The state’s top elected officials and the state’s biggest newspaper have framed the issue of automatic restoration of voting rights for lawfully convicted felons in stark racial terms. We prefer the rule of reason.
In the Age of Trumpism, this may be hopelessly naive.
We believe automatic restoration of rights for rapists and violent felons disrespects their victims. According to our critics, this means we support “Jim Crow” policies.
The term “Jim Crow” is the historical moniker for Virginia government policies imposed to create a racial caste system. In today’s politics, it is hard to imagine a more damning charge against a white Virginian.
We have questioned the legal authority for the governor’s sweeping order restoring the rights of all felons, violent and non-violent alike. This, too, is labeled anti-black.
Proponents cite University of Virginia professor A. E. “Dick” Howard, who said the chief executive’s authority to issue this order is constitutionally clear.
Yet this clarity eluded every previous governor, every previous attorney general and their legal advisers since the 1971 Constitution’s ratification.
They reached the opposite conclusion, often citing Howard’s 1974 treatise on the new Constitution as the reason they could not issue such a sweeping order.
A position held for decades by some of the state’s most ardent and respected civil rights leaders is now said to flow from unreconstructed Jim Crowism.
This highlights a disturbing trend in our politics – the tendency to ignore facts to advance an agenda.
Fact: In 2013, Senate Democrats, including the current lieutenant governor, Ralph Northam, and Attorney General Mark Herring, as well as every African American senator unanimously supported a restoration-of-rights amendment to the Virginia Constitution.
The proposed amendment said a non-violent felon would automatically get back his or her voting rights upon completing a sentence if he or she had first paid all the fines, fees and other costs imposed because of the conviction.
Fact: Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s (D) order has no such precondition.
Fact: Many non-violent felons who deserve to get their voting rights restored often lack the financial means to pay these outstanding fees and costs, accumulating over years with interest. The 2013 amendment would have effectively denied them rights restoration for life.
Fact: If it is allegedly “racist” today to oppose the governor’s order, then it was “racist” in 2013 to have tried to amend the constitution to make such an order impossible.
Fact: This 2013 proposed amendment treated violent and non-violent felons differently. The governor’s role in restoring non-violent felon rights is seemingly erased.
Under that proposal, McAuliffe’s current order – he says 80 percent of the felons covered were non-violent – would have been blocked.
Fact: The 2013 amendment would have kept the provision universally seen at the time as requiring the governor to review violent felons’ right restoration requests individually.
By lifting the burden of non-violent felon restoration from the governor, the proposal would have made it easier for the chief executive to speed up the case-by-case review for violent felons.
Fact: The policy of disenfranchising felons dates to colonial times when only some white men were allowed to vote. Howard pointed this out in his treatise. Without such a policy, those lawfully convicted could still vote while incarcerated or otherwise serving out the sentence.
Reasonable people should be able to reasonably disagree on policy or constitutional law without being sentenced to run a phony a racial gauntlet.
Felon population statistics by race are sobering. However, the disenfranchisement provision applies equally to all those lawfully convicted. Whatever bias exists in the criminal justice system – and the statistical case is compelling – has to manifest itself much earlier in the process. Playing the race card makes an honest discussion of this hugely serious issue much harder.
We don’t believe rapists or violent felons have a legal, much less moral, claim to automatically have the same rights as their victims.
Based on their public positions, neither did Northam, Herring, every African American state senator, the Senate’s Republican leader, Tommy Norment, Howard or McAuliffe in 2013.
Those are the facts. They speak for themselves.