Conservatives Have Never Wanted Poor People To Have The Right To Vote-- And They Still Don't

Yesterday we looked at the pitiless attitude of Republicans towards the non-rich. Conservatives have always been quite militant in trying to make sure the non-rich were excluded from voting. Conservatives tried from the founding of the Republic right up to the current day, with Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips telling right-wing radio listeners that the founders of the country originally put "certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote... 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 owner." And it's not just a lunatic fringe hate-monger like Phillips. It's also lunatic fringe hate-mongers inside Congress, like Paul Broun (R-GA) and Mike Lee (R-UT).

And like we said, this tendency didn't just start with the Tea Party and the GOP. Many Americans were horrified Monday when the Beijing-appointed leader of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying it was unacceptable to allow his successors to be chosen in open elections, in part because doing so would risk giving poorer residents a dominant voice in politics. His blunt remarks reflect a widely held view among the Hong Kong elite that the general public cannot be trusted to govern the city well. Do you think its any different from the view American conservatives hold?

When the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, only white male Protestant property owners over the age of 21 were allowed to vote. Only 6% of the population were allowed to vote when George Washington ran for president. When progressives tried expanding the right to vote, conservatives insisted it was an issue for the states not the federal government. The last state to remove property ownership as a voting requirement for white males was North Carolina (in 1856). All through the 1800s, conservatives cracked down on attempts to allow freed slaves, indigenous people, women, native born Americans of Chinese ancestry to vote. American Indians weren't granted citizenship and voting rights until 1919-- and even then it was only to Indians who had served in the military. The next year (1920) the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote passed.

And the current Supreme Court isn't the first to be harboring a pack of far-right racists misfits in fancy robes. In the 1920s the Supreme Court specifically excluded Americans whose ancestors had come from Japan and India from voting! It wasn't until 1952 that the McCarran-Walter Act gave all Americans of Asian ancestry the right to vote. Conservative-controlled states continue to put up road blocks to allowing anyone who is not white and well off the chance to vote. They use methods from unconstitutional poll taxes and difficult to get ID requirements to just restricting voting hours to times when working people can't get off work and putting fewer voting machines in poor urban neighborhoods.

Wednesday, writing for The Atlantic, Peter Beinart asked the question that has divided progressives and conservatives forever: Should the poor be allowed to vote?. He went right to Romney's 47% dichotomy, vilifying almost half the citizens of our country as victims who "believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing."

In distinguishing between Americans whose economic independence permits them to make reasoned political choices and those who because of their poverty cannot, Romney was channeling a hoary American tradition. In 1776, John Adams argued that men (let alone women) “who are wholly destitute of Property” were “too dependent upon other Men to have a Will of their own.” In 1800, only three states allowed property-less white men to vote. For most of the 20th century, southern states imposed “poll taxes” that effectively barred not only African Americans from voting but some poor whites as well.

Beinart wrote that "In 2012, Florida House candidate Ted Yoho remarked, 'I’ve had some radical ideas about voting and it’s probably not a good time to tell them, but you used to have to be a property owner to vote.' Anti-democracy fanatic Steve King (R-IA) said pretty much the same thing in 2011. Beinart says they're outside the mainstream of Republican thought. But they're not; they may be outside the mainstream of what most Republican politicians are willing to talk about... at least in public. "But," he wrote, "they support policies that do just that. When GOP legislatures make it harder to vote-- either by restricting early voting, limiting the hours that polls remain open, requiring voter identification or disenfranchising ex-felons-- the press usually focuses on the disproportionate impact on racial minorities and Democrats. But the most profound impact may be on the poor... Obviously, the United States is not Hong Kong."

Glad to hear it.