Tea Party Nation Judson Phillips thinks the franchise should be taken away from renters
Of course, the complexities in trying to operationalize such a plan are, shall we say, staggering.
Tea Party Nation Judson Phillips thinks the franchise should be taken away from renters
This criticism always sounds a little hollow--when people talk about interpreting the constitution 'as the framers intended', I'm pretty sure they don't mean the parts that later amendments changed.
ReplyDeleteI think that the actual quote is quite revealing:
ReplyDelete"The Founding Fathers originally said, they put certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote. It wasn’t you were just a citizen and you got to vote. Some of the restrictions, you know, you obviously would not think about today. But one of those was you had to be a property owner. And that makes a lot of sense, because if you’re a property owner you actually have a vested stake in the community. If you’re not a property owner, you know, I’m sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners."
This idea has been around for a while; Robert Heinlein mooted the idea that only vets should vote (and these restrictions of either property or military service were common in the Greek city states).
I think it will be worth a post expounding exactly what I think the issues would be with this in practice.
This is not to say that I don;t have a lot of interest in arguments from original intent. I was merely commenting on the practical difficulties implicit in such a change.
Yeah, you're absolutely right. My apologies.
ReplyDelete@David: no troubles. There is a line of attack that does do precisely what you were concerned about and you are right to keep us honest.
ReplyDelete:-)