How Sacred Is the Right to Vote

we're likely to start to see more of tomorrow. And by the way, credit for all of this segment goes to any McCarthy from National Review, who's talked about this at length, and reading and listening to his stuff has sort of illuminated me on this and caused me just to realize, even just looking at the Constitution itself and realizing that the right to vote is rarely talked about

in the Constitution. It's rarely delineated, it's rarely expounded upon, its rare it's not really anywhere clearly declared that the ability to cast your vote is a sacred and fundamental right. There is stuff guaranteeing the right to vote in certain respects within the Constitution, so basically you're guaranteed that it's guaranteed that the people will vote for members of Congress. In the original draft of the Constitution, it was really only guarantee that you would vote for your member of

the House of Representatives. And it wasn't until the twentieth century that the Constitution was amended to allow the people directly to elect their senators. Provisions were also put into the Constitution over time, saying well, if you're gonna let people vote, you can't deny people the right to vote on the basis of a poll tax or failure to pay a poll tax. The Constitution got amended to say every adult eighteen and over can vote, that you can't be denied the right to vote on the basis of

your race. But that's about it. There's not really anywhere in the Constitution a florid, elaborate declaration of the importance of voting or the sacred right to vote and how it's secured, if anything, that the right to vote certainly as the Constitution was originally framed, also of course expanding the right to vote to women with the nineteenth Amendment.

The right to vote as it was conceived in the original Constitution was fairly limited because the framers of the Constitution had a certain vision of what they wanted the country to be, and it wasn't a democratic vision. They didn't like the concept of democracy. Now why is this relevant, Well, here's what's happening with all these election lawsuits. So you have your state its ordinary means as established by statute, federal statute, and individual state statutes pretty much all fifty states.

The ordinary way to vote is you show up on election day, you go to a voting center at your precinct, You fill out a ballot in a secret ballot booth, You hand in your ballot. That's the way that voting is supposed to happen, as kind of established mostly by statutes, not really in the constitution, but mostly established by statutes. That is the normative way to vote. States set up rules to facilitate voting in any fashion outside of that. You're allowed to vote in any fashion outside of that

that the state establishes. But the idea is, hey, if you're voting outside of this context, we've determined that this context, the secret ballot is the safest, most secure, most surefire way of ensuring the integrity of your vote, that your vote's not influenced by outside actors, that your vote is counted, et cetera. This is the best way to do it. This is the way we want, This is the ideal way to do it. So if you're going to vote in some other fashion. You can do it, but you

gotta follow the rules. You have to postmark your mail in or absentee by a certain day. You gotta do this. You gotta fill in your name here. You have to have a witness by signed two witnesses, or a blah blah blah, whatever the rules are for your individual state. These are the rules, and if you don't follow them, your vote doesn't get counted. That's it. We're giving you some grace, extending you an opportunity to vote outside of

the normative, most secure way of doing it. So if you don't follow this, whatever safety precautions, ensuring reliability, anti fraud protection schemes that we have, if you don't follow them, tough luck, you're out. And so what happens in state after state after state seems to be this, a group of Democrat voters wants to be able to vote without having followed the rules in some way, shape or form.

Not following the rules, and that rule in isolation seems pickyun or kind of picky or sort of like a ticki tacky technicality. Well, he had it postmarked by election day, you know, So why should it matter that the ballot arrived two days later, or you know, whatever it is. You know, we should be counting all the but even if they're not postmark, we should be counting all the ballots that arrive even within three days after the election.

Or you know, or this or that, or well, why are you saying that someone's vote can't be counted just because the two signatures on the outside weren't obtained because they misread the instructions. That that's not fair. And the appeal is always made in these lawsuits to the sacred American right true vote. You're going to deny someone the ability to have their vote be counted, to deny them

the sacred, god given cornerstone of our republic. You're going to deny someone the sacred right to vote on the basis of this little technicality. How could you? And often

those kinds of court cases win. Often judges will allow a party who has not followed the rules to get their vote counted on the basis of some kind of grandiose idea that, well, you know, the right to vote is a more important value and we need to respect that, and this is a small rule technicality and blah, And in isolation, probably one of these individual cases seems like not a big deal, Like, come on, you're really gonna say someone's vote can't count because they just didn't, you know,

fill out this signature line or something like that, they were one day late, and you're gonna make their ballot not count and the response should be yes, their vote shouldn't count. These rules are in place to ensure the integrity of the election. These rules are in place to ensure that fraud doesn't occur, that bad actors don't abuse

the system to try to game it. You can vote outside of voting at your precinct in person on election day if you want, but if you do, you gotta follow the rules, because we have rules to ensure that the election is authentic and has integrity, that the result is actually reflective of what the country wants, or what the your state wants, or your congressional district wants, your county wants, your city won whatever. But it's all premised

around that. The court challenge is premise the sacred right to vote. Now, what it's really premised around, I think is Democrats like to cheat, or maybe there are Republicans who like to cheat too. But it seems like the vast majority of these lawsuits are framed as Democrat voters didn't follow a rule in some way, shape or form, their lawyers file this lawsuit, and they and that's and it's Republicans opposing the lawsuit. That's what seems to be

the consistent scenario in state after state after state. And I'm here to tell you I don't know how much the framers of the Constitution really viewed the right to vote as the most important thing. Allow me to explain first is the kind of vision before I go to the break. I'll explain this first, is the vision of what the framers of the Constitution thought this country was going to be. We talk a lot about democracy, but what the framers of the Constitution liked was republicanism, not democracy.

And I'm not talking about the modern Republican party or the modern Democrat part. I'm not making some statement that, you know, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have been Republicans rather democrats. What I'm talking about is those forms of government, republicanism, a mixed republic, versus direct democracy. The framers of the Constitution accepted the conservative worldview of most authors in the ancient world. Most of the authors of

classical antiquity that democracy was a terrible idea. Most of most classical Greek authors writing about the democracy of Athens in the four hundred s BC looked at it with disgust. They didn't like it. Even a lot of Athenian authors didn't like direct democracy. And they basically thought that direct democracy where law where your populace is governed by the

will of the majority. They thought it could quickly turn into just a tyranny of the majority, that the majority could just vote away the basic protections for the minority. If you had a true straat majority, if you had a true straight up majority rule. You know, first of all, you could just have one House of Congress. Let's say we just had the House of Representatives. And Mike Johnson said, all right, well, we're going to pass a law here saying that no democrat has the right to speak, no

democrat has a right to freedom of speech. He could just pass that he has a simple majority. And the framers of the Constitution thought that was a terrible idea, that once you had just simple majority rule, the party in power could oppress the party out of power. The party in power could vote themselves bred and circuses. They didn't like direct democracy, explicitly did not like it. What

they liked was republicanism. The Founding Fathers thought of themselves as re creating, in some way in the new world, a vision of the Roman republic. That's what they liked. They liked Rome, not Athens. They liked the Roman republican system, and that's how they envisioned themselves. They envisioned themselves a lot of the Founding Fathers themselves Thomas Jefferson, et cetera.

They thought of themselves as if they were recreating the life and lifestyle of a patrician, noble Roman, a wealthy Roman who made his money off of his land holdings, a gentleman farmer slash scholar slash statesman slash general. That was their kind of vision of what was best to say life. George Washington sort of embodied this, and the

constant comparisons between George Washington and Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus was a famous Roman sort of sort of a legendary Roman senator who was called upon to be the dictator of the city of Rome. The dictator was a temporary office in Rome, where instead of having two guys, the two consuls be the chief generals in charge of Roman military affairs. They would say, all right, well, we can't have these two generals fighting with each other. We have a really serious threat,

the Republicans in danger. We need a dictator, one guy who talks. So they pick a guy. There's a famous story about Cincinnatus who was picked. He was working on his farm. He said, hey, Cincinnatus, we need you to be the dictator. The enemy's coming. Help save Rome. He sets down his plow, he goes, He leads the Roman army, he defeats, the enemy, comes back several months later, picks up his plow, keeps plowing. That was the Comparson made

to George Washington constantly, constantly, constantly. That's who we named the city of Cincinnati after. Okay, and the idea of Washington being the American version of that. They thought of themselves as the Roman elites, and they viewed the right to vote in this very sort of attenuated way. When we returned the ways in which the founding fathers didn't actually think voting was that important, and by the not

for me to suppress your votes. Go vote if you want to, but I don't think just voting in general is necessarily a grand virtue. Next on The John Girardi Show. In the first segment, I was trying to explain people have this sense that the right to vote is like one of the most sacred and fundamental of all American rights and kind of but not really. It's actually much more attenuated than you'd think, and was given a lot less emphasis by the founding fathers than you would have imagined.

It was not something that was in the Bill of Rights. Bill of Rights has a right to fredium of speech for exercise of religion, right to keep a bear arms, not to have a soldier quartered in your house against unreasonable searches and seizures. You know, go through the first ten amendments to the Constitution. The right to vote isn't

in there. And in fact, when you read the Constitution, especially looking at like the Constitution as originally adopted, the only thing, the only federal office that the Constitution actually directs people to vote for is your member of the House of Representatives. You didn't get to vote for your US senator. The state legislators voted for the senators who represented each state, and even the presidency. States could determine however they wanted how they would pick their electors for

the electoral College. Now, over time, the way that all states wound up determining that is by a democratic vote of the people of those states. But it didn't necessarily have to be that way. It could have been through an election by the state legislator. By the state legislature. It wasn't even necessarily envisioned that the average Joe American citizen would have the right to vote for president. Not necessarily.

The only thing he was really allowed to vote for that was guaranteed by the Constitution was his member of the House of Representatives. Now this got amended over time. In the twentieth century, it was mended to say that the average Joe citizen could also vote for his US sender, But that was not in the Constitution at the time of its adoption. Why the framers of the Constitution thought of themselves as recreating in a certain fashion, the Roman Republic.

They didn't like direct Greek democracy. They actually thought that voters, for the most part, were pretty dumb, and that they're exercising the right to vote could be destructive for stuff that was beyond their capacity to understand and beyond their capacity to really engage with it. So let's look at again. In the original structure of the constitution, individual states could pick their own electors for president, sort of in whatever

system the state developed. And there's a decent amount of evidence apparently that the state a lot of these states envisioned that the state legislatures would just pick the electors who would cast their votes for president in the electoral College, and the idea being that maybe some of these electors would themselves be state representatives or statesmen who would be able to bring the important interests of their state to the electoral College for the proceedings of voting for a

new president. Now that's not really how the system wound up going. Basically, what happened is all these individual states decided via statute to say, well, no, the electoral college will be basically determined, the electors for the electoral College will be determined by a vote of our citizenry. So you citizens vote for electors who are going to vote for Donald Trump or electors who are going to vote for Kamala Harris. That's it. And pretty much every state

has adopted that via statute. Yes, literally every state has adopted that via statute. Although with some slight differences, notably Maine and Nebraska. Most of the states have it set up so that if a majority if fifty percent plus one, if Kamala Harris gets fifty percent of the vote plus one in California, all of California's fifty or whatever it is, electoral College members vote for Kamala Harris. Not so in

Nebraska and Maine. Nebraska and Maine, the individual congressional districts that compose the electoral College votes within Nebraska and within Maine can go to one candidate or another. So you can see a split where Maine goes three electoral College votes for Kamala Harris and one for Donald Trump. Nebraska could go I think it's five in Nebraska four or

five Nebraska three for one, one for the other. And basically the idea that the Founding fathers had was that we don't actually trust the entire citizenry to vote on questions of the utmost critical importance. They honestly had a very non egalitarian attitude in all of this. They thought, yes, we the founding fathers here, who are gentlemen, farmers, educated philosophers, statesmen, military officers, we should be able to decide who our senators will be. And by the way, the Senate is

very much copying a Roman institution, the Senate. It's perfect, you know, copy the idea of the Senate in Rome was the most dominant, most powerful, most important sort of governing body within the Roman Republic, governing, if you will advise body. And it was a body of not people who were elected to represent anybody. The Senators did not represent the people of Rome at all. It was just the council of the elders, the wisest. It was an

aristocratic council. It was just all the people with the most money who came from the older established families, and their decisions on things were what would ultimately become law. Us senators. It's a direct attempt to copy that, the idea of being, No, this is not pure egalitarian democracy that we wanted to establish. They let the people vote for the thing that was most localized and closest to them. They're member of the House of Representatives, and that was it.

And the idea being if you really don't understand an issue, why is your vote, why should your vote matter? If you are really not wise enough, experienced enough, old, whatever, why should your vote matter. And this is why I've always had this bugaboot. There's always these sort of value neutral ways that people push, well, everyone should vote, everyone should register to vote, get out there and vote, registered to vote. I don't know that that's necessarily a good idea.

How many people out there, total rumdums that you know who you know, are out there voting for Kamala Harris. There's this meme going around the internet, me and the Boys fighting in World War three because Taylor Swift told her stupid girlfriends to go vote for Kamala Harris. Like, yeah, that could be. So what I'm saying is, look, if you understand politics at a pretty high level and you

want to go vote, be my guest. But I'm not gonna necessarily sit here and pontificate that it's absolutely everyone's sacred duty. I don't know that that's true, and I don't think that's how the Framers would have thought of it. When we return the sheer insanity of voting for your daughter to have the right to kill your grandkid. Next, on the John Girardi Show, there's another one of these

weird Democrat ads out, these weird Kamala Harris ads. Following up on the strange ad where you have a group of women going into vote and they're in what it seems to be very much coded that they are in Republican territories. Everyone's wearing like patriotic stuff because Democrats aren't very patriotic. I guess, all right, I guess that's the

assumption here. And these women look across from each other and they nod knowingly, and then they decide to vote for Harris, and the ideas, oh, vote for Kamala Harris. It'll be our little secret. You don't have to you know, you don't have to vote for Donald Trump. You could just vote for Kamala Harris because you believe, you understand, she's what's right women. And it's very women themed. And they've now produced another one with a bunch of dude,

big dudes. One dude with a big old beard walking in to vote and his daughter is standing there saying hi, daddy, and he's looking over at her, looking protectively at his daughter, and decides to vote for Kamala Harris. And I'm apparently not seeing this as much, but in Florida, the non stop constant messaging for their Amendment four is basically voting to protect my daughter's rights. That's the message that's being pumped out. Protect your daughter's rights, protect your daughter's rights

to do what. Protecting my daughter's rights to abort my grandchildren. It's the unspoken premise, but that's the unspoken right being protected. But that's what we're talking about, protecting your daughter's right to abort your grandchild. It blows my mind the idea of running on abortion as a right. And I know what the response will be, the responsiblity. These Republican abortion bands are killing women. Let me just speak to that because I've actually dealt with this time and time again.

Essentially all of well not essentially, because it's very much quantifiable. There are fourteen states right now that have laws on the books restricting abortion with some kind of gestational age limit.

In all fourteen of them, all fourteen of them, there is language in the bill, language in the law very clearly allowing for treatment of life threatening conditions, whether that is pregnancy treatment, whether that is a post miscarriage i e. Post spontaneous abortion, which, by the way, all these laws that are restricting abortion are defining what abortion is to not mean miscarriage. So I don't care what you know that there's different medical terminology of what the word abortion.

This is one of the huge problems that's happening right now. In certain kinds of medical parlance, the word abortion means any ending of pregnancy, whether spontaneous or induced. It can mean a spontaneous abortion is what you and I would

commonly call, in common parlance, a miscarriage. So liberals will say Republicans are banning abortion access to treatment for an abortion, when what they're meaning is a miscarriage or an ectopic pregnancy, a situation where no one is intentionally trying to kill the child, or where the child has already died in the womb. We just need to end the pregnancy by

removing the body of the child from the woman. In all these states, they define abortion as killing of a living embry or fetus, and they have exceptions for life threatening or and I don't even know that it's an exception, as much as it's a clarification that this is a different kind of situation for say, an ectopic pregnancy, treatment removing the body of a child who has already expired, providing after care for someone who maybe has already had

an abortion. None of that is prohibited. This woman needed a DNC and that was prohibited by the state law. No, the procedures are not prohibited, So this is another aspect of this, all right. There are two kinds of surgical abortion procedures, a dn E and a DNC. DNE means dilation and curreitage. DNE means dilation and extraction. These are

the two methods for performing abortions in first and second trimesters. However, when a woman has suffered a miscarriage such that the child has died in her womb already, and we just need to remove the body of the child from the woman's uterus, because if the child is if the child's deceased body is left there, it can cause very serious

health problems. It can cause sepsis, infection, et cetera. Okay, so the procedure to remove the body of a child who has expired is actually the same exact procedure as to perform an abortion on a living organism. But obviously the two things are wildly different as far as the ethics involved. Performing one of those procedures on a child who is alive intentionally is an act of killing a living member of the human species, a living innocent member of the human species, i e. Murder to remove the

body of a child who has deceased is actually medical care. Okay, because if that doesn't happen, the woman could get very, very sick. This is a medical treatment. It is treating something that is wrong with the human body. Abortion doesn't do that. That's another thing to think about when people say abortion is healthcare. No, healthcare means doing something to fix something that's wrong with the human body or to maintain it in a state of health. Abortion is ending

a natural, healthy bodily process called pregnancy. It's not treating anything. It's an attempt to address a woman's financial insecurity or not being ready to have a baby or something like that. But it's not a medical reason. It's not a medical intervention. It's not a healthcare intervention. It's a kind of social intervention. It's kind of like the difference between you're a hockey player who got his nose broken and you need a

rhinoplasty versus Michael Jackson getting a rhinoplasty. Right, if you're a hot key player and you got a broken nose, you need your nose reconstruct us so you can breathe and stuff. Michael Jackson just wanted a new nose because he was a crazy person and thought his nose didn't look good. The rhinoplasty for Michael Jackson was not really a healthcare intervention. There was nothing health about it. It was just him wanting to look different. I won't say better.

They certainly didn't look better after those after all, those surgeries just looked weirder. But there wasn't. That wasn't a medical intervention. And in fact, that distinction is reflective in all kinds of things like public policy and insurance policies and stuff like that. Okay, if you break your nose, you know, a hockey player breaks his nose and wants to get a rhino, insurance might cover that. That's actual medical care. You have something really wrong with your nose,

you need to get it fixed. Insurance is not going to cover the Michael Jackson rhinoplasty, right, And that's why when people make an argument abortion is healthcare, they're really making a very distinct kind of argument. It's not them just saying abortion is good. They're saying no abortion should be covered by insurance. Abortion should be funded through public insurance plans. Abortion should have this kind of status rather

than that kind of status. Those of us who say it's not healthcare, it's not just us saying it's bad in a different way. It's making a very distinct argument. So all of these state laws allow for people to receive treatment after a miscarriage, They allow people to receive treatment for an ectopic pregnancy. They allow premature deliveries for a pregnancy where something is seriously threatening a woman's life

or health. I know of tons of pro life obgyns who live in these states who have felt no restriction on how they practice based on those state laws. It's not rocket science but a cog. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists hates these pro life laws so much that they refuse to provide guidance to physicians about here's what you can do, here's what you can't do. Here's what these state laws say, this is what you do.

They've had to rely on the attorney attorneys general of these states to write to these hospital systems to tell them to spell out, this is what you can do, this is what you cannot do. I am loath to come to this conclusion, but I start to genuinely believe, and other people smarter than I am, who know this stuff even more in depth than I do, agree with this assessment. I think a COG and groups of pro abortion physicians, pro abortion public policy people, they almost want

these women to die. They would rather almost maybe I'm overstating it, but they would rather not provide guidance, let there be chaos so that these pro life laws get discredited. I'm here to tell you none of these cases where women have died because they got a delay in receiving care after an abortion in a state where abortion was restricted in none of those states would they have been would state law have prohibited them from getting care. It's very clear in the Georgia law with those two women

who died in Georgia. It's very clear in the Texas law with this one case from Texas. Oh, by the way, this one case in Texas that just got reported on the last two weeks. It was a hospital that had had other women die there from delays in care from way before abortion was outlawed in Texas. Maybe it's just a medical malpractice problem at these hospitals. Maybe it's just

hospitals that are not taking their patients seriously enough. When they're presenting signs, you know, initial signs of going into sepsis, that could also be it, but that's not dealt with. And it could also just be that the abortion pill is pretty dangerous. There's a five percent chance you're gonna have an incomplete abortion. Women aren't really given enough information about that. They're not really told what to do, They're not given follow up appointments of these abortion providers. The

abortion pill itself is dangerous. That's why these women are dying. That's why they're going into sepsis. Because the abortion pill allows for an incomplete abortion, meaning that there's a risk of you getting infection, you getting sepsis, you dying. So preserving the right of your daughters to do that, preserving your right of daughter or your daughters to kill your grandchildren. It's an insane way of pushing this. It is built

on so many lies. When we return, My final prediction for election night next on The John's Roady Show, my final prediction for the twenty twenty four election, I think Kamala's gonna win. I don't know. I just have this sinking feeling. I feel like Trump's winning, but not by enough. I feel like I'm gonna look like a total putts if I say Trump's gonna win and he doesn't. I don't know. I don't think he's gonna win. I think it's too close, and I know that whether under I

think undercover of law, Democrats do enough shenanigans. I don't know. I don't think he's gonna win. But what I do do know is that the best election night coverage will be tomorrow six to eight pm John Girardi Show, and then eight pm onward Me and Trevor breaking all the election stuff down throughout the state, throughout the country. Don't miss it tomorrow night on Power Talk. This is John Girardi for the John Girardi Show.