Should The Voting Age Be 16?

There are some people, among them US Representative for the 7th District of Massachusetts Ayanna Pressley, who think that the national voting age for federal elections should be lowered to sixteen. 

They say that today's sixteen-year-olds are mature enough to be trusted with the vote. Unfortunately for Representative Pressley, not enough people agreed with her stance. Last month her peers soundly rejected the idea of extending the ballot to sixteen-year-olds.

The U.S. House of Representatives has rejected a measure proposed by U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Dorchester) to lower the voting age in elections for federal office to 16. On Thursday night the House voted 126-305 on the amendment, Pressley’s first as a member of Congress.

“Some have questioned the maturity of our youth. I don’t,” Pressley said on the House floor before the vote, according to video provided by C-Span. “A 16-year-old in 2019 possesses a wisdom and maturity that comes from 2019 challenges, hardships, and threats.”

An ally, U.S. Representative Grace Meng (D-New York), pointed out that high school students have been getting more active in political matters in recent years.

Michigan Republican Governor Weakens Minimum Wage/Paid Sick Leave

Apparently, many Republicans don't really believe in democracy if by democracy you mean that the people ultimately get the final say. What they do believe in though is using the process of democracy to thwart the will of the voters. Lose an election? Rewrite the laws and rules so that the incoming elected officials don't have the same power that you had when you were in office. 

Getting worried about ballot initiatives but don't want to be seen to oppose them before an election? Adopt them and then immediately gut them after the election.

Lansing — Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder on Friday signed controversial bills to weaken minimum wage and paid sick leave initiatives that had been headed toward the Nov. 6 ballot before intervention by the Republican-led Legislature.

The minimum wage law will raise Michigan’s rate from $9.25 to $12.05 per hour by 2030, instead of the $12 by 2022 proposed under the initiative. The minimum wage for tipped restaurant workers will rise to $4.58 by 2030 instead of $12 by 2024. The paid sick leave law now exempts more than 160,000 small businesses that have fewer than 50 employees each from a mandate that would have otherwise applied to every company in the state.

Supreme Court Decision : Ohio Voting Rolls

If you live in Ohio, skip a few elections, and don't respond to state inquiries, you will be purged from the voting rolls. And the Supreme Court agreed that there's no problem with this.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday upheld Ohio’s aggressive efforts to purge its voting rolls. The court ruled that a state may kick people off the rolls if they skip a few elections and fail to respond to a notice from state election officials. The vote was 5 to 4, with the more conservative justices in the majority. The case concerned Larry Harmon, a software engineer and Navy veteran who lives near Akron, Ohio. He voted in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections but did not vote in 2012, saying he was unimpressed by the candidates. He also sat out the midterm elections in 2010 and 2014. 

But in 2015, Mr. Harmon did want to vote against a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana and found that his name had been stricken from the voting rolls. Ohio is the only state that commences such a process based on the failure to vote in a single federal election cycle,” said a brief from the League of Women Voters and the Brennan Center for Justice. “Literally every other state uses a different, and more voter-protective, practice.” The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, ruled in favor of Mr. Harmon in 2016, saying that Ohio had violated the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by using the failure to vote as a “trigger” for sending the notices.

A Reuters study in 2016 found that at least 144,000 people were removed from the voting rolls in recent years in Ohio’s three largest counties, which are home to Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus.

Tom Perkins: Return to Aristocracy

There has been a lot written of late about inequality. Unsurprisingly people on the Right tend to defend inequality in general and the massively increased inequality of the past 40-50 years as a good thing. People on the Left tend to consider increased inequality a bad thing while some go so far as to consider virtually any inequality as problematic. The Right, or at least corporations and the monied class have been winning this argument for a very long time. To the extent there is increased energy on the Left about this it's a last ditch stand or cynical media posturing by politicians who'd like to change the subject from their own complicity in the workings of the machine while keeping those campaign contributions rolling in. But there are some people of the Right who are not content with being wealthy, not content with paying relatively low taxes by historical American standards or by the standards of other First World industrialized nations, and not content with having money treated as speech and having political bribery virtually legalized. Some people, aristocrats in all but name, are starting to wonder why those damned peasants have the right to vote at all.

I mean if you're so awesome and so intelligent that you've built or expanded multinational corporations, discovered new medicines, increased the limits of knowledge about the universe, or at the very least made yourself and your family more money than could be spent in one lifetime, is it really fair that some sap who hasn't even made a million dollars gets the same vote as you do? Some rich people think that they should have more say in society while more of us peasants should have no say. Venture capitalist Tom Perkins, last heard from comparing the wealthiest 1% Americans to Jews hunted and exterminated during the Holocaust, is such a man.

"The Tom Perkins system is: You don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes," Perkins said. "But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How's that?" 

The audience at the Commonwealth Club reacted with laughter. But Perkins offered no immediate indication that he was joking. Asked offstage if the proposal was serious, Perkins said: "I intended to be outrageous, and it was."

It is hard to overestimate how profoundly undemocratic and unAmerican this proposal is. There is always a tension between the private sector in which the boss can more or less operate as he sees fit (especially without unions) and the public sphere of democracy and a republican form of government in which everyone has a say and both private power and public power are limited by constitution and law. Evidently Perkins doesn't like our system any more. Perhaps he should consider leaving the country and resettling in a place like Afghanistan or Somalia where whatever the local Big Man says, goes. He might be much happier. The entire swath of American political history has tended towards expanding the franchise, not limiting it.

Perkins offers no reason as to why it would be a better thing if only rich people voted or had even more of an outsize impact on elections than they already do. I guess to him it's self-evident. But I think he's going to have to come up with a better argument than "I'm rich and dislike the current President."

An aristocratic system tends not to last if you have other elements like an educated middle class, social safety nets, unions and other non-government support groups, etc. Because sooner or later people without the vote or with limited political say realize that they greatly outnumber the rich and have no need to bow and scrape before them. But to be an American is not to bow and scrape before anyone NOR to want anyone to do that before you. Perkins should learn how to be an American. I think he was apparently born in the wrong country and wrong century. If nothing else, Perkins should realize that a society that moves too far towards plutocracy and autocracy eventually gets balanced out by a Robespierre...

Jury Duty: Who Are Your Peers?

What is a peer?

Well according to the dictionary a peer is a person who belongs to the same age group or social group as someone else.  A peer is one that is of equal standing with another or especially one who belongs to the same societal group based on age, grade or status.

You have a constitutional right to a criminal trial by a jury of your peers. I will leave it up to the experts like The Janitor or Old Guru to fully break down exactly what are the exceptions to that rule and what peers mean in a legal setting but for many non-lawyers I think it's safe to say that in that context peers would mean adult US citizens. There are of course some questions about whether or not a criminal defendant is guaranteed to have a jury made up of people who share their immutable characteristics (I don't believe this is the case) or whether the state can deliberately and maliciously exclude people who share such characteristics with the defendant (also I don't think this is, with a few exceptions, the case).

But in today's world of ever increasing globalization and immigration, should peer be restricted to US citizens? And when it comes to such things as elections and jury duty who really gets the last word? The federal government or the states? Well that answer can often depend on which side you're on when it comes to such things as immigration. People who point to federal supremacy when a state like Arizona tries to make life more difficult for illegal immigrants often turn a blind eye when a state like California tries to make life easier for them. And people who scream about the primacy of states rights when Alabama attempts to kick out illegal immigrants wax poetic about federal supremacy when California, Illinois or New York try to do end runs around specific federal programs designed to identify and deport illegal immigrants.

The latest proposal coming out of, you guessed it, California, does not, despite what detractors imply, apply to illegal immigrants, but it does seek to extend rights and duties usually thought only to accrue to citizens to legally resident non-citizens.

LINK

SACRAMENTO — Legal immigrants who are not American citizens would be able to serve on juries in California under a bill that lawmakers sent to Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday.The measure joins a proposal already on the governor's desk that would also allow legal permanent residents to serve as poll workers in California elections.The bills are among a handful that would expand immigrant rights in California and have sparked rancorous debate in the Legislature.

Immigrants "are part of the fabric of our community," Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski (D-Fremont) said during the floor debate Thursday. "They benefit from the protections of our laws, so it is fair and just that they be asked to share in the obligation to do jury duty."

Republicans opposed the measure, which passed the Assembly with a bare majority. The Senate approved the bill Monday."I do think there is something called the jury of your peers," countered Assemblyman Rocky Chavez (R-Oceanside). "Peers are people who understand the nuances of America."

He noted that some immigrants come from countries where suspects are guilty until proven innocent and where people are taught to obey authority, not question it.The bill, AB 1401, was authored by the Assembly Judiciary Committee, which seeks a way to expand the pool of eligible jurors in California...

I think you can probably guess what I think of this proposal but just in case you can't I will spell it out. There is an argument that can be made for the elimination of the nation state. There is also an argument that can be made that nationalism is just another form of bigotry and them vs. us thinking. You could argue that separating people or granting them rights based on where they were born on this planet is not really all that different than basing their level of rights on other characteristics over which they have no control such as their race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. Non-citizens have legally voted in previous elections.

I am wholly unsympathetic to these arguments. The nation state isn't going anywhere anytime soon. Neither are different cultures and different ways of understanding the world or different ideas about how a criminal justice system works.

There is a process by which anyone on this planet can become an American citizen. Depending on which year you're referencing, about a million or so do each year, in which case they can vote, serve on juries and do other things which, usually but not always in the American political system have been reserved to citizens. When you vote or serve on a jury you are exerting influence over a political system you are invested in and for which you have some form of loyalty or hopefully understanding. This isn't perfect of course. There are plenty of stupid or malicious people who vote or serve on juries (how else can you explain the election of Ted Cruz or the acquittal of Casey Anthony) but that is our system. In many respects it's the least bad of all the others.  

My peers are American citizens. I do not wish to be judged by non-citizens. I do not want American elections to have non-citizens participating in them as poll workers or really in any capacity. I know that there are many smart, sober, well-read and intellectually curious permanent non-citizens in this country. I work with several and have no problems saying that some are far more intelligent than I. All the same though this isn't their country unless and until they become a citizen. I don't think it's too much to ask that jury duty and any sort of election work be restricted to US citizens.  

Am I wrong?

Should permanent legal residents be able to serve on juries?

What should be the distinctions between citizens and legal residents?