Press Release: July 4th Looks Grim for American Constitutional Rights

Poll: July 4th, 2020 Looks Grim for America's Constitutional Rights

New study shows dramatic plunge in confidence in U.S. Bill of Rights

 
By Jeff Barge

One of Abraham Lincoln's least known quotes is this: "Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backwards."

But as we celebrate July 4th, 2020, it looks like that may no longer be true.

Tracking a twenty year plunge, twin opinion polls taken in 2000 and again in 2020, 20 years apart, show that Americans' faith in their Constitutional rights has cratered.

In the newly released study, the identical questions on Constitutional rights were asked by the same research company, Opinion Research Corp, in both years. The scientific results have a margin of error of 3%.

The disillusioning results are as follows:

--While 64% of Americans felt that rich and poor had the same access to free speech in the year 2000, in the survey taken last month only 52% felt that way, a drop of 12 percentage points.

Only Tik-Tokers and K-Pop fans really enjoy “free speech” in America anymore, some would opine -- just the way these groups "filled" seats at Pres. Trump's recent Tulsa rally. "While we’ve seen wealthy interests and foreign nations use money to try to manipulate and misguide public opinion," says West Hollywood Mayor John Heilman, "people of limited means can use the internet to express and amplify opinions.

The rest of us seemingly have to pay to get our voices heard. In the current Senate race in Colorado right now, for example, Democratic candidate John Hickenlooper says he is being outspent 3-1 by his Republic opponent. To get speech nowadays, you have to pay.

--While 83% of Americans felt that rich and poor had the same access to the right to vote in the year 2000, twenty years later only 55% feel that way, a drop of 28 percentage points.

Democrats often accuse Republicans of deliberately making it hard to vote in order to keep minorities, immigrants, young people and other groups from the polls. The big news in the voting fight this year was that Donald Trump finally admitted it. Referring to a Congressional proposal for increased spending on voting, Trump told Fox & Friends: “The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

It's worth noting that we may already have a "de facto" vote by mail system in place -- 85% of the vote in the most recent Kentucky primary came by mail, while Minneapolis predicts that 70% of the votes for November's election will be mail-in ballots.

Massive purging of voting is another issue. Just read this excerpt from a recent article in Britain’s The Independent: “

“According to data compiled by Mother Jones,
between 2016 and 2018, more than 17 million names have been removed
from the voter rolls. While names are removed from voter rolls every
year due to deaths or citizens leaving the state, the number of voters
removed from the rolls since 2016 has significantly increased.

Between 2016 and 2018, states on average removed 7.6 per cent of
their voters from the rolls. However, the purge in some states went much
further.

Indiana purged the greatest number of voters, removing 22.3 per
cent of the state's voters from its rolls. Both Virginia and Wisconsin
removed 14 per cent, and Maine, Oklahoma and Massachusetts removed
between 11 and 12.1 per cent."

Gerrymandering, intimidating poll monitors, inadequate voting facilities, stringent voter ID regulations, and campaigns against voting by ex-felons are other barriers that Stacey Abrams’ “Fair Fight Action” and others are fighting.

--While 41% of Americans felt that rich and poor had the same access to the right to run for elected office in 2000, the new survey last month shows only 33% now feel that way, a drop of 8 percentage points.

Harvard professor Larry Lessig posits a country called Lesterland, where 144,000 people who are all coincidentally named Lester choose the candidates that the other 300 million get to vote for.  Seattle demi-billionaire Nick Hanauer foresees pitchforks coming for his "fellow .01%-ers" if they do not address the issue of increasing wealth inequality. He makes comparisons to the period preceding the French Revolution in the 18th century.

Whatever the situation, as Timothy Tyson of the Poor Peoples' Campaign and Duke University emailed about the right to run for office: "Politics requires large sums of money and free time to run, and poor people do not have those things, nor political action committees that flood the airways for their preferred candidates.  Poor candidates are practically unelectable."

--While 28% of Americans felt that rich and poor had the same access to the federal courts in 2000, 35% feel they do today, a gain of 7 percentage points.

Joe Soss, the Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service at the University of Minnesota, writes that criminal courts in the U.S. have become desperate for revenues and begun siphoning them from the bottom up, so that defendants in criminal cases can no longer afford equal justice.

 “Since the 1990s, governments and corporations in the United States have created a host of new ways to generate revenues by extracting resources, disproportionately from poor black, indigenous, and other communities of color,” he writes. “Such practices include fine-centered policing, court fees, commercial bail, prison charges, civil asset forfeiture, and more".

And when people get arrested and are taken to court, he says, they enter a whole new world where they're forced to pay fees for various court operations. “They take on legal and financial obligations and then they may find themselves in jail where they have to pay for phone calls and for electronic monitoring. They get ushered into this expensive world of commercial bail, where more money gets taken from their families and friends. And then of course people are put in prison or on probation or parole, and again there are ‘pay to stay’ fees; basic necessities have to be purchased from commissaries; charges to make video calls and phone calls; you name it, money gets extracted. All that is before we even get to the issue of how people's bodies are used for free or cheap labor in prisons.”

Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire's "Candide" suggests that the right path for each of us is "tending our own garden." But while we've been tending our own garden, someone else seems to have taken over the whole land.

As our Constitutional rights slip away on this national holiday, we should all vow to vote our convictions this coming November 3 and restore our nation to what "truly" made it great -- our guaranteed Constitutional rights.

--Jeff Barge is the president of Lucky Star Communications, a Cleveland-based communications consulting firm. He commissioned this survey.