be limits as to how far their authority could go. (RELATED: The Failed Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt: The Rise of the Managerial State)
Madison framed the argument this way in Federalist 51:
It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.
Operating majorities have consigned an entire race of people to tertiary status. The Jim Crow laws were duly passed by state legislatures and signed by their governors. The Constitution was there to protect them, and though it took an obscenely long amount of time before its explicit terms were enforced, the whole foul structure did come crashing down. In the meantime, when the country was not well inclined towards civil rights, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were secure until the day that they were understood and enforced. Had only a majority been needed to remove them or alter them, they surely would have been gone.
Ultimately, our own human laws, even our constitutions, derive their validity from “Nature and Nature’s God” who limits their power absolutely from ever alienating people’s right to life, liberty, and property, all used according to the term of their user’s license.
Constitutions’ roles in the republic, then, are to set as hard a limit on the kinds of laws governments can make – as hard a limit as humans are rightfully able to set. We do not allow a simple majority, of officials or even of the voters at large, to alter or remove our most basic liberties.
But as the Progressives then thought of themselves as having evolved decisively beyond human error, and therefore were capable of and deserving of unchecked power, they worked hard to lower constitutional obstacles to their program.
If anything, in this era of massive government/industry collusion (i.e., fascist) in the unprecedented overreach of the COVID lockdowns and in ongoing censorship, the need today is in the opposite direction. Thus, the amendment the legislature set before Ohio voters for ratification in August will require once more a supermajority, here of 60 percent of the voters, to approve constitutional change.
It’s this reaffirmation of a defense against majoritarian tyranny that has today’s progressives fabricating a campaign of lies, as in a truth-defying leap, they call this amendment an attempt to undo the principle of one man, one vote.
No matter that anything that truly violates one man one vote would be thrown out as unconstitutional on the first challenge. (Every person’s vote under the amendment would count the same as any other’s. No one’s vote would count for less. No juror’s vote counts for less than any other’s even though unanimity is required for a criminal guilty verdict.)
What matters to those bankrolling the duplicitous ad campaign is that this amendment would make their aim more difficult. They have cast this vote as being about abortion. They certainly don’t want to address the principle of the actual procedural change. That is because if the amendment passes, then it will be harder for them to change Ohio’s constitution to remove the most basic of all rights to the most vulnerable and weakest of all classes – the unborn. They want to be able to remove the right to life by the barest of majority votes.
Presumably after that, they will be for the present amendment proposal, if they will be content to consolidate their victory at this point. Their vote against it is only because their larger principle is not protection of human rights of the most vulnerable, but rather the elimination of those human rights that limit their own aspirations, even if it leaves the other with nothing.
As with any elite and privileged class, that is the extent of their concerns. When the most basic rights of others get in the way of their privilege, those rights are to be removed.