(no subject)
Nov. 24th, 2004 12:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
theweaselking"The Resounding Silence Continues. How Much is Enough for the Media to Cover Votergate 2004?"
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Jesse Jackson weighs in on things:
The trouble starts at the foundation. Americans have no right to vote for president. That sounds crazy, even un-American. We are the oldest constitutional democracy on the face of the earth, so we assume we have the right to vote. Not so. Our Constitution prohibits discrimination in voting on the basis of race or gender, and gives 18-year-olds the right to vote. But it has no clause guaranteeing citizens the right to vote for federal officials.
We're writing constitutions that provide that right in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it does not exist in the United States. One hundred eight countries have the right to vote in their constitutions, but not the United States.
Instead, our Constitution delegates voting rights to the states. State legislatures can appoint the electors who vote for president in the Electoral College any way they want. This all seemed pretty irrelevant until the Florida mess in the 2000 election. There, the Republican-controlled legislature, acting at the behest of Gov. Job Bush, announced that it would simply select a pro-Bush Electoral College delegation if the outcome of the popular vote was still unsettled on Dec. 12.
Then, in the infamous Supreme Court decision on Bush vs. Gore that ordered that the popular vote not be counted, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared that, since the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for the president of the United States, Florida's legislature could do whatever it wanted.
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Jesse Jackson weighs in on things:
The trouble starts at the foundation. Americans have no right to vote for president. That sounds crazy, even un-American. We are the oldest constitutional democracy on the face of the earth, so we assume we have the right to vote. Not so. Our Constitution prohibits discrimination in voting on the basis of race or gender, and gives 18-year-olds the right to vote. But it has no clause guaranteeing citizens the right to vote for federal officials.
We're writing constitutions that provide that right in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it does not exist in the United States. One hundred eight countries have the right to vote in their constitutions, but not the United States.
Instead, our Constitution delegates voting rights to the states. State legislatures can appoint the electors who vote for president in the Electoral College any way they want. This all seemed pretty irrelevant until the Florida mess in the 2000 election. There, the Republican-controlled legislature, acting at the behest of Gov. Job Bush, announced that it would simply select a pro-Bush Electoral College delegation if the outcome of the popular vote was still unsettled on Dec. 12.
Then, in the infamous Supreme Court decision on Bush vs. Gore that ordered that the popular vote not be counted, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared that, since the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for the president of the United States, Florida's legislature could do whatever it wanted.