Republic, not a democracy = failed argument
Mike Lee makes up his own definitions.
It’s very common among Republicans these days, as the push for voter rights and greater access to the polls accelerate, to claim that we are not a democracy, but instead we are republic. Specifically, they like to call it a “constitutional republic.”
Utah Senator Mike Lee, last October, actually put a large op-ed [1] on his own page expounding on this very concept and in the course of it strayed well beyond the definitions to support his own her thanposition, rather than the actual definitions that we know to be a fact in political science.
According to the dictionary online, the definition of a republic is narrow: a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch. [2]
For reference, China is a republic, North Korea is a republic. Both also have constitutions. Would any rational person say that they are actually truly representative governments?
We have a constitution, but the definition of a republic says nothing about a constitution. It also specifically doesn’t say anything about democracy, but it does say that the representatives are elected. Apparently therein lies the rub. Who exactly gets to decide who are our representatives? Who are the ones who get to vote?
The trajectory of democracy in the United States has been of gradually expanding the franchise to include more citizens. In early America only white property men could vote. This was later expanded to allow all white men to vote. After the Civil War the Constitution was amended to allow black men to vote. We then later expanded the ability of voting to women in the early 20th century.
This expansion of the franchise has received the constant push back since the 1870s with the implementation of Jim Crow across the South and voter restrictions in many states recently. The goal is to make it more difficult to vote to suppress turnout and energize a particular segment of the population to be the sole determiners of who represents us in our representative government.
Mike Lee, in his screed, also references “super-majority” in the Senate as a feature of our “balance of power” in government. He does admit it is so “under current rules” while ignoring the fact that those rules are made up and NOT in the Constitution, or was any such super majority cited by the writers of the Federalist Papers [3], the premier source for what the framers wanted in the Constitution.
Lee boldly (and baldly) states:
democracy itself is not the goal. The goal is freedom, prosperity, and human flourishing
Really? The contradiction is that we cannot really have freedom without democracy! China is a great example of prosperity and (relative) human flourishing, yet certainly not with actual freedom.
The ironic statement in Lee’s essay is this:
one political party is threatening to undermine one of the republican checks included in the Constitution
He refers to discussions by Democrats to add justices to the Supreme Court whil ignoring that Republicans undermined the checks in our system with obstruction in order to pack the court themselves. Delaying a right under the Constitution of a sitting president to appoint a justice to fill a vacancy (using arguments of sophistry) to enable the next president of your party to do so is itself court packing!
He also claims that the Supreme Court is the bastion which strikes down laws when they violate the Constitution. Yet, time and time again we see SCOTUS wade into the legislative sphere to make up arguments for striking down laws which do NOT violate the Constitution. The most blatant example was the court invalidating elements of the Voting Rights Act, a law passed in a widely bipartisan vote under a Republican president.
One last thought. Lee also says:
There is no reason New Yorkers and South Carolinians and Hawaiians have to have the exact same health care or education or welfare or tax policies
Why? He makes this statement as if axiomatic, when it really isn’t. Why shouldn’t access to education or health care be the same from state to state? Similarly with voting. Why should an American’s access to these things vary based on one’s zip code? Especially voting, which is a right!
[1] https://www.lee.senate.gov/2020/10/of-course-we-re-not-a-democracy
