Yes, it’s a really bad idea to suggest that the way a judge does his job is inevitably determined by his skin color or national origin. I’m just surprised that people who have long urged that judicial appointments should be made with “diversity” in mind have so quickly come around to this view ….
Shame on the Washington Post — The Washington Post had an editorial criticizing the lawsuit filed recently by Republican leaders of the state legislature against Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe’s recent executive order that restores the right to vote to all felons, no matter their crime.
Let’s start with the most important point: It is ugly and irresponsible for the Post to begin its editorial by saying that the Republican lawsuit is “the latest in a series of GOP measures meant to dilute and minimize the electoral clout of African Americans in the commonwealth.” There is no evidence — and none is cited — that Republicans are acting with racist intent here, and shame on the Post for making this baseless and libelous accusation.
At the end of the editorial, the Post says that disenfranchising felons “serves no social purpose,” but this is false, too. If you aren’t willing to follow the law, then you can’t demand the right to make the laws for everyone else. We have certain minimum, objective standards of responsibility and commitment to our laws that we demand of people before allowing them to participate in the solemn enterprise of self-government, and some people don’t meet those standards: children, noncitizens, the mentally incompetent, and people who have committed serious crimes against their fellow citizens.
In the middle, the editorial misstates the history of Virginia’s disenfranchisement law: While just after Reconstruction the law was indeed tweaked in a way aimed at the newly freed slaves, the law now on the books has no racial animus, and indeed Virginia disenfranchised felons before the Civil War, when blacks were not allowed to vote anyway. The editorial also ignores the fact that the Republican lawsuit’s interpretation of the state constitution was shared by, for example, the administration of a recent Democratic governor and many others, as Hans von Spakovsky and I discussed recently here. And the editorial uses the hackneyed and — as I discuss here — misleading cliche that felons no longer in prison should be able to vote because they have “paid their debt to society.”
The right to vote can be restored to felons, but it should be done carefully, on a case-by-case basis after a person has shown that he or she has really turned over a new leaf, not automatically on the day someone walks out of prison. After all, the unfortunate truth is that most people who walk out of prison will be walking back in.
But let me end where I began: While wrongheaded, it’s not irresponsible for the Post to think that felons should be able to vote. But it is irresponsible for it to say that those who disagree with it on this point can only be motivated by a racist desire to keep black people from voting.
The Shampoo Police — George Leef writes here about a state-law challenge to a Tennessee licensing regulation that is keeping a woman from working as a shampooer (shampooist?) in a hair salon. The usual insanity, but it brings to mind this question: As the federal executive and judiciary get worse, is it time for conservatives and libertarians to start focusing more on what can be accomplished in state courts using state laws and constitutions?
Children Teaching Children – My published comment on a Chronicle of Higher Education articleregarding student demands that there be fewer courses about “dead white dudes” and more courses about what the students think is important:
“I am in my sixties now, and I have to say that my first reaction on reading a story like this is the same as my first reaction when I read stories like this fifty years ago: Why do 18 year olds think they are qualified to dictate what they need to study? If their parents were making such demands, I would be more sympathetic.”
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Finally, the federal government last week came out with its latest numbers on out-of-wedlock birthrates, by race and ethnicity. Nothing new or surprising, but disturbing and depressing nonetheless.
The preliminary data for 2015 show 40.2 percent of all births were out of wedlock, and there are very big disparities among the different racial and ethnic groups. Highest are non-Hispanic blacks at 70.4 percent, followed by American Indian/Alaska Native at 65.8 percent, and Hispanics at 52.9 percent. A little better are non-Hispanic whites at 29.2 percent, with the lowest figures by Asian/Pacific Islanders at 16.4 percent.
That’s a big range — from 70.4 to 16.4 — and as noted before there is an obvious fit between how well a group is doing by any social indicator you like (education, crime, employment, poverty, you name it) and how many children are being born into two-parent families.
