Voting Rights: Multiple Fronts, One Goal
Everyone interested in ensuring the right to vote should also be interested in achieving a democratic constitution, writes Luke Pickrell
Last week, the House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE) to further restrict suffrage in the U.S. The bill, which is not expected to pass the Senate, would require most people to have a passport to vote. In response to the House vote, Democratic Party Congressmember Summer Lee stated, “Let me be clear: They don’t want you to vote. They don’t want to hear Black voices, Brown voices, LGBTQIA voices, young voices. Our fundamental access to our democracy is being politicized.” Lee also announced the Right to Vote Act to create the first-ever (!) statutory right to vote in federal elections.
Lee’s response to the SAVE Act exemplifies the Democrat’s typical response to attacks on suffrage: doubling down on the existing Constitution to solve a problem created, lo and behold, by the Constitution. Lee and her cosponsors do not explain how the Right to Vote Act can pass through the intentionally convoluted and obstructive legislative meatgrinder of the House and Senate. Nor do they say anything about Article III’s unelected federal judiciary and its role in decimating the Voting Rights Act of 1965 through decisions like Shelby County v. Holder. When it comes to voting rights, Democrats (including Joe Biden and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) are afflicted with the “constitutional creedism” described by Aziz Rana in The Constitutional Bind. No matter how many problems the Sacred Text generates, the Sacred Text’s structural provisions are always seen as the solution.
Republicans do want to further restrict the already limited ability of Americans to vote. However, Lee’s wrong that Americans have any semblance of “fundamental access” to “democracy.” Democracy is a matter of universal and equal suffrage — precisely what the gerrymandered House, malapportioned Senate, Electoral College, imperial Executive, and unelected federal judiciary deny.
As Tom Paine explained, “The true and only true basis of representative government is equality of rights.” Universal and equal suffrage is the “primary right by which other rights are protected,” and to take away that right is to “reduce a man to slavery, for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this case.” Therefore, the fight to protect voting rights must be linked to the demand for universal and equal suffrage and a democratic constitution. We must also expose and ridicule the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to demand real democracy to build the ranks of a political party that will.
As previous generations of American socialists understood, social and political gains won through struggle will be in danger as long as they are structurally entrusted to the bourgeoisie and foe-liberals who despise universal and equal suffrage. In the words of Crystal Eastman, co-founder of the ACLU, we must “uproot the existing mode of constitutional decision-making” and ensure “meaningful control by working people over the constitutional system as a whole.” Allan Benson, who ran for President using the Socialist Party of America’s 1916 platform that demanded a democratic republic, argued the rights of citizens would be safeguarded only if constitutional power was “vested in the people themselves.”
Rosa Luxemburg also understood the connection between expanded suffrage and a democratic republic. During the Prussian suffrage protests of 1910, thousands of people demonstrated and mobilized against the hated three-tier suffrage system. Frustration grew after the authorities “responded” with legislation that left the immensely undemocratic system intact. Contra the backpedaling Karl Kautsky, Luxemburg encouraged the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) to remember Friedrich Engel’s critique of the 1892 Erfurt Program and recognize the democratic republic as the distillation of various social demands, including anti-militarism and suffrage reform. The demand for democracy was the “drastic summation” of the “daily battle against all individual manifestations of the reigning reaction.”
The only defense is a good offense. Protests against voting restrictions must be tied to the demand for a democratic republic, not channeled into the Constitution. The struggle for democracy in the U.S. has multiple fronts and one ultimate goal.