Billy_Kinetta
Paladin of the Lost Hour
- Mar 4, 2013
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- #61
It negates something being a right, next!
So you are against requiring ID to vote too, right?
Voting is not a right.
OK......That was stupid.
Show me the constitutional text covering the right to vote.
OK. It's mentioned 5 times.
Scholars and courts often note that the Constitution nowhere says, "All individuals have the right to vote." It simply rules out specific limitations on "the right to vote." A right not guaranteed in affirmative terms isn't really a "right" in a fundamental sense, this reading suggests.
But if the Constitution has to say "here is a specific right and we now guarantee that right to every person," there are almost no rights in the Constitution. Linguistically, our Constitution is more in the rights-preserving than in the right-proclaiming business. The First Amendment doesn't say "every person has the right to free speech and free exercise of religion." In the Second, the right to "keep and bear arms" isn't defined, but rather shall not be "abridged." In the Fourth, "[t]he right of the people to be secure ... against unreasonable searches and seizures" isn't defined, but instead "shall not be violated." In the Seventh, "the right of (civil) trial by jury" -- whatever that is -- "shall be preserved." And so on.
In those terms, it ought to mean something that the right to vote is singled out more often than any other. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment imposes a penalty upon states that deny or abridge "the right to vote at any [federal or state] election ... to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, ... except for participation in rebellion, or other crime." The Fifteenth states that "[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote" can't be abridged by race; the Nineteenth says that the same right can't be abridged by sex; the Twenty-Fourth says that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote" in federal elections can't be blocked by a poll tax; and the Twenty-Sixth protects "[t]he right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote."
Voting: Right or Privilege?
Oh, the glorious bliss of a public education. You must be completely orgasmic, all the time.
Your examples illustrate specific constitutional proscriptions by which voting cannot be denied. None grant a general right to vote.
By your own argument, the 26th amendment granted those 18 or older the vote. It also did not grant a general right to vote, and certainly not for every person, as there is no such thing, and indeed the vote can be removed from any person for any number of reasons.