Honor the Past, Support the Future: Vote!

Election Day is Tuesday. 

And yes,  I can vote. 

And will.  

Too many people went too long without that right for me to take it lightly.

In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John to “remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. . . . If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”  

The ladies were not “remembered” when it came to the Constitution, an important point rarely mentioned by those who treat that document as sacred text. The war to end taxation without representation did little to ensure fair voting rights for all.

In 1848, a woman’s rights convention gathered in the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, N.Y with almost 200 women in attendance “to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of women.” Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments and Grievances should be required reading in every American history class, a reminder that even those who fight for freedom are often thinking of their own freedom, not the rights and freedom of others.

For the next 72 years, Women’s Rights Conventions were held each year,  with women gaining the votein newly formed states and territories like Wyoming (1869), Utah (1870) and Washington (1883).  States where democracy was the oldest were among those most reluctant to grant women the vote: Pennsylvania voted NO on a women’s suffrage referendum in 1915, despite a highly organized statewide campaign. Four years of hard work later, Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, and Pennsylvania was the sixth state to ratify it, to in June, 1919.

Votes for women came painfully slowly. Votes for other groups seemed to come more quickly, but with more ongoing backlash, and more violence along the way. Early state constitutions extended the right to vote to all free male adult property owners, regardless of ethnicity or country of origin. By the time of the Civil War, property ownership as precondition had been removed, but  states and territories had imposed other conditions: poll taxes, literacy requirements, religious restriction banning “non-Protestants.”  

The Reconstruction Act of 1867 required the former Confederate states to approve new constitutions ratified by an electorate that included black as well as white men, and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which made clear that former slaves were to be given status equal to other citizens. 

That was swiftly followed by the Fifteen Amendment, which states “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

And that Amendment was swiftly followed by a host of state and local laws designed to exclude “certain elements” from access to the vote: arbitrary literacy tests, limited hours for voter registration, burdensome poll taxes. Mississippi, where  90 percent of black voting-age men registered to vote in the years following the Civil War, cut that number to less than 6 percent by 1892. It has never since been as high as 90 percent.

I was eight in 1964, the summer three civil rights activists were murdered in Mississippi while registering black voters. One, Michael Schwerner,  was from my hometown of Pelham, New York, classmate and friend of one of my uncles. He, James Chaney  and Andrew Goodman were missing for 44 days before their bodies were found buried deep in an earthen dam. They had gone to investigate the burning of a black church, had been arrested by police on trumped-up charges, and then released to the waiting Ku Klux Klan.

According to the coroner’s report, the two northern white men, Schwerner and Goodman, had each been shot once in the heart. James Chaney, the black man from Mississippi, had been shot three times and badly beaten. The doctor who examined his body testified: “I have never witnessed bones so severely shattered.” 

In 1969, after years of legal dodges and great public outcry, TheFifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals ruled: "we find ample proof of conspiracy and each appellant's complicity in a calculated, cold-blooded and merciless plot to murder the three men.” 

Of the more than twenty men implicated in the deaths, none were convicted of murder, and only six served time, none more than six years. 

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a response to the escalating violence that flared into national view during the events surrounding the march on Selma. The Act attempted to put an end to discriminatory election practices, outlawing poll taxes and literacy tests, with the force of federal prosecution and both civil and criminal penalties. It provided immediate relief from obstacles to voting, but also put in place a preclearance mechanism for certain states and jurisdictions to prevent passage of new election laws and procedures that would thwart the act’s intent and create new barriers to inclusive elections.

The Act was renewed and amended in 1970 and 1975, renewed and amended for 25 years in 1982, reauthorized again for another 25 years in 2006

Seven years later, on June 25, 2013, in Shelby County vs. Holder, the Supreme Court overturned a key provision of the Act, invalidating Section 4, which defined which jurisdictions required pre-approval of election law. The ruling required Congress to establish new criteria before pre-approval rules could be applied.

 

A Voting Rights Amendment Act was introduced in Congress in January 2014 and again in January 2015. An even stronger Voting Rights Advancement Act was introduced in June 2015.  Voting rights advocates across the country have called for passage of those bills, to little effect. Meanwhile, legislators across the country have produced a flurry of election law bills, many that would limit voter access, others that would make voting more accessible.

On this All Saints Day, I find myself pausing over the names of those who saw the opportunity to vote as essential first step to a life of full inclusion.

I marvel at the perseverance of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jeanette Rankin, Alice Paul, Lecretia Mott.

And I’m humbled by the courage of  Chaney, Shwermer and Goodman, Medgar Evans, Martin Luther King, so many more, known and unknown.

For them, the right to vote, for themselves and others, was an all-consuming vision.

For too many of us, it’s a minor interruption, an aggravating obligation tacked on to an already too-busy day.

Yes, our system of democracy, especially here in Pennsylvania, makes informed voting hard.

We have elections on one mid-week work day, difficult for those who work long shifts, travel long distances to work, juggle public transportation, child-care, inconvenient work hours.

And we have many levels of elected officials – more in the US than other countries, more in PA than any other state.  

And yes, it’s difficult to find objective information about all those candidates. Hard sometimes even to understand the office they’re running for. (Prothonotory? Really????).

I confess, sometimes I don’t vote the person, I vote the idea: for the less-dominant party, for the independent candidate, for candidate from an under-represented population.  For the candidate who DIDN’T engage in personal accusations.

But I also spend time at least trying to make an informed choice: 

1. Locate my pollingplace (and polling place number)  
2. Check my local ballot (in some places, Vote411 is helpful. Or google “county name sample ballot”. Here’s Chester County’s.) 
3. Read the candidates' websites. 
4. Look to see who endorses them and why. (For the PA Judicial Races, the PA Bar has provided PAVoteSmart, which contains candidate recommendations for PA Supreme Court, Superior Court,  and Commonwealth Court.

And yes, I vote. Knowing the system is imperfect. 

Knowing my vote, alone, counts for little.

Doing what I can to honor sacrifices of the past.

Offering what I can to support the voting rights of the future.

Other recent posts on PA politics:

• Failing Our Future, Oct. 25, 2015
• Justice Matters,  Oct. 18, 2015

Earlier posts on elections and voting: 

• Who Is Allowed to Vote? September 21, 2014
• Vote Smart, October 19, 2014
• Love Your Neighbor, Vote with Prayer, September 28, 2012
• Voting Pro-Life,  November 2, 2014
• The Dance of Democracy, November 11, 2012
• Election Eve Examen, Nov. 4, 2012

Additional issues posts are listed on on What's Your Platform?

Justice Matters

This week I attended a Pennsylvania Supreme Court candidates’ debate, and found myself timing judges. Each justice had a minute to answer, so for an hour and a half, I held up my cards: thirty seconds, ten seconds, then a bright yellow STOP.

It felt odd, and a little amusing, to be timing judges.

Strange, and a little wrong, to be thinking about which judges I would vote for.

Describing the incident to others in the days after, the response was often the same: What? We elect judges?

Pennsylvania is one of eight states that still elects judges at every level: municipal courts, Common Pleas Court, Superior and Commonwealth Courts, Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

The first set of debate questions addressed the scandals that have led to a record-number of vacant seats on the seven-member Supreme Court. Chief Justice Ron Castille recently retired at the mandatory age of seventy. Justice Seamus McCaffery retired after suspension related to sexually-explicit emails. Justice Joan Orie Melvin was indicted, suspended, and disbarred after charges she used government staff to perform campaign work. One of the remaining four justices,  Justice J. Michael Eakin, is now under investigation for his own part in the offensive email scandal: 

Scroll through the state Supreme Court Justice J. Michael Eakin's private inbox and it seems as if everyone is in on the joke: judges, state prosecutors, assistant U.S. attorneys, public defenders, private lawyers. 

Everyone, of course, except the defendants or victims who could wind up in their courtrooms or offices. 

As one of the candidates pointed out, the sexist, racist, homophobic nature of many of the emails calls into question the possibility of a just hearing for anyone in the denigrated groups, but also raises concern about "overly chummy" relationships among justices, prosecutors, public defenders.

An independent Judicial Conduct Board and a Court of Judicial Discipline exist to investigate judicial misconduct, but the PA Supreme Court has chosen to override both entities, and address past and current concerns “in house.” The candidates agreed that the Supreme Court should not investigate itself, but apparently there’s no mechanism in PA law to ensure independent review.

An important question posed to the candidates asked about equal access to justice in Pennsylvania, focusing on issues of bail, public defenders, and investigative resources for indigent defendants. The candidates were clear in their acknowledgement that equal access does not exist in Pennsylvania. Court schedules are crowded, public defenders are overburdened, and Pennsylvania is the only state in the nation that provides no state funding for public defenders. “It’s a question of money,” several candidates affirmed.

  

Who follows any of this?

Who cares about it?

Why does it matter?

On a simple economic level, as one candidate pointed out, it costs more in the long run to deny real justice: defendants who are pushed through the system without a fair trial can appeal, and appeal again, with lengthy court cases, and heavy attorney fees.

And then there’s the issue of prison costs: states across the country are now spending more on incarceration than on higher education,  In Pennsylvania, state investment in education has been cut repeatedly, with a moratorium on new school construction, while money for prisons continues to grow, with a $400 million prison complex under construction, to provide room for 300 additional inmates. 

But far beyond the costs of appeals and incarceration are the economic cost in wasted lives, damaged families, lost present and future income. I’ve watched in horror the spiraling cost to families ripped apart by unfounded accusation, inadequate legal representation, illogical incarceration, resultant trauma and anger, subsequent delinquency, a downward spiral of poverty and injustice.

And then there’s the damage to whole communities when the ruling paradigm is incarceration, with the resultant ongoing consequences to families and to ex-offenders after they serve their time:

many return to find that Pennsylvania law prevents them from getting liscences to do certain types of work, prevents them from getting housing and sometimes bars them from entering their former neighborhoods altogether. These types of laws are known as "collateral consequences," and according to a national website that tracks them, Pennsylvania has nearly 1,000 of these restrictions.

"It's become almost like a sport for the legislators to create all these barriers," says Angus Love, a lawyer with the Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project.  

There’s no simple fix to the compounded injustice that plagues our state, and our nation. Some states have moved to merit selection of judges. That would be a start. The House Judicial Committee will be hearing testimony Tuesday about HB 1336, which would remove the three statewide courts (Supreme, Superior, and Appellate) from partisan elections. 

Then there’s the statewide budget: we’re more than 100 days into a budget impasse between the PA legislature and governor. Buried in all the partisan spin is the reality that the budget proposed by the legislature provides ample funding for prisons and little redress of major cuts to education which have left Pennsylvania with the most inequitable school funding in the country.

Add to that a complex structure of laws that strip poorcitizens of their rights while protecting the affluent and well connected, and a legislature far more interested in preserving partisan power than addressing inequities of education, policing, or access to justice.

Again, I pause to listen to the voices in my head: you think too much.

Really, who can expect us to pay attention to this?

What does anyone know about voting for judges, or legislators, or any other of the myriad of offices Pennsylvania sends our way for election?

That’s the hoped for response.

From the two-party machine that works hard to keep us voting the party line.

From the party leaders who reward compliance with nominations and legislative leadership positions.

From the deep pockets that fund the process in expectation of allegiance from judges and legislators who dance to keep them happy.

Years ago our rector Martyn Minns, then lead pastor of Truro Church in Fairfax, Virginia, asked the congregation to join him in memorizing Luke 4:18 to 21, Jesus' public reading from Isaiah 61:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

Breaking Chains

    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
  and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Our church had gained recognition for its support for the pro-life movement. Martyn insisted that our care for the weak and powerless should go far beyond that to provision for the homeless, welcome for the stranger, proclamation of freedom for those imprisoned, sturdy opposition to all forces of oppression. 

I’m encouraged to see the Pennsylvania Council of Churches call attention to justice in its annual gathering this week, titled “Lord, Let Our Eyes Be Opened: Breaking the Chains of Mass Incarceration.” 

For those of us who can’t attend, there are still ways to engage.  Our local League of Women Voters started investigating criminal justice in PA last year. Since then, I’ve repented - often - of my years of inattention, and worked hard to understand the issues and possible solutions.

A readable introduction is Human Rights Watch's Nation Behind Bars, which offers a clear overview of the problem, and recommendations for change. 

For a book length discussion, check Michelle Alexander’s highly recommended The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

And there are plenty of organizations providing information and opportunities to engage. I follow DecarceratePA, the Sentencing Project, the Vera Institute of Justice, the Justice Policy Institute, and Justice Fellowship, led for years by a friend, Dan Van Ness, who still attends Truro Church. 

The first step in change is to understand, to pay attention, to care at least a little.

And vote. This year’s election will set the tone of the PA Supreme Court for decades to come.

Check the Pennsylvania Bar Association recommendations found on PAVoteSmart, and link from there to candidates answers to questions. Find out more through the League of Women Voters of PA’s statewide Voters’ Guide.

 Justice matters.

There are lives hanging in the balance.