Democrats Need to Learn How to Speak about Liberty

Commentary

Fitchburg, Wisconsin—Wrote a piece eight years ago on voting rights work by city of Madison, Wisconsin, (In These Times).

Imagine a municipality affirmatively advancing the personal liberty of voting, a fundamental Constitutional right. That's what Madison, and other Wisconsin municipalities did.

But I had trouble getting a decent quote from Madison, and had to settle for Madison City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl's statement. "Our goal is for each eligible voter to be able to cast a ballot and have that ballot counted."

Witzel-Behl's statement is bureaucratic, almost defensive, and neither mentions or shows explicit reverence to people's personal liberty to vote. Typical Democrat. No values, no understanding of what voting means as a liberty.

Liberty is ours, and Democrats don't get that.

That's because Witzel-Behl and virtually every Wisconsin Democrat in office do not believe in our foundational liberty of voting in Wisconsin, under Article III, Suffrage, Wisconsin Constitution. Democrats are little more than victims from multi-front attacks on cherished liberties. 

And federally, with a few exceptions, national Democrats are not much better. See Democracy Docket for an example of how to talk about and litigate liberty.

If Democrats want to establish a political culture defending and advocating for Constitutionally guaranteed liberties such as voting rights, they have failed—a dangerous defect when judicial supremacy reigns under a Republican judicial assault against liberty led by Republican partisans on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Civil Rights Movement

Memphis, Tennessee, USA, Civil Rights Marchers with 
"I Am A Man" Signs, 1968—Image Bettmann/CORBIS
Zinn Education Project

The 1950s-60s-70s succeeded culturally, legislatively and in federal court because grassroots Americans and citizen groups presented clear, moral and constitutionally grounded arguments for liberty, equality and the promise of America.

No DEI, no politically correct, scolding semantics, no identity-politics polemics that today seeks to foist and instruct a flight from reason onto the grassroots whose duty is perceived as mindless compliance.

Voting is your liberty, voting is your right. Anybody tries to stop you has to answer to us. That' needs to be the political message. This commitment and political statement is something we rarely get from Democrats.

The current assault on voting ofcourse is a long project of Republicans.

Wisconsin 2008 Voter Obstruction Effort

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen and the Republican Party leveled their guns to obstruct voting rights on Wisconsin in 2008, lest too many of the wrong type of voters showed up for Obama.

Trump is attempting to replicate what Van Hollen wanted.

See Van Hollen's and the GOP 2008 efforts at voter suppression in which Van Hollen's ridiculous effort was tossed out of court.

In the 2008 case, (J B Van Hollen vs. Government Accountability Board (GAB) et al) Van Hollen tried to create a new Wisconsin constitutional qualification to vote by fiat: A perfect match of spelling of voters' names in state bureaucracies, after first secretly assuring fellow Republicans he would commence this frivolous legal action at the 2008 Republican National Convention held in Minneapolis, as first reported by WisPolitics in a scoop that includes audio.

Several former judges serving on the state Elections Board would have failed Van Hollen's new constitutional standard proposed in 2008, as this GOP effort drew wide ridicule and defeat in court.

"Nothing in state or federal law requires that there be a data match as a prerequisite for a citizen's right to vote," Judge Maryann Sumi said in dismissing Van Hollen's lawsuit that tried to use the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) as a voter suppression tool.

Today, Trump is attempting his similar anti-voting project by trying to nationalize state-administered elections. Trump is trying to create federal bureaucratic lists of state voters, and appointing his administration as the sole deciders who determine who gets to vote, based on bureaucratic and documentary exact matches of voters' names with mandated new documentation.

Elected Democrats need to comprehend and explain what Trump and Republicans are up to: Creation of anti-voting federal bureaucracies, unconstitutional bureaucracies, and simply speak out in clear terms: Don't fuck with voters.

I have my doubts Democrats' are equipped to stand with voters.