Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:<\/p>\n
The cover story in the Minnesota Bar Association\u2019s Bench and Bar magazine this month is \u201cFelony Disenfranchisement, Why 5 Million Americans Can\u2019t Vote This November.\u201d The cover art is a Black man in a jail cell. The authors are two criminal defense lawyers. The article raises all the usual DFL points but with one jarring note. Note this claim:<\/p>\n
\u201cMany believe felony disenfranchisement became a popular idea when it was clear the Constitution granted the right to vote to all of its citizens, regardless of race, since this was a method of preventing many blacks from voting. There is strong evidence, arguable rock-solid proof, that the laws were in fact intended to target and ultimately eliminate the black vote.\u201d<\/p>\n
And compare it with this complaint:<\/p>\n
\u201cMinnesota is not among the states that have made felony disenfranchisement laws less oppressive. In fact, Minnesota has not changed its law since it began disenfranchising felons in 1857.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now wait one minute. Minnesota was a territory in 1857, it didn\u2019t become a state until 1858. The 15th Amendment was adopted in 1870, AFTER the North won the War. But felons were disenfranchised in Minnesota 10 years earlier. Early legislators somehow knew that one day the state would send men to fight in a War to gain independence for Blacks and that eventually we would need to lock up those same Blacks to take away their voting rights, so our prescient ancestors quickly adopted this law first!<\/p>\n
Since that piece of \u201crock-solid\u201d proof is obviously false on its face, the rest of the arguments in the article are so suspect as to be unpersuasive. I\u2019d need a lot more convincing before I\u2019d vote to overturn 150 years of unbroken precedent to give convicted felons more rights.<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p>\n
Como Park<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The anti-Voter-ID movement started by pulling ever-growing “cost impacts”, to put it in the classical Latin,\u00a0de anus<\/em>. \u00a0Why would wholesale manufacturing of history be a stretch?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails: The cover story in the Minnesota Bar Association\u2019s Bench and Bar magazine this month is \u201cFelony Disenfranchisement, Why 5 Million Americans Can\u2019t Vote This November.\u201d The cover art is a Black man in a jail cell. The authors are two criminal defense lawyers. The article raises all the usual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election-integrity","category-minnesota-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31339"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31341,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31339\/revisions\/31341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}