Let states decide: A plea for policy sanity
If only President Joe Biden had waited one more week to lose his composure over his party’s beleaguered voting rights bill! In fact, this coming Friday would’ve been perfect timing for an undignified presidential fit to focus our attention where it increasingly needs to be — on the eternal tension between governance from afar and governance closer to home.
Each year on or around Jan. 22 — this year on the 21st — hundreds of thousands of people gather in Washington, D.C., for the March for Life. It commemorates 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court negated widely varied state laws and established, top-down, its own view of abortion for the entire nation.
Nearly 50 rancorous years later, the court is revisiting this decision (not for the first time) as it weighs a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions — in Mississippi — after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Before Roe, abortion laws were generally in the process of being loosened, a byproduct of the 1960s sexual revolution. The Supreme Court short-circuited that process, and we’ve been fighting about it ever since. Roe did more to polarize American politics than anything else in modern history.
How is Congress’s proposed voting rights bill evocative of Roe? The bill would override each state’s prerogative to craft a process for fair elections that works for its residents and its unique circumstances.
Elections, pandemic restrictions, health care costs — it’s intriguing how many of the perplexing issues and challenges we face may have different solutions from state to state.
COVID has forced us to relearn this truth, or at least it should have. Policies should vary from dense cities to sparsely populated regions, from crowded business settings to low-traffic sites, from intimate, stuffy spaces to vast rooms with more air and better circulation and filtering. Policies should vary because needs and risks vary. One policy does not fit all.
Whether it’s voting procedures, health care delivery systems or abortion regulations, what works for Massachusetts may not work for Montana or Maine.
While Roe upended varying abortion laws nationwide, it was COVID that upended election rules. In 2020, many states created new measures willy-nilly to allow voting with as little human contact as possible and to give citizens more time to cast their ballots.
But many states set up these new rules via emergency powers, without appropriate legislation. Some of these new arrangements did not inspire voter confidence.
Now, as the 2022 mid-terms loom, some partisans are eager to keep these looser measures. Any effort to restore pre-pandemic guidelines brings an accusation of trying to “restrict the right to vote.”
In Georgia, for instance, one item Democrats attacked in the Republican-led Legislature’s bill was reducing the number of “drop boxes” for mailed ballots. Prior to COVID, however, the state had none at all. The 2021 bill keeps this innovation, but with a lower number than used during the pandemic.
Is that reasonable? Georgians should get to decide. Likewise, Pennsylvanians should get to decide, via our state representatives, what voter identification requirements are appropriate.
Article 1 of the Constitution says, “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”
Congress may, but it need not. One size does not fit all. Details like population density, primary industry, topography and so on really matter, not just state by state, but county by county.
As luck would have it, this is also the week during which we celebrate the incomparable legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. His life’s work culminated in the landmark civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s — a beautiful instance of the power of the federal government being absolutely necessary to secure the constitutional rights of all citizens, no matter where they live.
Knowing when to look to the U.S. Capitol, the state capitol or city council is a crucial responsibility of citizenship. This time it’s “No thanks, Joe.”