by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN, Editor
Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
When I wrote
“America’s Unequal Heritage,” my column in this space in last month’s Zenger’s, I had no idea that the San Diego Police Department
would so quickly prove my point! But that’s just what they did on the morning
of November 29, when they arrested Occupy San Diego media spokesperson and
former Congressional candidate Ray Lutz for setting up a table at Civic Center
Plaza in order to register voters.
In my earlier
piece, I noted that while the Tea Party movement has come up with some real
howlers in their attempts to link their points of view with those of the
Founding Fathers — notably their preposterous claims that the original 1789
version of the U.S. Constitution was “divinely inspired” (if we could bring
them back, the Deists who wrote it would either be angry at that or find it
hilarious) and the First Amendment really didn’t provide for the separation of
church and state — there was one aspect of their thought that was shared by the authors of the original Constitution.
It was the idea
that the U.S. should be, not a democracy, but a republic — and one in which the
right to vote should be restricted to a carefully selected few. James Madison,
the principal author of the U.S. Constitution and the only President besides
George Washington who actually was at the convention that wrote it, made the
point very clear in #10 of the Federalist Papers, when he argued that a representative republic would be a healthier
system than a true democracy because a republic would “refine and enlarge the
public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens,
whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose
patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to
temporary or partial considerations.”
What this meant
in practice was a system in which no office higher than a member of the House
of Representatives would be directly elected — Senators would be elected by
state legislatures, and the President would be chosen by electors picked
however the state legislatures decided — and the vote would be limited to
people with “property,” i.e., white male landowners. Though activists from the
1820’s through the 1960’s challenged this elitist system and eventually
expanded the franchise (first to all white men, then to people of color, then
to women and then to young people) and amended the Constitution to allow people
to vote directly for Senators, the Tea Party openly has called for a return to
a more restricted franchise and for returning Senate elections to state
legislatures.
Republican state governors
and legislators have aggressively been pushing for measures to make voting harder. In Maine, a Republican governor and legislature
repealed same-day voter registration — though Maine voters were able to pass a
referendum to restore it. In Wisconsin, Republican Governor Scott Walker has
also ended same-day voter registration and, according to Elisabeth Pearson of
the Democratic Governors’ Association, “said students could only vote with a
college ID that meets certain criteria — criteria that almost no schools meet.
Now they’re saying technical college ID’s don’t count. And in the six months
since he’s passed his voter suppression laws, they still haven’t updated the
online forms that say to get a voter ID you need a birth certificate, which you
can’t get without a photo ID.”
In my earlier article, I
quoted Florida State Senator Michael Bennett (R-Bradenton) as calling voting “a
hard-fought privilege” — not a right,
but a favor government giveth and government taketh away. And at Civic Center
Plaza the idea that voting is a “privilege” has been enforced by the San Diego
Police Department and used as an excuse to put Ray Lutz in jail.
Not that that’s what they said they were doing. In the two-minute video of Lutz’s
arrest, one of the cops taking him into custody said that they had no objection
to him registering people to vote, merely to setting up a table so he could do
so. That’s one of the many mind-numbingly absurd regulations the police have
subjected the Occupiers to from day one, often seemingly made up on the spot
and all based on the idea that the police and the city government “own” the
square and allow anybody else to use it or not at their whim. Since the
Occupation started October 7, the law in Civic Center Plaza has been
essentially whatever the police say it is at any given moment — and when the
police are allowed to make up their own laws on the fly, it means you’re living
in a police state.
What’s more, the city
government had already made it clear that they considered the Occupiers as a
group apart from the “legitimate” citizens of San Diego. A reporter for San
Diego CityBeat wrote that when he had taken
a group of people from the Occupation into the Mayor’s office to fulfill their
legal right to inspect city records, a security person told them that “Occupy
people” were not welcome into the Mayor’s office. In other words, because they
had congregated in Civic Center Plaza to fulfill their First Amendment right “peaceably
to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” they
were not allowed into the Mayor’s office to petition the government for a
redress of their grievances.
The arrest of Ray Lutz
wasn’t simply the enforcement of the arbitrary will of a handful of police
officers. It was a clear class statement on the part of the rulers of San Diego
that they don’t want the “wrong” people, the “Occupy people,” to be able to
vote at all. Ironically, the Occupiers themselves are divided on the issue of
voting; some believe that republican institutions are inherently corrupt and only direct democracy is a legitimate form of governance
(the exact opposite of James Madison’s position), while others understand that
political power in a republic goes to whoever is on top when the votes are
counted (accurately or otherwise), and therefore people seeking social change
not only should but must involve
themselves in some manner with the electoral system.
That, no doubt, was the point Ray
Lutz — whose other social-change project besides Occupy San Diego is a Web
site, www.citizensoversight.org,
that aims to make it easier for San Diego residents to hold their elected
officials accountable — was trying to make. His table was intended as a
message to the Occupiers themselves that, despite their legitimate criticisms
of the electoral system as too dominated by corporate money and power, they
should still exercise their right to vote. An Occupy movement that rejects
electoral politics altogether is one the powers that be don’t have any reason
to fear; an Occupy movement that uses both direct street action and electoral politics is one that can move the
center of gravity in American politics Leftward, the way progressive activists
in the U.S. did in the 1910’s, 1930’s and 1960’s — and Right-wing activists
moved it Rightward in the 1980’s and the last three years of the Tea Party.
Whatever the police or the
city authorities say, Ray Lutz was arrested on November 29 because he wanted to
help the “wrong” people vote. A once-popular slogan of the anti-electoral U.S.
Left said, “If voting could change things, they would make it illegal.” Between
the attempts of Republican governors and legislators to shrink the electorate
and make it more difficult for younger, poorer and darker people to vote, and
arrests like Ray Lutz’s, maybe that’s just what the 1 percent that runs this
country is trying to do!
