United States Constitution
24th Amendment:
“Amendment XXIV
ABOLITION OF POLL TAXES
Passed by Congress August 27, 1962. Ratified January 23, 1964
“SECTION 1”
“The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay poll tax or other tax.”
*** Fast-forward to April, 2019:
The Republican-controlled Florida House of Representatives has just passed legislation that would require people to pay financial obligations as part of their criminal sentence before they can vote again.
The law would require repayment, even if the obligation has been converted to a civil lien. The vote was 71-45.
This nation is headed back headlong to a time in which an underclass, that was heavily people of color but also included some whites, had no chance of rising.
We are instead going to rise up like we did last year in the election of 2018, and we are not going to let it happen.
But we do need to form a grand coalition to do it. We need to stop judging each other for political perfection, and focus our energy on defeating the forces of privilege, corruption, and regression.
The new Trump Republican Party is a rump party of that very privilege (oligarchy), corruption (emoluments), and regression (racism, sexism, and homophobia/transphobia).
Let’s make Russian disinformation, trolls, and election shenanigans irrelevant, by banding together in massive numbers and easing up on one another, even when our politics are not perfectly ideal in someone else’s view.
