National Review Online
Friday, November 26, 2021
Democrats on the New York City Council, last
seen expelling Thomas Jefferson from their chamber, have decided to
attack another venerable pillar of American democracy: citizenship. A
veto-proof majority of the Council, backed by incoming mayor Eric Adams, plans to
allow over 800,000 green-card holders and non-citizen residents with work
permits to vote in municipal elections. This is not a small number of additional
voters: no candidate for Mayor of New York has received 800,000 votes since
Rudy Giuliani in 1993.
The immediate objection to the plan, which prompted even
Bill de Blasio to veto it previously, is that it violates the state constitution, which provides that “Every citizen shall
be entitled to vote at every election for all officers elected by the people .
. . provided that such citizen is eighteen years of age or
over and shall have been a resident of this state, and of the county, city, or
village for thirty days next preceding an election,” and that “laws shall be
made for ascertaining, by proper proofs, the citizens who
shall be entitled to the right of suffrage hereby established.” It further
requires the secret ballot for “elections by the citizens.”
No state permits non-citizens to vote. Ballot initiatives
in Alabama, Colorado, and Florida explicitly limited the vote to citizens by
overwhelming popular majorities in 2020, joining Arizona and North Dakota. The
constitutions of many other states are written, like New York’s, with the
assumption that voting rights derive from citizenship.
Each of the guarantees of voting rights in the national
Constitution — in the 14th, 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments — is
explicitly limited to “citizens of the United States.” Since 1996, federal law
has made it a felony for non-citizens to vote in federal elections, although
federal law allows states to make their own choices.
Non-citizen voting is the latest push by progressives —
along with felon voting and mass amnesty — who fear that they cannot win
elections conducted only among law-abiding American citizens. San Francisco is
presently the only major city to allow it, and the governance of San Francisco
is not exactly a model that anyone should emulate. Chicago also allows
non-citizens to vote in some school elections, as do several Maryland
municipalities.
The Vermont legislature recently overrode a veto by
governor Phil Scott of a plan to permit non-citizens to vote in Montpelier and
Winooski. That plan faces its own legal challenges under Vermont’s constitution.
The Illinois legislature and the city council of Washington, D.C., are also
both considering proposals for non-citizen voting.
There are good reasons why Americans have traditionally
limited the vote to citizens. Citizenship is no mere formality, as anyone who
has attended a citizenship ceremony can attest. It is a bond of right,
responsibility, and affection between the citizen and the nation. Duties such
as voting and jury service have long been essential attributes of citizenship,
limited to those who by residence and public declaration of allegiance have
permanently joined the community. We require new citizens to pass a test to
demonstrate their understanding of our history, values, and political system.
Adding the votes of non-citizens dilutes the votes of
citizens as well as the value of citizenship itself. Moreover, while the push
for legal resident voting is couched in part in the rhetoric of taxation
without representation, anyone who has followed progressive politics can
confidently predict that the success of these measures will lead to further
efforts to enfranchise “undocumented” illegal aliens next. But non-citizens are
not a separate, oppressed class; those who choose to become citizens are, like
citizens under age 18, passing through a temporary status.
The Founders, though they welcomed immigrants and set for
them a path to become citizens, were cautious about extending the franchise
immediately to new arrivals. The proper time period to become a citizen was
hotly debated: Congress changed it four times between 1790 and 1802, ranging
from two years to 14 years before settling on five years. The intensity of the
debate reflected the importance they placed on the status of citizen.
Alexander Hamilton, himself an immigrant, wrote that “The
impolicy of admitting foreigners to an immediate and unreserved participation
in the right of suffrage, or in the sovereignty of a Republic, is as much a
received axiom as any thing in the science of politics, and is verified by the
experience of all ages.” Jefferson warned that masses of immigrants from
European monarchies “will bring with them the principles of the governments
they leave, imbibed in their early youth; or, if able to throw them off, it
will be in exchange for an unbounded licentiousness, passing, as is usual, from
one extreme to another. It would be a miracle were they to stop precisely
at the point of temperate liberty.” Maybe that is why the City Council didn’t
want him to see what it would do next.
Just this month, New York State’s voters soundly rejected
misbegotten progressive efforts to water down the state’s
requirements for registration and voting. If the City Council votes to dilute
the voting rights of the city’s citizens, the state should step in to protect
them.
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