Who can vote in the United States?: The voting rights amendments

" ... that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

- Closing lines of Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" (November 19, 1863)

Many Americans have historically been denied the vote in this country ...

Voting rights are one of the most important rights that anyone can have in a free country. They are a right by which many others can be defended, and the essence of popular government in democracies and republics. But voting rights were long restricted in this country to white male citizens who had private property, and who were 21 years of age or older. They could be denied for failure to pay poll taxes, for having ancestors that had been enslaved, or for any number of other things that were used as restrictions on the right to vote.

Frederick Douglass, a notable advocate of African American voting rights

... and the changes in these policies were made somewhat gradually over a period of decades

It took a long time for this situation to be rectified, and the changes brought herein were made somewhat gradually over a period of some decades. Thus, it would seem appropriate to review them now, and show what categories are forbidden to be used as legal grounds for denying people the right to vote. (I should acknowledge that some would classify the Twenty-Third Amendment as a voting rights amendment as well; but since this amendment is more relevant to the electoral college than it is to individual suffrage, I have saved that discussion for another post. I will focus this post instead on the four amendments about voting rights at the individual level.)

Martin Luther King, another notable advocate of African American voting rights

Why people will always find the executive branch more interesting than the other two branches

"If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send one hundred and fifty lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and talk by the hour?"

- Thomas Jefferson

In every society that I know of, people are fascinated by power - whether their own power, or someone else's. Even in democratic societies, people fear the power of governments; and those who have to live under totalitarian regimes live in still greater fear. People in these countries usually take great care not to offend their governments, of course, because retribution from these governments can be so terrible and swift. Obviously, the governments of more democratic countries don't possess anything like this degree of internal power, of course, but they do possess a great deal of external power that makes them a force to be reckoned with. Nowhere is this more true than the United States, I think, where the resources at the government's disposal (military and otherwise) make it more powerful than any other.

The Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense

People do find the executive branch (including the police and military) more interesting

All three branches of our government have power, of course, but I think people are more fascinated by the executive branch than either of the other two. There have been movies about the legislative branch (such as "Mr. Smith Goes To Washington"), and there have been movies about the judicial branch (such as the John Grisham movies). But for every movie about one of these two branches, there is another movie about the federal police force or the United States military (parts of the executive branch), and some movies even focus on the White House itself.

Headquarters of the United States Department of Justice, or "DOJ"

How to prevent tyranny: Separation of powers and checks & balances

"The political liberty of the [citizen] is a tranquillity of mind, arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order to have this liberty, it is requisite the government be so constituted as one man need not be afraid of another."

- Baron de Montesquieu's "De l'esprit des lois" ("The Spirit of Laws") [published 1748], Book XI, Chapter 6

Montesquieu had some important ideas about how to prevent tyranny (and they're still relevant today)

The U. S. Declaration of Independence owed much to the work of John Locke, the English political philosopher. But the political scientist Donald Lutz said that "If there was one man read and reacted to by American political writers of all factions during all the stages of the founding era, it was probably not Locke but Montesquieu." (Source: The American Political Science Review, Vol. 78, No. 1, March 1984, p. 190) This is not to deny the importance of Locke, as he was also an enormous influence on the Founding Fathers (see my blog post for evidence of this). Nonetheless, Montesquieu is definitely the author that had the greatest influence on both sides of the ratification debates, and perhaps even on the finished product of the United States Constitution itself. He's almost like a Founding Grandfather of the United States, his influence is so strong. This is why I recently finished reading his most famous work "De l'esprit des lois" ("The Spirit of Laws") in the original French. He was a Frenchman, who wrote his most famous work in 1748 - a book written over a quarter of a century before the American Revolution. This book was one of the most important influences on the Founding Fathers.

Baron de Montesquieu

How to prevent bad government: Keep any one group from getting too much power

Montesquieu is probably best known today for his important theory of a separation of powers in government. Put briefly, this theory is the idea that bad government is best prevented by keeping any one group from getting too much power over the others. James Madison referenced this danger in the Federalist Papers by saying that "the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." (Source: Federalist No. 47) Hence, the need for a system of government that divides up these powers as much as possible. This is something that the United States Constitution does by dividing up this power into three branches of government - the legislative, executive, and judiciary. The legislative branch makes the laws, the executive branch enforces the laws, and the judiciary branch judges and interprets the laws, with as little overlap between these three kinds of power as possible. (More on that in a separate post - for now, I will confine myself to talking about the specifics of the theory, at least in basic form.)

5 limits on presidential power that you never heard of

"For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other."

- Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" (1776), Chapter III

Impeachment is not the only limit on the president's power

"What's the difference between a president and a king?" This is a question that Americans sometimes ask themselves, and we usually conclude that there are major differences between the two (or at least ought to be). But if you had asked this question at the time of the Constitutional Convention, many Americans would have feared that there wouldn't be much difference between the two under the new Constitution. They might have said that it was too much power to give to one man (like the president), and that powers might be best confined to a larger body like the Congress. They eventually came around to see the presidency as a necessary institution despite these potential hazards, but they still worried greatly about executive power. Moreover, they were wondering how the Congress could check (or stop) the power of the presidency. The most obvious example of a legislative check on the president is the Congress's power to impeach the members of the executive branch - and, most importantly, the president himself or herself. But this is far from their only check on the president's power, since there are a number of others to be found in the Constitution, if you know where to look for them. I will be spending this post discussing just five of them.

King George the Third, the monarch that the American Revolution was (partially) fought against