The Kansas Supreme Court offered a mixed bag in a ruling Friday that combined several challenges to a 2021 election law, siding with state officials on one provision, reviving challenges to others and offering the possibility that at least one will be halted before this year’s general election.
But it was the ballot signature verification measure’s majority opinion — which stated there is no right to vote enshrined in the Kansas Constitution’s Bill of Rights — that drew fiery dissent from three of the court’s seven justices.
Does it?
States must have a constitution that guarantees a representative government. I’d love someone to take this to SCOTUS saying Kansas can’t have federal reprentation if they don’t guarantee the right to vote.
For your consideration, here is the text of section 2 of the 14th amendment:
A literal reading of this text, apart from the anachronism by which voters must be male and 21 (which should be overridden by the 19th amendment, which enfranchises women’s vote, and the fact that voting age today is 18) says that if your state doesn’t let its citizens vote and abide by the result, its electoral college votes won’t count either, and neither will its congressional delegation be seated.
How funny would it be if Kansas lost statehood?
They would lose their representation, not their statehood. There is no legal mechanism for a state to leave the union.
Yet
Well now that you’ve said that out loud, I could see conservatives being all over finding reasons to disqualify representation from blue states. (By which I mean make up reasons that sound good to a base that doesn’t think good)
Hard to disagree with Republicans trying when Democrats opened that can of worms. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/01/02/us/politics/trump-ballot-removal-map.html
deleted by creator
Removing a legal candidate illegally isn’t removing someone’s right to vote? If the GOP party does choose Trump, and you block entire states from being able to vote that candidate. That’s LITERALLY removing people’s right to vote.
Served two terms which is the legal maximum. Everyone understands we can’t have a third. If dems forced it through and he ran again (regardless of winning a third or not) You can’t be surprised when the GOP tries for a third for a candidate either.
Grow up dude. Just because you don’t agree with someone’s stance doesn’t make it trolling.
They challenged the constitutionality of his candidacy< they didn’t remove the right to vote. So no, people can still vote after that. Pretty straightforward.
Also, if the theoretical Obama candidacy was upheld by the court, would you argue that they illegally tried to remove him?
It’s a constitutional restriction, just like someone who took place in an insurrection or rebellion can’t run. Again, basic part of the case here.
Take your own advice and realize that just because someone disagrees with you, that doesn’t mean they were the one who reported you.
Source: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/does-the-14th-amendment-bar-donald-trump-from-running-for-president/
And the Supreme Court has stated otherwise.
This is factually incorrect based on the law, it’s intention, and the supreme court. Forget the fact that Trump hasn’t been found guilty of insurrection or rebellion (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/us/politics/trump-impeachment.html ,https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-votes-to-acquit-trump-for-role-in-capitol-attack [note that this was in 2021, long before Trump running for this election]). So holding him as applicable to the 14th is incorrect for a number of reasons. You’re feelings on the matter and your insistence otherwise is irrelevant.
Interesting… I’m pretty sure I called out the correct person. Unless you’re saying that you are indeed @[email protected]. Originally I put your username in, because it was in paste buffer and apparently the copy command didn’t take. I corrected it within 30 seconds.
And just so it’s clear. I wish both presidential nominees the worst. I have no dog or pony in either race. This country is fucked and I’m glad I have a second citizenship to leave the country when shit here finally goes tits up.
Isn’t the requirement only that the government be “republican”? A republican government doesn’t necessarily have to be representative. It only needs to not be a monarchy.
That’s the requirement of the Guarantee Clause (article 4, section 4) of the constitution- in its time, it was about barring non-democracy states from statehood, it was a guarantee of protection of any state from foreign invasion, and protection of any state from internal coup or rebellion.
But, if you look at section 2 of the 14th Amendment, it’s a banger: if the right to vote is denied to citizens qualified to vote, the state doing it will lose its federal representation (as in, it will not just lose its electoral college votes in federal elections, its congressmen will not be seated). The purpose for this section of this amendment was to prevent confederate states from denying the formerly-enslaved the right to vote, and it should certainly apply today if Red-State legislators try to use their power to strip their citizens of their ability to meaningfully vote
Your comment about §2 of Amendment 14 doesn’t seem right. The text states that representation is reduced proportionally to the percentage of male citizens over 21 who are denied the right to vote.
Yes, that was the wording then, it was the qualification to vote (male, citizen, over 21). Since the adoption of the 19th Amendment (which happened after, and supercedes this text) that standard has included women and today you just need to be a citizen and over 18. The proportionality of loss of EC votes and congressional seating (these are apportioned on the same basis, after all) was about states like South Carolina and Mississippi, whose population of enslaved people exceeded that of white citizens- if these states didn’t respect the new citizenship and voting rights of most of their citizens, they’d lose more than half of their federal representation, and that in turn would cost them and their confederates influence in the resulting federal government.
My prior comment, made in the context of a Kansas court declaring that voting is not a right according to the Kansas constitution, was intended to point out that if nobody has that right in Kansas, that may be well and fine in Kansas politics, but if Kansas conducts itself in that way it will cost them influence federally, and that sets the stage for another round of Voting Rights Acts that can be used to guarantee voting rights federally even if states don’t want to do it themselves.