Charles CW Cooke: Voter ID and Gun Rights

Why, I wonder, are voter ID’s recusants so deafeningly silent when it comes to the stumbling blocks that are constructed in front of other constitutional rights, including ones that are literally and explicitly enumerated? As the Supreme Court has now rightly confirmed, the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, and, however the future jurisprudence fills in the blanks and defines the scope of that right, it remains immutably, unassailably, incontrovertibly true that all law-abiding Americans enjoy the right to buy and to own firearms and, by extension, that governments at every level are prohibited from restricting that right. And yet they damn well do, all the time, and to nary a squeak from the anti-voter-ID crowd.

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Nightmare said:

Please show us the hypothetical right to vote in the Constitution, not the several amendments that prohibit particular "stumbling blocks" to the hypothetical by the states.

There is no Federal Constitutional Right to vote.

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beebobby said:

Not only is there a right to vote in the Constitution, but it’s the single right that appears most often in the Constitution’s text – five times in all. In fact, four separate Amendments – the 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th – even use the same powerful language to protect it: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged . . . .”

Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment imposes a penalty upon states that deny or abridge "the right to vote at any [federal or state] election ... to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, ... except for participation in rebellion, or other crime."
The Fifteenth states that "[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote" can't be abridged by race;
the Nineteenth says that the same right can't be abridged by sex;
the Twenty-Fourth says that "the right of citizens of the United States to vote" in federal elections can't be blocked by a poll tax;
the Twenty-Sixth protects "[t]he right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote."

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Nightmare said:

Please show us the hypothetical right to vote in the Constitution, not the several amendments that prohibit particular "stumbling blocks" to the hypothetical by the states.

There is no Federal Constitutional Right to vote.

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Nightmare said:

Nice word, recusant! I'll have to remember this one and throw it into my writing and conversations, perhaps in place of "resistant American" or alternate it with dissident and recusant. It means refusing to submit to authority ecclesiastical (the original use) or secular, a refusenick. LOL, an antonym is papist. Sweeet, for a confessing Lutheran.

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Anarcho-capitalism (also referred to as free-market anarchism,[1] market anarchism,[2] private-property anarchism,[3] libertarian anarchism[4]) is a political philosophy which advocates the elimination of the state, while retaining the concept of private property, in favor of individual sovereignty.

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We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read. - Mark Twain

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