I guess Massachusetts is not the only state where the forces of liberalism, corporate welfare. government hacks, and all-powerful judges can deny the people their right to vote. Paul Jacob tells the story of his fight for freedom in Oklahoma.
Then, the various forces of big government that had worked so hard to block the vote, joined by a who’s who of corporate CEOs and the heads of energy companies and banks (can you say “daddy welfare”?), challenged the petition. And the Oklahoma Supreme Court came to their aid, providing a much different standard for residency than in the past. The judges now equated residency with a “permanent home.”
How permanent was “permanent”? One petition circulator, who moved to Oklahoma in September of 2005 and was still living there in July of the following year, was ruled not to be a resident.
The court thus struck enough signatures from the 300,000 gathered to deny the people of Oklahoma a vote on the spending cap measure.
Jacob and two others were arrested for the crime of gathering petition signatures to allow the voters of Oklahoma redress of their grievances before their elected representatives. And the only reason they were even susceptible to the criminal penalty was because of an illegal campaign of harassment to which authorities turned a blind eye.
Sounds an awful lot like the fight to defend marriage in Massachusetts against an activist court, pandering legislators, and a deep-pocketed lobby that know they would lose a free vote by the state’s citizens.
Ironic that our democratic freedoms are most under attack not by conservatives or even in Guantanamo, but in the bastions of liberalism. But then, let’s also point out that political corruption and a grasping at power does not know any ideology but its own, whether liberal or conservative. Still, I believe we see it more often among the former than the latter.
[via Instapundit]
Well, the counties and towns where I grew up were controlled by a conservative GOP mafia for decades, and its hold on power has only recently and tenuously been broken, though I cannot say much for them that have broken it other than to encourage brokenness.
And there are liberal GOP mafias and conservative Democrat mafias (of course, the latter controlled the South for decades upon decades, as well as some northern urban areas).
Having been the head of a conservative/libertarian-ish group in law school during the Reagan years, and watching many people I knew well go from principled thoughtful people to people happy to pig out at the banquet table of power with the sweeping re-election in 1984 (really, the transformation from 1984 over the next couple of years was stunning), I’ve since learned never to want landslides for anyone, lest they claim a “mandate”. Unfortunately, we’ve since discovered that politicians will claim a mandate when they get about 50% of the vote. Oh well.
Power corrupts. All movements get corrupted once they’ve settled happily into power. They need to be slapped hard once in power. Each and every one of them, especially the ones we support. I think a good Catholic charism in politics is to put that into practice – being harsher on our own sides power-hungry folks before our opponents.