Re: OT:Thanksgiving

Judson McClendon wrote:
"Pete Dashwood" <dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I find this staggering. How can Democracy work when every State is
allowed to interpret who can and cannot vote? How could anyone interpret
this mess?

There should be one clear law for the Union: "Everyone not in jail
has the right to vote." Anything less creates schisms and classes in the
society.

The historical reason for the varying rules between states has to do
with how the election process is defined in the Constitution. It was
the intent of the Founding Fathers that states have a large degree of
autonomy, and that the Federal government be relatively weak. Most
early Americans fled oppression in Europe, and did not like the idea
of a powerful central government here.
(The primary reason for the U.S. Civil War was to reverse this, not
to free slaves, as is commonly thought. Freeing slaves was the
tentative excuse, but not the reason. For example, shortly before the
Civil War, the southern states submitted a bill to free the slaves
peacefully over a few years, but the northern states voted it down.
If the intent had been just to abolish slavery, that would have been
the time to do it, and avoid war. Forcing the southern states to give
up slavery overnight would have destroyed the economy. Only an idiot
would have thought that a good idea, because the slaves would have
been starving along with everyone else in the South. Yet that was
what the southern states were presented with, or secession.)

Exactly. "Freeing the slaves" was not the cause of the Second War of
Independence, at least not directly. More pressing reasons had to do with
the admission of new states and whether they would be "Slave," plus the
encroachment of the slave states by the federal government.




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