Federal judge guts Florida law requiring felons to pay fines before they can vote

[SaysWho?]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/federal-judge-guts-florida-law-requiring-felons-to-pay-fines-before-they-can-vote/2020/05/24/a7f553ba-9c3a-11ea-a2b3-5c3f2d1586df_story.html

 

Quote

A federal judge has gutted a Florida state law requiring felons to pay all court fines and fees before they can register to vote, clearing the way for thousands of Floridians to register in time for the November presidential election.

 

Republican lawmakers and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) pushed the measure after Florida voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2018 to expand voting rights to felons who have completed “all terms of their sentence including probation and parole.”

 

The law’s backers said it was necessary to clarify the amendment, while critics said Republicans were trying to limit the effects of what would have been the largest expansion of the state’s electorate since poll taxes and literacy tests were outlawed during the civil rights era.

 

The law, critics said, had made it virtually impossible for most felons to register, either because of an inability to pay or because the state offered no way for them to know what they owed or whether they had already paid.

 

Quote

“The Twenty-Fourth Amendment precludes Florida from conditioning voting in federal elections on payment of these fees and costs,” wrote Hinkle, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton, referring to the constitutional amendment that bans poll taxes.

 

Hinkle did not find, however, that the law intentionally discriminated on the basis of race, as the plaintiffs had argued, because of the disproportionate number of African Americans among the state’s population of felons.

 

[Keyser_Soze]

So republicans will be able to vote now?

[SoberChef]

I have never, nor will I ever, understand or comprehend just exactly how & why it is legal to take away someone's right to vote, regardless of whether or not they committed a crime.

[skillzdadirecta]

And the Florida voters elected for felons to get their voting rights back and Desantis and the Republicans immediately tried to overturn the will of the people. 

[Keyser_Soze]

There was a guy I worked with, he moved here from Philadelphia. He said he couldn’t register to vote because he committed a felony. So I checked out the California website and it said he can. So I told him and I’m pretty sure he registered. I know he signed up for health insurance at least 

[SoberChef]

Here in NYS, it seems to be a common misconception among those with felonies, regardless of if they ever actually did time, that they all think the right is immediately stripped away from them forever. The real crime is that there is hardly anything out there advocating for these individuals to impart upon them wisdom that in fact this right has indeed NOT been stripped from them. That being said however, while incarcerated, you cannot exercise the right. This last part always reminds me of a scene from OZ narrated by Augustus about how those locked in a prison count as constituents which in turn allows more money sent to that district for whatever the fuck that in the end, only goes to ensure that the prison system population continues to grow - to hold onto power and take it away from others. Pisses me right the hell off!

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

2 hours ago, SoberChef said:

I have never, nor will I ever, understand or comprehend just exactly how & why it is legal to take away someone's right to vote, regardless of whether or not they committed a crime.

I’m sure connecting the dots looks like this. 
 

most incarcerated citizens are minorities, Black and Latino. -> Black and Latino statistically vote Democrat. -> Republicans make it so felons cannot vote. -> Republicans get to suppress the voters of their opposition. 

[mclumber1]

2 hours ago, SoberChef said:

I have never, nor will I ever, understand or comprehend just exactly how & why it is legal to take away someone's right to vote, regardless of whether or not they committed a crime.

 

In general, I believe all civil rights should be returned to convicted criminals once they've finished their sentences.  There is no reason a person who was busted for cocaine possession shouldn't be able to vote or own a gun.  I can see the argument against a violent felon owning a gun or requiring a recovering pedophile to register where they live, but in general, if you've done your time, you should be able to become a full member of society again. 

[SoberChef]

40 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I’m sure connecting the dots looks like this. 
 

most incarcerated citizens are minorities, Black and Latino. -> Black and Latino statistically vote Democrat. -> Republicans make it so felons cannot vote. -> Republicans get to suppress the voters of their opposition. 

Unfortunately, you aren't wrong.

[Uaarkson]

54 minutes ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I’m sure connecting the dots looks like this. 
 

most incarcerated citizens are minorities, Black and Latino. -> Black and Latino statistically vote Democrat. -> Republicans make it so felons cannot vote. -> Republicans get to suppress the voters of their opposition. 

Ding ding ding

[TwinIon]

I hope this ruling stands. It's so clearly the right and constitutional thing to do.

[Jason]

Federal judges aren't allowed to rule on state laws in relation to each other, right? Just whether the state law violates federal law? Because there's also the fact that Florida has a plain language requirement for ballot initiatives and there was simply no way to read this poll tax requirement into the proposition language.

[Firewithin]

1 hour ago, TwinIon said:

I hope this ruling stands. It's so clearly the right and constitutional thing to do.

 

lol like any of that matters anymore 

[Snaynay1]

6 hours ago, Spawn_of_Apathy said:

I’m sure connecting the dots looks like this. 
 

most incarcerated citizens are minorities, Black and Latino. -> Black and Latino statistically vote Democrat. -> Republicans make it so felons cannot vote. -> Republicans get to suppress the voters of their opposition. 

Actually Dems made it illegal to vote as a felon in Florida for over a hundred years. Just as most of these black targeted felon laws popped up in the late 1800s after they were allowed to vote. Ignoring the last 100 years of voter suppression while parading around blaming republicans for a law that never got off the ground if the height of hypocrisy. I guess the days of when Florida used to round up blacks and bring them to court right before elections to get them on the ten cent law was cool for 100 years since it wasn't Republicans that passed it.

[CastlevaniaNut18]

17 minutes ago, Snaynay1 said:

Actually Dems made it illegal to vote as a felon in Florida for over a hundred years. Just as most of these black targeted felon laws popped up in the late 1800s after they were allowed to vote. Ignoring the last 100 years of voter suppression while parading around blaming republicans for a law that never got off the ground if the height of hypocrisy. I guess the days of when Florida used to round up blacks and bring them to court right before elections to get them on the ten cent law was cool for 100 years since it wasn't Republicans that passed it.

Hurrr, durrr, did you know it was DEMOCRATS who started the KKK?

[skillzdadirecta]

59 minutes ago, Snaynay1 said:

Actually Dems made it illegal to vote as a felon in Florida for over a hundred years. Just as most of these black targeted felon laws popped up in the late 1800s after they were allowed to vote. Ignoring the last 100 years of voter suppression while parading around blaming republicans for a law that never got off the ground if the height of hypocrisy. I guess the days of when Florida used to round up blacks and bring them to court right before elections to get them on the ten cent law was cool for 100 years since it wasn't Republicans that passed it.

The fuck are you talking about? Who is actively engaging in race based voter suppression NOW? It is the Republicans.  Who chose a deliberate strategy of courting racist former Democrats in the south after the Civil Rights movement? It was The Republicans.  To say that today's Republican and Democratic parties resemble anything close to what they looked like a hundred years ago isn't hypocritical,  it's idiotic.  Shit today's Republican party doesn't resemble the Republican party from TEN years ago. What the hell is the point you're even trying to make here?

[CastlevaniaNut18]

1 minute ago, skillzdadirecta said:

The fuck are you talking about? Who is actively engaging on race based voter suppression NOW? It is the Republicans.  Who chose a deliberate strategy of courting racist former Democrats in the south after the Civil Rights movement? It was The Republicans.  To say that today's Republican and Democratic parties resemble anything close to what they looked like a hundred years ago isn't hypocritical,  it's idiotic.  Shit today's Republican party doesn't resemble the Republican party from TEN years ago. What the hell is the point you're even trying to make here?

He's one of those people pretending the Civil Rights movement didn't essentially make the parties do a switcheroo. History is important but what matters is what's happening now. 100 years ago isn't really relevant to the issue and where the parties stand at present.

[CastlevaniaNut18]

The democrats of today aren't the democrats of a hundred years ago, so lumping them together really has no point other than to be a moron masquerading as an intellectual. 

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

The democrats of today aren't really even the democrats of ten years ago

[skillzdadirecta]

I love it when Republicans call themselves "The Party of Lincoln"  As if Lincoln would be welcome in today's Republican party... shit Reagan wouldn't even be welcome in today's Republican party.

[SaysWho?]

It's tiresome educating people on this. The vast majority of black congresspeople and black Americans in office are Democrats, the black Democrat who ran against DeSantis in 2018 was against requiring felons to pay fines, but herp derp mcslurp, I'm sure they were fucking themselves over the past 100 years amirite?

 

Reminds me of this meme.

 

[Keyser_Soze]

Why you gotta slam Snay so hard doe?  

[Jason]

24 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

Why you gotta slam Snay so hard doe?  

 

For all the talk of the CEB engaging in groupthink and savaging people who deviate from it, I feel like we're actually pretty good about not doing it until it's clear someone is intentionally being lazy and/or trolling.

[Keyser_Soze]

1 hour ago, Jason said:

 

For all the talk of the CEB engaging in groupthink and savaging people who deviate from it, I feel like we're actually pretty good about not doing it until it's clear someone is intentionally being lazy and/or trolling.

 

Snay isn't a troll.

[skillzdadirecta]

10 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Snay isn't a troll.

He isn't but that was a pretty bad take doe. I was surprised he went there to be honest.

[CastlevaniaNut18]

5 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

He isn't but that was a pretty bad take doe. I was surprised he went there to be honest.

I'm not. 

[CastlevaniaNut18]

I've seen him with several bad takes in the past. Kinda like ranting. 

 

I don't think he's a Trumper, but that doesn't exclude one from having bad takes. 

[Keyser_Soze]

21 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

He isn't but that was a pretty bad take doe. I was surprised he went there to be honest.

 

Maybe it's a bad take, maybe it's what he believes but you could engage him entirely differently instead of laughing and making fun of him.

 

Something like, "Interesting perspective but I believe you may be mistaken because..."

And maybe you educate him, maybe you don't but you won't end up  driving him away because you're being a jerk.

[thewhyteboar]

If anyone is actually really interested in the party switch, here is some reading:

 

Hubert Humphrey's 1948 DNC Convention Speech

https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/huberthumphey1948dnc.html

"My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. People -- human beings -- this is the issue of the 20th century. People of all kinds -- all sorts of people -- and these people are looking to America for leadership, and they’re looking to America for precept and example."

 

This speech caused Strom Thurmond to storm out of the convention and run as a Dixiecrat on a platform of segregation. Thurmond of course, would later become a Republican (remember when Trent Lott had to step down as Majority Leader when he said the country would be better off if Thurmond won??? Different times man).

 

Next, Jackie Robinson (yes, that Jackie Robinson!) and Barry Goldwater

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-jackie-robinson-100-politics-mlk-nixon-0131-20190130-story.html

 

"But Republican leaders weren’t looking for a black messiah, and in the following year, Robinson implored Nixon to counter Barry Goldwater’s white-centered politics. “We’re not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are,” Goldwater had said. That divisive statement, Robinson wrote Nixon, “will be Republican policy until someone other than Goldwater vigorously denies that the Republican Party is not interested in the Negro vote.”

Nixon did not come through, and Robinson’s disappointment only deepened when the Republicans nominated Goldwater for president in 1964. “His candidacy reeks with prejudice and bigotry,” Robinson wrote.

Warning that Republicans were forming a “white man’s party,” Robinson then supported the Democratic Lyndon Johnson-Hubert Humphrey ticket in 1964. But he drifted back to the Republican fold once again in the mid-1960s, this time focusing his lobbying efforts on his all-time favorite politician, Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York. “The sooner there is a strong two-party system in New York as well as nationwide, the sooner we get our rights,” he penned to Rockefeller in 1965."

 

Robinson would later support some other Republicans, but he recognized how terrible Goldwater was for the party.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/03/goldwater-jackie-robinson/474498/

This article has a lot of good quotes from black newspapers during the time.

 

“During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake,” Robinson wrote in 1967. “One of them was the National Republican Convention in San Francisco, which produced the greatest disaster the Republican Party has ever known—Nominee Barry Goldwater.” Robinson, a loyal Republican who campaigned for Richard Nixon in 1960, was shocked and saddened by the racism and lack of civility he witnessed at the 1964 convention. As the historian Leah Wright Rigueur describes in The Loneliness of the Black Republican, black delegates were verbally assaulted and threatened with violence by Goldwater supporters. William Young, a Pennsylvania delegate, had his suit set on fire and was told to “keep in your own place” by his assailant. “They call you ‘nigger,’ push you and step on your feet,” New Jersey delegate George Fleming told the Associated Press. “I had to leave to keep my self-respect.”  

 

As the Draft Goldwater campaign expanded in early 1963, the editors at the Chicago Defender warned that Goldwater’s “brand of demagoguery has a special appeal to ultra conservative Republicans” and that he “cannot be laughed off as a serious possibility as is being done in some quarters unfriendly to him.” After the 1964 Republican National Convention, the Defender suggested, “Goldwater in the White House would be a nightmare from which the nation and the world would not soon recover.” Another editorial two days later struck a stronger tone: “The conviction is universal that Goldwater represents the most diabolical force that has ever captured the leadership of the Republican Party. After 108 years of exhortation to freedom, liberty, and justice, the GOP now becomes the label under which Fascism is oozed into the mainstream of American politics.” (pretty fucking prescient, eh?)

 

And last, for anyone who still thinks the Civil War wasn't about slavery, let me present the Cornerstone Speech, by the Confederate Vice President, Alexander Stephens

https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornerstone-speech

 

"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

 

"It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of His ordinances, or to question them. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another, as He has made "one star to differ from another star in glory." The great objects of humanity are best attained when there is conformity to His laws and decrees, in the formation of governments as well as in all things else. Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws. This stone which was rejected by the first builders "is become the chief of the corner" the real "corner-stone" in our new edifice."

[CastlevaniaNut18]

9 minutes ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Maybe it's a bad take, maybe it's what he believes but you could engage him entirely differently instead of laughing and making fun of him.

 

Something like, "Interesting perspective but I believe you may be mistaken because..."

And maybe you educate him, maybe you don't but you won't end up  driving him away because you're being a jerk.

Honestly, it's the go to argument conservatives give about racism. It's  been parroted and corrected for so long, it's like parody at this point. If you still want to argue that, it deserves nothing but derision. As Fright said, it's tiresome trying to educate people on this one. 

[Keyser_Soze]

1 hour ago, CastlevaniaNut18 said:

Honestly, it's the go to argument conservatives give about racism. It's  been parroted and corrected for so long, it's like parody at this point. If you still want to argue that, it deserves nothing but derision. As Fright said, it's tiresome trying to educate people on this one. 

 

Well at least @thewhyteboar had the right idea.  
 

Also, we are a close knit group not “people” so if there is someone close to you who should know something you should tell them better.

Now if Snay was som guy off the street I’d say sure fuck em!

 

But the carrot worked for @Dodger just saying 

[Jason]

I don't think snay is a troll but I think he knows better and pulls a dodger on us when he's feeling salty.

[CastlevaniaNut18]

6 hours ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Well at least @thewhyteboar had the right idea.  
 

Also, we are a close knit group not “people” so if there is someone close to you who should know something you should tell them better.

Now if Snay was som guy off the street I’d say sure fuck em!

 

But the carrot worked for @Dodger just saying 

You edited it later. 

 

I have less patience for people I know. I come from a family of straight up racists. I'm beyond being polite with their nonsense. 

 

Not that I really know Snay. Just a few interactions here. 

[sexy_shapiro]

Snay has been posting here long enough that I don’t believe for a second that he’s never heard about the party switch before. He either knows he’s wrong and is trolling, or know’s the truth but doesn’t believe it.

[Anathema-]

maybe we don't always have to go all HAM on everybody