The Right to Vote (True Blue)

Mark Schmitt, in response to Kevin Drum's post about individual rights, makes a key distinction between Drum's 3 rights. First, though, Drum:

If you asked me to name the most fundamental rights of U.S. citizen -- the absolute minimum core that we could have and still call ourselves America -- I'd name three: freedom of speech, the right to a fair trial, and the right to vote. The government should not be in the business of limiting any of these things except in the most extreme cases.

And Schmitt:

The official Most Important Right, according to our government, is, The right to vote.

Schmitt goes on to talk about a plan for real universal suffrage, but there's a reason why it doesn't exist - and I think it provides an important context.

Simply put, the difference between the first two rights and voting is their derivation - the first two, according to the Western philosophy that created our nation, derive from the Creator. That means that Congress is, technically speaking, empowered to say that someone should or should not have the right to check a box.

Should they, though? That's the real question. In a democracy, to paraphrase, you go into an election with the public you have, not the public you want. One of the fundamental guarantors of future democracies is that this does not change; that elected officials cannot decide who gets to cast a vote when their incumbency is in question. And that's the real problem with the whole mess of felons not voting - the effect that has on democracy.