Senator Clinton chases the pedophile vote.

Grubbing for the Felon Vote

He was busted in Bangkok. Eric Franklin Rosser was the first pedophile to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. He distributed child pornography. His hidden-camera videos show him having hot pumping sex with his 10-year-old niece. The girl told police the molestations had continued for five years. Another tape shows a 9-year-old girl masturbating the graying Rosser and giving him oral sex. Rosser, a former keyboard player for John Mellencamp, is a disgusting pervert. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry have taken steps to ensure that Mr. Rosser has the chance to vote for the Democrat of his choice.

Carefully conducted studies have demonstrated that the most vicious, perverted, corrupt, destructive, sadistic and degenerate scumbags in America, if given the opportunity, would prefer Democrat candidates by a margin of three to one. That’s why the Democrat Party leadership is eager to restore full voting privileges to every convicted felon in America.

Only Maine and Vermont permit felons to participate in public elections while in prison. Thirty-three states deny the franchise to felons while on parole. Twenty-nine states withhold voting privileges from felons on probation. Seven states keep certain types of felons off their voting rolls and seven states withhold voting privileges from felons for all time.

Every state has the legal authority to revoke a criminal’s voting privilege because the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution stipulates that persons guilty of “participation in rebellion, or other crime” may be denied voting privileges. Furthermore, the federal government may not infringe upon any state’s authority to grant or rescind the voting privileges of felons. So voting is a states’ rights issue.

Florida is one of the seven states that withhold the franchise from felons for all time. After George Bush won Florida by 537 votes Democrats claimed that a purging of 1,104 eligible voters from the rolls, all of whom were mistaken for felons, had cost Al Gore the presidency. This assertion assumed that those randomly eliminated persons would have shown up at the polls in unusually large numbers and that 85 percent of them would have voted for Al Gore, which is contrary to past voter behavior. Furthermore, despite the Florida secretary of state’s legally mandated efforts to clean the roster of ineligible felons a whopping 5,600 ineligible felons voted illegally in Florida in the 2000 presidential election. Sixty-eight percent of these crooked vote casters was a registered Democrat. Therefore, if the state of Florida had made no errors in cleaning its list of ineligible voters and if all ineligible voters had been denied the opportunity to cast a vote in the 2000 presidential election, then George Bush would have won Florida by over one thousand votes.

Furthermore, a comprehensive examination of 64,000 ballots cast in 67 Florida counties, demonstrated that Bush’s 537-vote lead over Al Gore would have increased to 1,665 votes using the counting standard advocated by Al Gore himself. This study was funded by USA Today, the Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder Newspapers and was conducted by accountants for the national accounting firm BDO Seidman. The newspapers sought to examine the issue of “undervotes,” which are those ballots that pass through a voting machine without tripping the counting mechanism. The United States Supreme Court had stopped a similar by-hand examination of undervote ballots on December 9th, 2000. So all the whining that Bush was “selected, not elected” is crap. Mark Seibel, the Miami Herald’s managing editor said of the ballot study: “I think that it was worthwhile because so many people had questions about how the ballots had been handled and how the process worked.”

So George Bush was legitimately elected and Al Gore was always the loser of the 2000 presidential election. But it was that narrow margin of victory that made the liberals even nuttier. Ever vigilant for a new constituency to add to their burgeoning roster of special pleaders, the liberals committed themselves to the cause of restoring voting privileges to convicted felons. The Democrats fabricated a synthetic constituency from America’s most destructive and disruptive criminals, all of them proven enemies of our nation’s moral health. Liberals were greatly encouraged by the fact that a wildly disproportionate number of high-caliber criminals are black males, which afforded the liberals the opportunity to twist the felon-franchise issue into an argument about race and about “civil rights” and allow them to festoon their pontifications with the catch phrases of the sainted civil rights movement of yesteryear.

And besides, the numbers were encouraging. Al Gore might have won the presidency if the half million convicts who are denied voting privileges in Florida had been allowed to vote in the 2000 election. About a quarter of those ineligible felons are African-Americans. Felons in general, when allowed to vote, usually favor candidates with leftward leanings. They may have resented confinement, but they warm to any bureaucracy that provides food, clothing, shelter and medical care at other people’s expense: just like crime itself, living in the nanny state sure beats working. And besides, those gun-control candidates make criminal activity so much safer.

So, after three embarrassing defeats in a row, the political party that gushes concern for women and victims of every sort gave a big wet kiss and a warm embrace to rapists, murderers, dope dealers, child molesters, home invaders and every sort of malicious thug. The Democrats placed no limits on restoring the felon franchise. Hillary Clinton gave the felon-vote campaign her heartfelt endorsement. Democrat Party efforts to overcome the perception that Democrats were soft on crime suffered a severe setback. No Democrat would admit that the push for the felon vote was prompted by desperation and for purely mercenary purposes; they proclaimed, instead, that they were serving a higher morality; they asserted that it was simply wrong to deny the vote to sociopathic jerks.

The very first accusation by the liberals was that felon disenfranchisement was racist because the felon population was so disproportionately black. The felon population is also disproportionately male, but no liberal suggested that felon disenfranchisement must therefore also be sexist. That would be too obviously stupid, but both blacks and males form a lopsided portion of the convict population for the same reason: they chose to become criminals. That’s right, they elected to join the prison population; they voted themselves off the voting rolls with their guns and their knives and their antisocial behaviors. The racial and gender mix of America’s prisons is just the ballot count of all that voluntary antisocial voting behavior. There is nothing sexist or racist about it.

Denying voting privileges to criminals is as old as ancient Greece and Rome; its history in America goes back almost as far as the Revolution. For a period after the Civil War some state legislatures did tailor their legislation to more heavily penalize those who committed crimes most often committed by blacks, such as petty theft, but those laws have long since been stricken from state penal codes; they have gone the way of the literacy test and the poll tax.

Furthermore, the spotty history of felon disenfranchisement is not evidence that such laws are bad public policy: good law can spring from impure motives. For example, recently discovered documents reveal that Abraham Lincoln was prepared to offer the South a peace deal that would have perpetuated slavery. He eventually got behind emancipation for tactical political reasons. Yet, despite its origin, the law ending slavery was the better choice. Also: no one tossed around the word nigger more casually than Harry Truman, yet no Democrat is suggesting that Harry’s executive order to integrate America’s military was a bad thing because it originated in Harry’s less-than-unbiased psyche. To condemn public policies because they have less than perfectly pure origins is to indulge in what logicians call the genetic fallacy. Given the muddled motivations for most legislation, a stubborn adherence to the genetic fallacy would quickly bring the creation of new law to a standstill.

The second “big argument” for felon enfranchisement is also an example of liberal fuzzy logic. Liberals argue that once a felon has served his prison sentence he has paid his debt to society; therefore, depriving ex-cons of the vote unfairly punishes them twice for the same crime. This is nonsense.

Felons are given a single compound punishment at the moment of their sentencing. That compound punishment is prison time and the loss of their voting privileges. Compound punishments are dispensed every day but Sundays in cities and hamlets all across America. For example, it is common practice to condemn drunk drivers to serve jail time and to pay a fine and to lose their driving privileges. Given the mayhem and sorrow that drunk drivers cause, lesser sentences would be too lenient and therefore bad public policy. The argument at hand is about our public policy regarding felons, those people who have demonstrated their utter contempt for the laws and customs of our republic. In their freely-chosen roles as killers, rapists, perverts and all-round enemies of society felons have deprived their fellow citizens of their property, their health and even their lives. The felon selfishly enjoys the benefits of living in America while shirking the burden of obeying America’s laws. For these reasons the Supreme Court made it crystal clear in a 1974 decision that the states can lawfully deny voting privileges to the proven enemies of our society as a punishment for their crimes.

“But voting is a right!”, whine the liberals. “It’s just wrong to deny someone their rights.” Also nonsense. By law and by ancient custom convicted criminals have been deprived of their rights to life (capital punishment), liberty (prison sentences) and property (fines and confiscations) ever since courts have existed. Denying the vote to people of demonstrated diminished moral capacity is an excellent way to ensure the moral and political health of our republic. Given the choice, most felons would probably rather lose their voting privileges than their driving privileges, so depriving them of the vote is treating felons less harshly than drunk drivers in the felon’s own estimation. The truly unjust deprivations of citizens’ rights have been perpetrated by the felons. Denying felons the right to vote is a righteous society’s way of dissuading other would-be felons from violating society’s rules. What punishment could be more fitting than to deny the opportunity to influence the character of our society to those who have demonstrated their utter contempt for our society’s rules and customs?

That is exactly what is at stake here: the collective power of millions of people of low moral character to influence the moral health of our legislative, executive and judicial branches of government. For example, all across America our most intimately felt levels of local and county government include elected sheriffs and judges and district attorneys. Local elections are often won by small margins. Do we really want the elections of these local hands-on agents of our public will to be swayed by the local members of the estimated 4.7 million felons who are now ineligible to vote? Do we want local drug gangs with buckets of drug money to throw around to become local voting blocs? If prostitution and drug networks and human traffickers could choose which sheriffs patrolled the streets and which judges dispensed punishment wouldn’t they prefer those candidates who espoused the silliest social-service theories of law enforcement? Would giving them the power to elect local officials be good public policy?

Senator Hillary Clinton thinks it would be a wonderful idea and so does the Democrat Party. The Count Every Vote Act of 2005 was sponsored by Senators Clinton, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, Barbara Mikulski and other Democrats. This proposed remodeling of American law and tradition imperiously flouts the United States Constitution by mandating felon voting privileges in every state; it’s a bold power grab that flies in the face of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee that felon voting shall remain a state-by-state prerogative. This legislation also thumbs the Democrats collective nose at the Supreme Court which had as recently as the previous November (2004) reaffirmed the Fourteenth Amendment’s position on felon voting by refusing to hear two felon-voting cases from New York and Washington state. The Democrat legislation, which would more aptly be titled the “No Scumbag Left Behind Act of 2005,” demands that “The right of an individual who was a citizen of the United States to vote in any election for federal office shall not be denied or abridged because that individual has been convicted of a criminal offense . . .” Mrs. Clinton slyly refers to “ex-felons,” a status unrecognized in law.

This audacious overreaching is borne of desperation. Democrats have done their math homework and the numbers have them in a snit: the Democrat Party hasn’t had a natural majority since the early 1960s when Lyndon Johnson garnered more than half the votes cast; no Democrat has won by more than 50.1 percent since then. Because Democrats can’t win more votes with their proposals they have chosen instead to re-engineer the electorate.

Senator Clinton estimates that there are five million disenfranchised felons in America, or about one of every 44 adults. This fact excites the liberals. A 2003 study by sociologist-professors Christopher Uggen of Northwestern University and Jeff Manza of the University of Minnesota revealed that about one third of disenfranchised felons would immediately acquire voting privileges if the Clinton proposal became law. More than a third of these thugs are African Americans, which is to say members of a larger community that is virtually married to the Democrat Party. The sociologists estimate that Bill Clinton would have won 86 percent of the felon vote in 1992 and an enthusiastic 93 percent of the goon vote in 1996. Punks identified with Bill on so many levels. Uggen and Manza estimate that a fully restored felon vote would have meant victory for Democrats in a string of senatorial elections that would have given the Democrat Party a twenty-year domination of the Senate from 1986 until the start of this decade. As if that fact weren’t creepy enough, there is ample evidence that illegal voting by felons is already perverting the electoral process.

For example, after a photo-finish election for governor in Washington state, the Seattle Times discovered that 129 felons had voted illegally in two counties. The Democrat winner, Christine Gregoire, won by 129 votes. Fully 544 felons cast illegal votes in districts leaning toward the Republican candidate Dino Rossi. If a typical 85 percent of these felons voted for the Democrat, then that was enough to change a 252-vote victory for Rossi into a 129-vote victory for the Democrat candidate Gregoire. Republicans have identified hundreds more criminal voters in Gregoire-leaning districts. In short, if the illegal felon vote had been stricken from the vote count, then the Republican Rossi would have become the governor of Washington, which is what the law-abiding majority of Washington’s voters desired.

To further poison the voting process, Hillary’s proposal would require every state to create a felon-outreach program that “shall notify any qualified ex-offender who resides in the state that such qualified ex-offender has a right to vote in an election for federal office.” She’s determined to leave no thug behind. She wants to reconstitute the electorate and fashion a new Democrat majority, no matter how degenerate it may be. This is the woman who won her senate seat by working to release sixteen Puerto Rican terrorists who had murdered six New Yorkers and maimed others in a bombing-and-bank-robbery rampage that continued from 1974 to 1983. The terrorists weren’t even petitioning for release; Bill Clinton simply plucked them from their prison cells and released them in a flagrant pandering for votes for his wife.

It wasn’t lost on the Democrats that John Kerry fell short of the presidency by three million votes, which is only sixty percent of the five million felon voters-in-waiting. The political party that declared that there were not nearly enough homosexuals in the barracks is now declaring that there are not nearly enough felons in the voting booths. Jesse Jackson wants to keep hope alive with a voting machine on Cell Block Five. It’s easy to see why the Democrats must expand their voting base with such weird strategies: their political perspectives have alienated far too many normal American adults. The Democrats are straining to scrape together a numerical majority from a loathsome sub-stratum of antisocial victimizers because the crybaby nanny-state vote-buying scams of the Democrats have so little curb appeal for mature hard-working adults.

If voting is truly precious, then we should expect all eligible voters to maintain some minimal respect for society’s laws. To do otherwise is to devalue the franchise. Committing felonies, which are the most serious violations of the law, should rightly disqualify the violator from participating in the process that so intimately shapes our culture. Limiting the opportunities of felons to participate in this process is meant to impress on them the seriousness of society’s disapproval. Prohibiting people of proven low moral character from voting can only enhance the health of the electoral process, especially in those states where felons are denied the power to choose local sheriffs, judges and public prosecutors.

The argument that felons have paid their debt and should be welcomed back into the political process springs from a baseless optimism. Prisons do not rehabilitate. With recidivism rates in the first decade after prison release running as high as eighty percent, any people who valued the health of their political process would hold this unrepentant criminal community at a sanitizing arm’s length, forever. And besides, exclusion from the political process is a cost that felons expect to pay when they make the decision to violate society’s rules. It’s a risk factor for those who voluntarily participate in antisocial criminal-scumbag enterprises. It’s a cost of doing business.

Wise societies do not entrust the making of their laws to people who are mentally or morally incompetent or who are disloyal or irresponsible. For this reason the franchise is withheld from children, the insane, citizens of foreign countries and persons who have committed the worst of crimes. And yet, Democrats are promoting voting privileges for all felons; some liberals are even promoting voting privileges for non-citizen aliens.

If Republicans had a clue they would showcase the proposed Clinton/Kerry criminal-enfranchisement legislation by letting this bill come up for a vote and then force every Democrat presidential wannabe to go on the record as favoring the extension of law-making powers (voting) to sociopathic, sadistic, child-raping cannibalistic killers. Imagine the political advertisements to follow: the scary montages of mug shots, the ominous music and the revolting “meet-the-monster” case histories. The 2008 campaign would be wall-to-wall Willie Horton and every voter would understand exactly why the Democrats so desperately want to blur the distinction between the criminal community and their law-abiding victims: Democrats have no natural majority among normal Americans.

Normal Americans have expressed their opinions on this matter. A poll commissioned by Associated Television News and conducted by Zogby Interactive reveals that most Americans, including most blacks and Hispanics, are opposed to restoring voting privileges to America’s worst criminals. Fifty-three percent of the American public evinced that voting rights for felons would be bad for our country, which is contrary to the thrust of the Count Every Vote Act sponsored by senators Clinton and Kerry.

A whopping seventy-one percent of our countrymen believe that the motive for such legislation is a self-serving scramble for votes by Democrats. Fully seventy percent of Americans believe that any restoration of voting rights for felons should be done only after a case-by-case review, but not for all criminals as a class. Even though the Clinton/Kerry bill panders to blacks, fully 61% of black folks believe that voting rights should only be restored on an individual basis. Hispanics shared this opinion by a 66% majority. This is really a very generous position. What blacks and others are saying is that sinners will be welcome back into the fold, but only after offering evidence of heartfelt contrition and a commitment to moral progress. To take any other position is to threaten the moral integrity of the fold.

Some states offer felons who seek the restoration of their voting rights exactly the sort of case-by-case review that most Americans favor. For example, in the state of Florida felons may go to a room in the State Capitol building and have their petitions reviewed by the governor personally. Audiences with the governor and his cabinet occur about every three months. The governor has the felon’s file before him and asks the petitioner probing questions about his rehabilitation.

A New York Times article on this topic (3/28/04) informs us that “The state automatically restores the rights of some felons after reviewing their records, while others need only fill out a short application. But others, including convicted drug traffickers, sex offenders, violent offenders and those guilty of public corruption, must go through an investigation and wait for a hearing in Tallahassee, which can take years.” In other words, those jerks who have done the most damage to the health of our society have the greatest difficulty reclaiming the power to choose sheriffs, judges, public prosecutors and legislators. This is exactly what most normal Americans say they want. But liberals are not average Americans; they want what’s beneficial for them not what’s good for America, so they wail and bemoan the fact that law and tradition now deprive the worst enemies of our society of the power to shape the future of our society. Hence the bogus arguments about how felon disenfranchisement denies blacks equal protection under the law and how denying thugs the vote is punishing them twice for the same crime. Liberals just can’t get over the idea that 600,000 disenfranchised criminal scumbags might have handed Al Gore the presidency.

Case-by-case review of felon application to regain voting privileges is good public policy. The New York Times discloses that “Many felons apply not just to regain voting rights, but because they cannot qualify for certain state-issued professional licenses – nursing or contracting licenses, for example – unless their rights are restored.” In Florida, the clemency board consists of the governor and three of his cabinet members who review the file of each applicant. This is a good thing. For example, do we really want convicted sexual predators to have access to nursing and contracting licenses that would allow them intimate access to our homes and our bedsides?

The New York Times says that the clemency board “. . . rejected the application of a man convicted of killing a pregnant woman while driving drunk in 1989 (her mother was there, tearfully saying that he had never apologized) and a man convicted of a lewd act against a child in 1993.”

Near the end of this front-page article the Times lets a Miami Democrat, Representative Kendrick B. Meek, articulate the liberal position on scumbag disenfranchisement: “Why should we keep people from voting after we spent all this money rehabilitating them? Why stand in judgment on whether they should vote or not? This is politicians standing in and playing the role of virtuecrat.” Wow. Let’s take a moment to unpack this revealing quote.

First of all, with recidivism rates running as high as eighty percent the notion that prisons are in the rehabilitation business is patent nonsense. Prison is punishment, period. Rehabilitation is a matter of individual conscience or spiritual conversion.

Second, Mr. Meek is bewildered as to why we should “stand in judgment on whether they should vote or not?” The answer is that every concerned citizen should exercise sound moral judgment in matters that affect the civic health of our republic. Mr. Meek should also be concerned. If people with trashy values vote in large numbers, then the nation will be guided by people with trashy values. Exercising sound judgment is every citizen’s civic responsibility.

And finally, Democrat Meek pouts that politicians are “playing the role of virtuecrat.” He’s mocking the very idea of a virtuous bureaucrat. Our country’s future is secure only so long as virtuous voters vote for virtuous politicians, so why mock the very idea of a virtuous politician? If Representative Meek can’t even imagine himself being such a person, then he should do our republic a favor and resign his office. The purpose of every political campaign is to allow the citizens to evaluate the candidate’s values and virtues. If a politician strives to preserve the health of the electoral process by safeguarding it from legions of proven law breakers, then why belittle him by calling him a “virtuecrat”?

Next, the Times article informs us that John Eason, the man convicted of committing a lewd act on a child agrees wholeheartedly with Democrat Meek. Eason’s application was denied. Says the Times: “He wanted his rights back so he could get a contractor’s license, he said, to take over his father’s business.” The Times quotes Eason: “The government thinks they’re doing society a favor by showing that it’s still convicting the bad people. But how does it benefit society to keep me down in this way?”

Excellent question, Mr. Eason: How does preventing child molesters from getting contractor’s licenses benefit society? The answer was splashed across the front page of the Newark Star Ledger (8/18/06) under the title “Films of child sex assaults rock porn case.” In this article we meet contractor Clement Bilski, Jr. who, like Mr. Eason, committed a lewd act on a child. Lots of children, in fact.

Hidden among the vast collection of kiddie porn that cops hauled away from Mr. Bilski’s home were selected videotapes that Mr. Bilski never shared with other perverts on the Internet. These videos “were a slew of homemade movies that graphically capture him sexually assaulting as many as a dozen children” according to the Star Ledger. “These were his personal trophies,” remarked one law-enforcement officer. Authorities are still trying to identify the victims.

The next day’s paper explained that Bilski was charged with sexually abusing eleven children ranging in age from eight years old down to 23 months – all of it captured on videotape by Bilski himself. According to the Star Ledger these tapes “[show] him in sexual acts ranging from oral sex to vaginal and anal penetration with nine girls and two boys.” And in some “instances music soundtracks had been added.” His crimes spanned a seven year period. The prosecutor said that what is known of Mr. Bilski’s predations might be just “the tip of the iceberg.” According to an article in the August 19th, 2006 Star Ledger, Mr. Bilski had a home-renovation business. “His clients were comfortable having him in their homes” and “Bilski used that trust to get at their children . . .”

Lt. Col. Frank Rodgers, the deputy superintendent of investigations for the New Jersey State Police said that “This is about trust and how that was exploited. He was like a hunter. He made the conditions. He developed the environment that he later exploited.” Prosecutor Luis Valentin announced that Bilski had been indicted on 429 counts of sexual offenses, child endangerment and other offenses and said there may be other victims.

Bilski installed hidden cameras to videotape 31 men, women and children in stages of undress; he used rope and handcuffs to restrain children during his attacks; he showed porno films to children. Bilski used “sexual devices and other objects.” Prosecutor Valentin said that Bilski made sure the attacks occurred in rooms where he would be able to detect any approaching adults. He delayed renovations as a way to remain in the house and cultivate the children. He learned the schedules of the parents and caretakers; he found time to be alone with his client’s children. The prosecutor observed that “These families will need to focus on getting their children the necessary professional medical and psychological care that is needed.”

Good advice. So I ask you, if this felon ever gets out of prison should he have his civic privileges restored as if nothing had happened so he can once again get his hands on another contractor’s license just like the one that was denied to Mr. Eason, the Florida jerk who committed a lewd act on a child? Of course not. That would be insane>. And yet, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry insist that scum such as this be dragged back into the center of America’s civic life, even going so far as to propose requiring states to notify released felons of their opportunities to select the very judges who will pass future sentences on them and their criminal pals.

Senator Clinton is willing to flout the opinion of most non-criminal Americans because she is convinced that 30% of felons would vote for her if her legislation became the law of the land. That’s 1.4 million new voters with an 85% statistical probability of voting the straight Democrat ticket. In a close race that would be the margin of victory. In the meantime, Hillary Clinton has proposed amending the Senate’s immigration reform legislation to provide federal funding for the education and health care of illegal sneak-ins. She wants to pander to that budding crop of Democrat voters with a virtual river of our tax dollars. In preparation for her 2008 presidential candidacy Hillary has assembled a platoon of 50 staffers and more than 20 consultants, including John Kerry’s favorite hair stylist Isabelle Goetz, who bills Hillary up to $1500 a month to keep Hillary’s locks trimmed. Clinton shelled out another $3000 to Hollywood makeup artist Barbara Lacy to make her fit to appear in a film that runs on Hillary’s website. The senator listed these indulgences as “media production” expenses in federal records. But all the cosmetics on this planet cannot conceal Hillary’s essential moral ugliness. The festering blemish smack in the middle of this mercenary woman’s public face is her eagerness to flood our civic life with a wave of criminal degenerates whom she is hoping will let her surf her way into the Oval Office.

The Felon Vote in New Jersey

In my home state of New Jersey the American Civil Liberties Union and several “minority rights advocates” filed suit seeking to overturn the New Jersey law that prohibits convicted felons from voting while serving terms of parole or probation.

One of the lawyers who prepared this lawsuit, Professor Frank Askin of Rutgers, made no mention of the Democrat Party’s desperate need to expand its voter base to forestall yet another crushing defeat. He told the New York Times that “The purpose of the lawsuit is to expand democracy and expand voting rights.” The professor went on about how “public opinion favors reintegrating ex-offenders into society, including making them full participants in civic life.” In truth, the public favors a prudent case-by-case review to ensure that felons are truly contrite and trustworthy before they are once again allowed to become “full participants in civic life.”

Professor Askin intoned that “We don’t believe the state has any justification in denying these people the right to vote.” He means the right to vote for the Democrats of their choice. As for the professor’s personal belief that the state doesn’t have “any justification” for denying the vote to those who have proven themselves to be anti-social enemies of a healthy American civic life, well . . . that’s just evidence of one professor’s myopic commitment to liberalism.

Professor Askin reminded the Times that similar laws were under challenge by liberals like himself in other states, including New York, Washington and Florida, on the supposition that these laws violate the federal Voting Rights Act. He said be believed that the ACLU’s chance of success was better in state courts than in the federal system. The professor pouted that 80 percent of the 15,000 ex-cons on parole in New Jersey and 60 percent of the 70,000 on probation are black or Hispanic. This was taken to be proof of “discrimination” against minorities, as though each and every one of these criminals hadn’t voted to leave the voter rolls by choosing to commit outrages against our society and, in most cases, against their our minority communities.

Later on, a New Jersey appeals court handed the ACLU, the NAACP and the Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey a stinging defeat be declaring that felon disenfranchisement did not unconstitutionally discriminate against minorities. The three-judge appellate panel noted that if the Legislature had specifically prohibited only African Americans and Hispanics from voting while still under state supervision, then the law would have violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection under the law. The panel’s decision declares that “In this case, the critical and specific constitution declaration if perfectly clear . . . [The constitution] authorizes the Legislature to disenfranchise entirely people ‘convicted of such crimes as it may designate.’”

The lawsuit had made a big deal of the contention that a disproportionate number of minority members were disenfranchised by this law. The court’s decision reminded everyone that these lopsided numbers are the result of individual criminal initiative and not the result of state-sponsored anti-minority bias. In other words, criminals have no one to blame but themselves for the predictable loss of their voting privileges. The better way for minority communities to expand their voter base is for them to more vigorously police their cultural values. The southern redneck values that were carried northward by waves of black migration and which are now strutting about as “hip-hop culture” are fertile soil for anti-social behavior.

According to columnist Bob Herbert (N.Y.Times 8/24/06) the glorification of thug culture has even spawned its own publications: Felon and F.E.D.S magazines are now available on New York City newsstands. Mr. Herbert had just picked up the “Stop Snitchin’” issue of Felon which included the letter-to-the-editor salutation, “Yo,wassup Felon!” The glossy F.E.D.S cheerfully touts itself as the magazine about “convicted criminals – street thugs – music – fashion – film – etc.” This magazine also bannered the “Stop Snitchin’” message. One featured article gushes about a wonder crime that featured “Hundreds of kilos of coke” and “over a dozen murders” and “no one flipped. [snitched] The dismayed Mr. Herbert opines that “What we have here are symptoms of a depressing cultural illness, frequently fatal, that has spread unchecked through much of black America.”

What’s really sad is that it took the publication of glossy magazines like Felon and F.E.D.S to give this black ultra-liberal columnist a clue that his reflexive defense of every “authentic” minority subculture might not have been a healthy impulse.

After years of blindly defending the “authenticity” and the “vitality” of black street culture, Mr. Herbert now laments: “When was it that the proud tradition of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois, Harriet Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall, gave way to glossy felon magazines and a shameful silence in the face of nationally organized stop-snitching campaigns?”

The truth is that the “proud tradition” never gave way to the redneck culture of hip-hop and Felon magazine. Two black cultures – high and low – have been traveling together, side by side, for over a century and a half. Both cultures compete for the allegiance of black youngsters. What has changed is the power of modern electronic technology to beam toxic moral messages directly to young people without adult oversight. These messages come fast and furious because there are now big profits to be made by glamorizing the gangsta lifestyle using the media of magazines and “music – fashion – film – etc.”

Once being a gangsta became an established fashion pose it was inevitable that it would be sustained by profit-hungry musicians, by videographers, by publishers and by the rag trade. It’s difficult for parents and pastors to compete with these conscience-optional industries. It doesn’t help matters that the well-funded legal machinery of the ACLU and the NAACP is working overtime to increase the influence of the unrepentant gangsta vote.

Professor Askin says he will take the cause of felon enfranchisement to New Jersey’s ultra-liberal Supreme Court. Most states have laws similar to New Jersey’s law. Only four states allow voting by probationers.

On Monday November 8th, 2004 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear cases from New York and Washington state that also argued that the Voting Rights Act is violated if too many minority group folks lose their voting privileges because of their own voluntary criminal behavior. The Voting Rights Act prohibits states from applying any “voting qualification or prerequisite” in a manner that has a racially discriminatory effect.

Reasonable people understand that felon disenfranchisement laws were meant to encourage all citizens to live righteous lives and to discourage antisocial behavior. Minority communities bear the greatest burden from criminal behavior which is the reason that opinion polls show a clear majority of minority members favoring the restoration of felon voting rights on a case-by-case basis. Because they are Christian communities they want to see some signs of contrition and rehabilitation before the power to pick their communities’ leaders is returned to proven antisocial troublemakers.

In any case, good public policy should be based on wisdom and not just cold statistics. For example, black folks are only 13% of the American population and yet black communities produce 55% of America’s killers. If America is the racist hellhole that some liberals claim that it is, then most of the killers on Death Row should be black. But only forty-five percent of the killers on Death Row are black. Does this mean that the system discriminates against white folks? Shouldn’t the ACLU be clamoring to boost the number of blacks on Death Row by another ten percent?

The answer is “No.” Lopsided numbers can have complicated root causes. The law should prohibit any state policy that intends to discriminate against any race of people, but laws that discourage criminal behavior are good public policy even if those laws are broken more often by people in minority communities. As it stands, felon disenfranchisement sends a clear message to every American community: if your community wants to enjoy full voting power, then suppress those cultural influences that encourage disrespect for law and order.

We know this much: black criminals usually victimize other blacks. That means that the popular Stop Snitchin’ campaign, complete with “Stop Snitchin’” T-shirts, is being promoted by thugs who don’t want blacks to do anything that would inhibit the thugs’ continuing victimization of other black people. That’s insane. Would any dignified community support a campaign that promotes its own degradation?

The Democrat Dilemma

The Democrat Party has lost its curb appeal for normal Americans. The reasons aren’t hard to find. For one thing, most Americans are patriots who don’t much want to see their country’s political process corrupted by agents of foreign powers.

Back on September 20th, 2002 the New York Times reported that “The Democratic National Committee has agreed to pay civil fines and turn over to the Treasury a total of $243,000 to settle accusations that it took more than $1 million in illegal foreign contributions in 1995 and 1996, according to Federal Election Commission records released today.

“The documents also state that the election commission’s general counsel found in 1999 that there was ‘reason to believe’ that the People’s Republic of China ‘knowingly and willfully’ violated federal election law.”

“Reason to believe”? My God! The Democrats were taking cash contributions from uniformed bagmen from the Chinese Red Army! The Chinese military loved Bill Clinton, the useful idiot who gave them advanced secret ballistic-missile guidance technology so that they could more accurately target American cities with thermonuclear weapons, against the advice of out patriotic Defense Department.

After the fund-raising scandal broke in late 1996, the Democrats reluctantly returned three million dollars in outlaw contributions. Kent Cooper, a former election commission official is now working at PoliticalMoneyLine.com, which follows the money in politics. Mr. Cooper commented that some of these fines were surprisingly low. He said that the election commission limited the fines assessed to some folks when they complained that they couldn’t afford to pay more. In other words, the crooked Democrats got a sweetheart deal from the election commission. “Some people will look at this and say the F.E.C. should have fined them more,” observed Mr. Cooper.

One of these crooked companies that the F.E.C. was so nice to is a gang called Global Resource Management which was formed in Ohio in 1996 for the purpose of resolving what they called “a construction-related contractual matter” in Saudi Arabia. This group greased the Democratic National Committee with $100,000 on August 18th, 1996 at an event in New York City that was promoted as a 50th birthday party for Bill Clinton. The leaders of Global Resource made the contribution to attain an audience with Ray Mabus, a former governor of Mississippi and the ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who helped organize the event.

Here’s the crooked part: the money contributed to the Democrats really came from Sheik Mohammed Oboud Al-Amoudi, a Saudi national, who wired $150,000 to Global Resource. The election commission said that Global Resource used this money to grease the Democrats “even though its officers had been informed that foreign national contributions are illegal.” According to the Times, “Mr. Cooper said the documents provided further evidence of the tactics Democratic operatives used to raise money before the 1996 elections.” In Mr. Cooper’s own words, “Here we’re dealing with wire transfers and shuffling money to accounts. What is going on here is warning bells are going off all over the place.”

The New York Times went on about how “The documents detail efforts by the Democratic Party and the Clinton-Gore campaign to build their war chest with help from wealthy Asian donors before the 1996 election. In all, the election commission disclosed $719,500 in fines today.”

The largest fine resulted from a gathering sponsored by the International Buddhist Progress Society, attended by Vice President Al Gore at which illegal contributions were transferred to the Democrat Party. The Times reported that “The national committee paid a $115,000 fine and agreed to turn over to the Treasury $128,000 it had received in illegal contributions. The Clinton/Gore ’96 Primary Committee paid a $2,000 fine the records also show.”

But even before the 2002 disclosures that the Democrats were sustaining themselves with illegal contributions from Saudi and Chinese Communist bagmen, the Democrats had a likeability problem among American patriots. Before leaving the Oval Office, Bill Clinton torpedoed Al Gore’s chances of becoming president with an armed assault on Miami’s Cuban-American community for the purpose of capturing a small boy and retuning him to Castro’s dictatorship – a boy whose mother had died struggling to get him to Miami. That cost Al Gore thousands of votes in Florida. Clinton’s last-minute pardons for scads of sleazy donors, convicts and a notorious at-large fugitive Democrat contributor didn’t help Gore’s image as Clinton’s protégé.

Al Gore’s desperate attempt to suppress the absentee ballots of patriotic military personnel serving overseas further tarnished Gore’s standing among patriots. He couldn’t even be saved by his friends in the liberal media who prematurely announced that Al Gore had won Florida – an announcement that discouraged 10,000 Republicans from going to the polls in Florida’s north-western panhandle, an area that is in a later time zone and therefore had its polling places open for an hour longer than the rest of Florida. This was a deliberate tactic; the media had been admonished for doing exactly the same thing once before.

The United States Supreme Court finally ended the nation’s agony by calling a halt to Al Gore’s continuing demands for nitpicking reexaminations of ballots in those geographic areas where he hoped to increase his vote count. The Court declared that the vote count would be based on the standard agreed to by both political parties before the election, using the ballots that had been designed by a Democrat.

Later, Al Gore’s stupid wife Tipper would refer to the 2000 election as that unhappy time “when we won the election but the Supreme Court decided we couldn’t serve.” We? All hail Queen Tipper!

After that, Al Gore went into a sulk, gained forty pounds and grew a beard. The self-congratulating Mr. Gore told America: “I could have handled the whole thing differently and instead of making a concession speech, launched a four-year, rear-guard guerrilla campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the Bush presidency . . . and there was no shortage of advice to do that. I just didn’t feel like it was in the best interest of the United States, or that it was a responsible course of action.”

What a big-hearted guy! Al could have continued to screw things up by refusing to respect the peaceful transfer of power in our democracy and he could have chosen to wage a “guerrilla campaign” to “undermine the legitimacy” of the legally elected government of America, thereby damaging our nation and flushing what was left of his dwindling reputation down the toilet, but he chose not to do so. Wow! Thanks a lot, Mr. Wonderful Person.

Since his release from the confining centrism of the Clinton administration, Al Gore has aligned himself with the new liberalism – a liberalism of aesthetic values characterized by an abhorrence of moral judgement. George W. Bush, meanwhile, went on to become the first president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to gain House and Senate seats for his party in his first midterm elections. He is also the first president in history to recapture control of the Senate in a midterm election – in spite of a soft economy.

Something was definitely rotten in Democratville. Clinton had governed like a liberal in his first two years with wall-to-wall HillaryCare, gays in the barracks and no welfare reform, and the Democrats paid for it in 1994. The belief that Democrats could be trusted on domestic issues had been shattered.

The politics of fear weren’t working anymore. In three consecutive national elections the Democrats had tried to frighten Americans into voting for them, especially black folks, who were told, literally, that if Republicans won office, then lynchings would become commonplace and black churches would burn. The NAACP, a de facto subsidiary of the Democrat Party, ran a series of disgusting political advertisements during the 2002 elections that blamed George W. Bush for the lynching of a black man in Jasper, Texas in 1998. James Byrd had been dragged until dead behind a pickup truck driven by two white ex-convicts. George Bush had been governor of Texas at the time and he thought that the death sentence passed on the two ex-convicts was punishment enough. What more could be done? Did the Democrats want Governor Bush to dig up the bodies of the two executed ex-convicts, revive them, and then execute them a second time? Dead is dead. You can punish a guy only so much.

Logic couldn’t restrain the NAACP. Their advertisements featured James Byrd’s daughter lamenting that the governor’s refusal to sign one seriously-flawed hate-crimes bill made her feel just like her daddy had been lynched all over again. The disheartening message from Democrats was that America would always be just like Mississippi in the 1930s if Republicans were elected. And yet, polls among American black youth make clear that they do not believe that racism shapes their futures. Ironically, it is only the Democrat Party that is now hell bent on a campaign to ensure that the very sort of unrepentant sadistic racist ex-convicts who lynched James Byrd will have their voting rights restored, no questions asked, so that they can choose cops and judges and mayors and congressmen. This is a perfect example of the moral incoherency of liberalism.

In October of 2002, on the same day that Saddam Hussein was “unanimously” re-elected, there was a near-unanimous vote in the U.S. Senate on an election-reform bill. This bill would have required every person wanting to vote to present a driver’s license or a Social Security number or some other meaningful piece of identification. The only two nay votes were those of New York’s super-liberal senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. Any why were they against voters providing proof of citizenship? “This would make it more difficult to vote in New York. It’s designed to suppress minority voting participation,” grumbled Senator Clinton.

She doesn’t want legislation with effective anti-fraud provisions; therefore blacks must be depicted as too pathetically childlike to produce the same sort of identification that blacks commonly present when renting DVDs at Blockbuster. Clinton and Schumer say they prefer some procedure wherein people just saunter into polling places and sign their names. Why? Could it be that American citizens have lots of identification – driver’s licenses, birth certificates, naturalization papers – and that illegal aliens have only bogus paper or nothing at all?

Way back on February 11, 1998 the left-leaning Associated Press announced that “A coalition of voter and civil rights advocates said yesterday that pending legislation to verify the citizenship of would-be voters imperils the rights of millions of Americans to cast votes.”

Becky Cain, then president of the left-leaning League of Women Voters, fretted that the bill would open the door to new discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities who, presumably, were too racially and ethnically challenged to rise to the simple everyday challenges that white people cope with so easily.

The left-wing Associated Press told us that “At a news conference on Capitol Hill, [Becky Cain] and representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union and organizations championing the disabled, blacks and Latinos said the measure is unnecessary because existing perjury penalties keep voter rolls largely free of noncitizens.”

That’s the opinion of these “champions,” but Representative Bob Dornan (R-Calif.) says his 1996 election defeat by Democrat Loretta Sanchez was the result of lots of votes by lots of Mexican citizens who vote in every California election.

Becky Cain called the legislation “highly charged and extremely controversial.” She urged President Clinton to veto the bill if it ever won the approval of the people’s elected representatives. The ACLU concurred. Becky hyperventilated that if the bill ever became law, then “hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of native-born and naturalized citizens would be dropped from the rolls or have to prove their citizenship to be reinstated.” She offered no evidence of this; she was just making up numbers. Since when is asking black folks and Hispanics to behave like adults “highly charged and controversial”? Why wouldn’t native-born and naturalized citizens have their birth certificates and their naturalization papers at their fingertips? New Jersey required me to produce six acceptable pieces of identification, including a birth certificate, before they would issue me a driver’s license. There were lots of black and Hispanic folks at the DMV presenting the same six pieces of identification. Minority people aren’t children; they can rise to the challenge of voter validation.

This bill’s sponsor, Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.) said his bill is “not an attempt to stifle voting by immigrants who have naturalized and become American citizens.” “What it come daown to said Horn’s press secretary Matthew Phillips, “Is do you support remedies to eliminate voter fraud?”

This legislation would have permitted election officials to submit the names of voters and those applying for voter registration to the Immigration and Naturalization Administration for verification of citizenship. Would any honest person object to this? The imploding Democrat Party doesn’t want any scrutiny of its hodge-podge splinter-group mélange of voters. That party’s extreme left wing wants openly declared foreigners to be able to vote in American elections. It’s presidential-wannabe rock stars – Hillary Clinton and John Kerry – want the worst sort of antisocial felons to have their voting powers restored because felons are the last best hope for the Democrat Party.

The Dems’ Other Black Problem

Back in the year 2000 seventy-four percent of blacks identified themselves as Democrats and a mere 4% as Republicans. Two years later the number of self-identified black Democrats had fallen to 63% and 10% of blacks were calling themselves Republicans, according to a nationwide poll by the Joint Center for Economic and Political Studies. The number of blacks calling themselves independents rose from 20 to 24% in the same two years. Among blacks aged 26 to 35 the number of self-identified Democrats declined from 70% to 56%, a generous 14%. Within that age group 29% called themselves independents and 15% identified with Republicans.

David Bositis, an analyst at the center observed that “The loyalty of older African Americans for the Democratic Party is certainly not there for younger African Americans and every year more of the older African Americans die or drop out of voting.”

Future elections may not provide Democrats with reliably overwhelming black majorities. If Republicans can woo only 15% of the black vote it would make a decisive difference in many states. According to the poll, 10% of blacks now self identify as Republicans and 24% of blacks of all ages see themselves as independents. Juan Williams observed that “Young black Americans seem ready for a forthright conversation about race and politics. While many older blacks responded with anger to Bill Cosby’s recent call for poor black people to take more responsibility for their problems, the young people I encountered were uniformly supportive of Mr. Cosby’s words.”

This is not good news for those Democrats who are promoting the unconditional restoration of voting powers for all felons. We can anticipate that morally mature blacks will become increasingly impatient with those morally immature inhabitants of black communities who keep frustrating the best efforts of their neighbors to get ahead, to acquire property, to maintain businesses, to get an education and to safely raise their children. The unrepentant jerks who cycle in and out of prison year after year are the enemies of any healthy civic order. The Constitution of the United States says that it’s all right to deprive the worst criminals of the privilege to vote, both as a punishment and as a form of community self-protection.

But don’t expect the Democrats to give up the criminal vote without a fight. The comfortably positioned old guard and their satellite supporters in quasi-Democrat groups such as the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference stand ready to resist any effort to reform the corrupt system that has historically preserved their power. Frightening voters with scary rhetoric is their weapon of choice.

For example, Martin Luther King III, president of the SCLC, authored a fright piece for the Baltimore Sun. It ran in the Newark Star Ledger under the title “Jim Crow casts a shadow over the polls.” Mustering all the inflammatory bombast at his disposal, Mr. King tells us that “astonishingly,” four decades after his daddy marched in Birmingham and his daddy’s “courageous band faced water hoses and police attack dogs” to call attention to bad stuff “including poll taxes” black Americans now face an even more insidious threat: “Today there is a new threat to minority voters, this time from cyberspace: computerized purges of voter rolls.” It was the not-too-well-educated little old black church lady’s worst nightmare: robotic racists attacking from cyberspace!

Mr. King offered that “The menace first appeared in Florida in the November 2000 presidential election.” This is an echo of Orson Wells telling his 1939 radio audience that space invaders had landed near Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. It’s War of the Worlds all over again with Republicans standing in for the hideous Martians.

Having set the tone, he tells black folks that while the media were distracted by hanging chads, “a much more sinister and devastating attack on voting rights went almost undetected.” The “sinister and devastating attack” was the lawful removal of ineligible voters from Florida’s voter rolls, which Florida’s secretary of state is required to do as a matter of law. Using birthdates, gender and name information the rolls were scanned and from millions of entries thousands of names were red-flagged as possibly ineligible. It’s not a perfect system. Because of the disproportionately high rates of crime among blacks and Hispanics, many of these red-flagged entries were eligible minority voters. That’s not proof that Jim Crow is casting a shadow over the polls – and the available remedy was for these inconvenienced voters to go ahead and cast provisional ballots that would be validated later when the error was resolved. But Mr. King is careful not to mention provisional ballots.

“We are not guessing about the race of the disenfranchised: A voter’s color is listed next to his name in most Southern states.” Oh, the horror! And why is the voter’s race posted next to his name? Why, because this information is required by the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which is a legacy of Mr. King’s very own daddy.

Mr. King laments that “the ethnic purge of voting rights” is the result of “an elected, and therefore partisan, official” having the job of updating the voter rolls. He’s actually describing a normal democratic process: the public elects people to do stuff that the people want done, such as keeping crooks off the voter rolls. If the method used was imperfect, then the method should be improved, but this imperfection is not just cause to start spreading defamatory rubbish about sinister and devastating ethnic purges.

He goes on to say that “the racial bias of the ‘scrub list’” was abetted by the “commonality of black names” which he calls a “legacy of slavery.” He’s repeating that old “slave name” nonsense. In truth, slaves typically had a single name such as John or Mary; no white slave master in his right mind would ever give his family name to a bastard slave child. After emancipation slaves gave themselves whatever family names they liked. From that time onward marriage usually determined black family names. The great wave of Irish immigration brought lots of poor Irish into close association with lots of poor blacks in the poor parts of lots of cities, which produced lots of black children with honorably acquired Irish family names.

During the 1930s Muhammad Fard, the door-to-door salesman who thought up the racist theology of the Nation of Islam, made pocket money replacing the “slave names” of gullible black people. The trash-talking Malcolm X (“slave name” Malcolm Little) popularized Fard’s fantasies. Today even Christian preachers repeat the slave-name falsehood.

King then lashes out at the Help America Vote Act, which he says “lays a minefield of other impediments to black voters” such as new identification requirements. God forbid that black folks should be asked to do anything new. He tars all the new state and federal voting reform laws as “frighteningly ill-conceived,” which pretty much leaves us with the existing way of doing things which allows the corrupt big-city Democrat bosses to vote everyone in the asylums and everyone in the graveyards for the Democrat of their choice. Back in 1960 the Democrat mayor of Chicago elected John Kennedy president of the United States by throwing Kennedy all of Chicago’s enormous cadaver vote. Had the mayor not done so it might have been Richard Nixon who was assassinated in Dallas. Democrats love their creaky voting machines, the ones that can be rigged by inserting a paperclip in the mechanism. Those paperclips have secured many a Democrat incumbency.

Martin Luther King III concludes his fright piece with this:

“Four decades ago, the opposition to the civil right to vote was easy to identify: night riders wearing white sheets and burning crosses. Today, the threat comes from partisan politicians wearing pinstripe suits and clutching laptops.

“Jim Crow has moved into cyberspace – harder to detect, craftier in operation, shifting shape into the electronic guardian of a new electoral segregation.”

Thomas Clough
Copyright 2006
Sept. 22, 2006