Who among us chose empire? Of the millions of Americans who were actually allowed to cast their vote, who among that number actually voted in favor of a foreign policy that required armed Americans to fashion another nation in America’s image? Who among that admittedly limited number voted to make the Americans the makers of princes in lands where most people speak a language unknown to the vast majority of Americans?
In the earliest days of the American Republic, when a tight, nervous knot of men, for they were all men, met in Philadelphia in the late 1770s, they had before them two examples that drew their admiration and emerged as models of what form of government this new nation would adopt: Rome and Britain. For two of the delegates, Messrs. James Madison of Virginia and John Dickinson of Delaware, these two examples were most attractive. Madison wanted a Roman-style senate, but with popular elections. Dickinson wanted a senate more like the British House of Lords, elected not by the people but by state legislatures. Dickinson won, and it was over a century before the people would be allowed to vote for their representatives. So much for democracy, huh? The point is that two examples loomed large in the American mind at the very beginning. Both were global empires.
Why didn’t Americans look to ancient or even native-born, that is, Indian democracies? They didn’t want democracy. They wanted to build a state that protected their wealth and privilege but seemed to be democratic. That’s why it took until 1912 for Americans to vote for their representatives with the Seventh [Seventeenth] Amendment. That’s why today, in the year 2003, there is not a constitutional right to vote. If you doubt this, remember the election of 2000, when Bush v. Gore was decided. If you recall, there were perhaps tens of thousands of people who were disenfranchised from voting.
The courts have been largely silent on this grave usurpation. That’s because they know there is no direct constitutional right to vote. It’s a state right protected by state statutes, state courts and state constitutions. The Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore, not based on the constitutional rights of the citizens to vote, but on equal protection under the 13th and 14th amendments. How deliciously ironic that the constitutional amendment, which was designed to protect the constitutional rights of Black Americans newly freed from 244 years of bondage, would be instead the tool used to usurp their right to vote in Florida and justified, to judicial usurpation of the political process, to install the bottom half of the Bush dynasty. America is drunk on the wine of empire, and like Rome, cannot see the precipice that looms before it, the pride that cometh before the fall. From death row. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are produced by Noel Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
