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.
The US Constitution, on the other hand, does not oblige the federal government to recognize the electoral votes or congressional delegates of a state that does not enfranchise its citizens and submit to their will in the form of their votes.
The Guarantee Clause (article 4, section 4) of the constitution requires that state governments take the form of a republic, versus that of a theocracy or monarchy or dictatorship. (All republics involve some degree of democracy). Section 2 of the 14th Amendment says that if states deny citizens the right to vote, those states shall lose their representation at the federal level- that is, if you’re not a democracy that submits to the will of its voters, you can do that but in the process your electoral college votes and ability to send congressmen to DC goes away- and your state will lose its ability to influence federal law and to elect federal officials.
Of course, the current SCOTUS is likely to find some way to assert that anything giving the GOP political advantage must be what the framers would have wanted no matter how many ways they told us unambiguously they fucking wanted government derived from the consent of the governed.
Calling it right now…the GOP is going to be using this wording to mean only Republicans can be in government.
I am sure the originalists will point out that there was no Republican party when the constitution was written. Therefore that could not have been the meaning.
/s
Something something muskets something 2nd amendment… ah forget it.
Well, there was the Democratic Republican party, founded by Jefferson and Madison. Interestingly enough, and perhaps inevitably, that party effectively split into the Democrats and Republicans. There’s Whigs in there and such, the absorbtion of competing parties, etc, but the ancestry is pretty clear.
It wasn’t technically there in 1776 but 1792 ain’t bad.