While it’s sad to say that we’ve accepted the reason the Republican Party is fighting like hell to restrict voting rights is to win elections and not the fabricated voter fraud… the new trickling of gossip within the extreme right is just scary.
It’s one thing to rig the system, it’s another to literally take the country back 100 years into the past. But a fear of change is basically what conservative means, so might as well add rewind and undo all civil progress to that definition as well.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory, or anything. The likelihood that it would ever happen is nil. However, the point is there are fringes who are actually talking about and considering such things. People who want to get more power by taking it progressively away from voters and the people who are just as much a part of this country as they are.
Thankfully, people who are advocating repealing the 17th Amendment, insofar as numbers, are small. But the general public needs to know about this sort of thing, because of the extent to which the extreme right is exploring how to grasp as much power as possible – it’s starting to be unsettling. Doing so, repealing the 17th Amendment, one should understand means taking a massive part of American Democracy, voting for members of the US Senate, back to before 1913. It REMOVES a big part of how Americans are represented by their government.
The 17th Amendment establishes direct election of US Senators – so that people of a state VOTE for their senators to represent them. Prior to that, the state elected officials selected the senators. The argument for people who prefer the pre-1913 way of doing things is that it gives states more power – but it gives PEOPLE much less power.
What’s more important when it comes to rights: rights of States or rights of People?
Those on the extreme right seem to be implying that state rights are more important than peoples’ individual rights. Scary, that is. Not quite freedom, is it?
In the past, state officials selecting US senators resulted in a dreadful amount of corruption in the state houses as people lobbied to get selected as a senator of the United States. Has everyone already forgotten Rod Blagojevich who is IN JAIL for corruption related to selling a senate seat? In current times, the moment a state official had the power to select a senator it became a corrupt process.
Beyond corruption in politics: people need to vote. That’s the core. The Republican Party needs to get serious about stopping people on its fringe pushing for voter restrictions. They scream “FREEDOM” from on a high, righteous mountain, while simultaneaously doing everything they can to take freedoms away from people with whom they disagree.
It should come as little surprise, then, that people who constitute the extreme right of the Republican Party are advocating to go BACK to this corrupt system: a system that takes away from the voters, and gives it to whomever controls the majorities in the state assemblies… which right now happens to be republican in a lot of states.
Parts of the republican party have been hell bent on changing voting laws so that they can either stay in power or get even more control over how the country operates… with less and less input from citizens. Now, while it’s a very small number of people, republicans are voicing repealing a Constitutional Amendment JUST so they can get more power, more money, and likely pass even more laws that restrict rights rather than protect them.
Bottom line: if Republicans want to wrap themselves in the flag and value guns more than the teachings of their religion – all the while using “protecting freedom!” as the boilerplate reply to any and all intellectual confrontation – at least stop passing law after law after law that restricts your own damn freedom without even realizing it. Voting for extreme politicians is NOT giving you more individual power, it’s taking it away in exchange for a brief moment of protest.
Like I said, it’s a trickle of a talking point right now. But that it even exists scares me. Grown ups in the Republican Party: time to bring in the kids and teach them how to be grown ups before they steal the keys from you and it will be too late.
