Medieval historian Beth Allison Barr recently wrote:
Current contributing editor and American historian John Haas sent along this response:
I hear this sentiment from a lot of people, who just assume a blanket rule barring convicted felons from holding office would be an unambiguously good thing, hence, a no-brainer. My answer to that can be stated in two words: Nelson Mandela.
If the big bright idea you’re touting would have prevented Nelson Mandela from being president, you need to take a time out and just reflect for awhile. I don’t believe any of this nonsense about “justice being weaponized” over the past several years, but if you wanted investigations and trials to get ginned up all over America to knock candidates out of the running, this is a perfect prescription.
Here’s another reason to reject the idea: the Constitution. Not in some brainless rote deference sense, but in a real understanding of its priorities and imperatives sense.
The Constitution’s eligibility rules for president are infamously minimal: You have to be a citizen, have resided here for 14 years, and be 35 years old. (Requirements for senators and representatives are the same with lower limits; for Supreme Court justices, even more minimal: there are none.)
The Constitution’s gossamer thin formal qualifications for office are determined by one over-riding imperative: democracy. Every formal rule for eligibility removes that much power of choice from the people. The framers wanted to put that power in the people’s hands.
If the people are capable of self-government, then they are capable of weighing a candidate’s fitness. (If we say “But they aren’t,” well, what are we doing then?)
If the people don’t care about a felony conviction–because they think the system miscarried, or the charges are bogus, or they think even a legitimate conviction irrelevant to carrying out the duties of the office–they should be allowed to exercise that judgment. Or so the framers thought.
I appreciate Dr. Haas’s points. But the fact that we don’t have direct election of the president, and that our founders specifically did NOT trust even the very limited franchise at their time with a direct election undermines his argument.
–Paul Thompson
I don’t see that, Paul. Correcting each of those–which to some degree we have though not fully–would be to move further in the direction of democracy first charted by the Constitution (the widest franchise in the world at the time). Formally prohibiting the people from choosing to vote for a felon when they feel there are are other considerations that over-ride that condition, Is to move away from democracy.