Social media is having a grand time with the misspellings in Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones’ filing to the U.S. Supreme Court in the fight over the Commonwealth’s redistricting referendum. Do you really need to know how to spell Virginia to enforce the will of the people?
I say that because, much in the same way the referendum was a vote for so-called fairness, the attorney general’s filing asks the Supreme Court to uphold the “will of the people,” not the Constitution.
Most people I talk to tell me that this won’t go anywhere, but having been around the block a few times, I know that it’s just the beginning of normalizing this rampant form of mob rule that comes from pure democracy without checks and balances. So, we must press into it.
U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, after the ruling on the laws broken to bring a referendum to a vote was announced by the Supreme Court of Virginia, that the justices were bringing back the “Jim Crow South.” Shortly after that, Virginia Congresswoman Jennifer McClellan, D-Petersburg, used the same phrase on NewsNation.
So, in the “Jim Crow South” (the original one), weren’t segregated bathrooms and schools the “will of the people” despite being unconstitutional? Weren’t actual poll taxes the “will of the people?” These tools cut both ways, and the framers of our country were careful to check that with the legislative process determining the rule of law.
Not that that is perfect, like when the Virginia Act for Sterilization of 1924 was declared constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes himself wrote that “three generations of imbeciles is enough,” as he allowed the Commonwealth to sterilize anyone, mostly Black people, who were on public assistance for too long.
But if this truly was the “will of the people,” why not simply change the laws that the Democrats were found to have broken in the passage of the call for referendum? Certainly, with a majority in both the Virginia House of Delegates and Senate, along with a Democratic governor, that shouldn’t be politically dangerous, right?
Or is it the realization that with a turnout of barely over 51% and a margin of also barely over 51%, turned out by nearly $70 million of advertising on everyone’s TV, smartphone, and laptop, that they know that it’s NOT “the will of the people,” rather 25% of the population trying to dominate the other 75%? Which is what winds up happening in unchecked and unbalanced democracy.
There is an arrogance that Virginia’s U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine gave voice to in a committee debate with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. He called the idea of “God-given” rights dangerous and theocratic. His basis comes from John Locke himself, whose theories on self-governance allow that although rights are God-given, they require a government dedicated to protecting them. Therefore, by Kaine’s position, if the government doesn’t protect a particular right, it has not granted it.
This is where AG Jones finds his misspelled filing to the Supreme Court. Defending a majority of votes cast in an election that never should have taken place because the law said no. As ‘Attoney General of Virgnia’ (sorry, couldn’t help myself), he swore an oath to defend those laws no matter how they are spelled out.
Beware this lurch to “voice of the people,” because they used to hold their rallies by torchlight under white sheets.
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