We are a group of friends and acquaintances -- a merry band of pranksters indeed -- who have been arguing about politics on-and-off, then really on, then a little off... since 1998. On email. But that meant literally thousands of emails a year. That was too many. So here's the blog dedicated to carrying on that spirit of political and pop culture argument and dialogue. You might think of us as "schmoliticians", because while we take politics seriously, we try not to take ourselves quite so.
I just don't understand why minorities don't believe the Republican Party is really trying to create a Big Tent like W, Karl Rove, and Tom DeLay claim every 4 years at the Republican Convention.
posted by Pete @ 7/12/2006 11:32:00 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I can't even fathom the audacity of lawmakers who expect people to speak our common, if not official, language and know how to read and right before they cast their ballots. I completely support a literacy test prior to a person becoming a registered voter. And frankly, I don't care if it alienates the illiterates and immigrants. If a person cares so little about assimilating into the American culture that he or she has not bothered to learn how to speak or write in English, their vote has no merit in my mind anyway.
Proving that Members of Congress follow the debate on Politics Schmolitics and act accordingly, the House overwhemingly passed a renewal of the Voting Rights Act today without the amendments to soften oversight of the states with long histories of racist voting policies or to drop the printing of multilingual ballots in areas with significant sets of citizens whose first language is not English. Over the dissent of Southern Republicans, of course.
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Todd, I'd have to disagree with your opinion. First, while I highly value education, I do not think that not having achieved a certain (one might even say minimal) level of education should keep a citizen from exercising his or her right to vote. Also, I feel that anything that aids a citizen - and remember we're talking about American citizens here, not illegal immigrants or any other disfavored group - to vote (printing ballots in another language, using large print for senior citizens, braille ballots for the blind, creating simple idiot-proof ballots for Floridians, etc.) is a good thing.
Also, many of these "basic" and seemingly "reasonable" qualifications beyond citizenship for the vote have a long tradition of abuse - in fact, a history of being created specifically FOR abuse. Historically, rules such as the literacy test have provided useful tools for bigots to wield against the minorities they hate. For example, before the practice was banned, a black man in someplace like Georgia could have approached a polling place and read War & Peace to the pollster, and the pollster would have declared him "illiterate" and refused him a ballot while declaring a white man who couldn't write his own name "literate" in the same breath.
These types of laws, which I disagree with in principal even if they were to function as intended, NEVER function as intended. Well, perhaps its more correct to say they function EXACTLY as intended. And that is the problem.
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