One of the measures Santa Ana voters will be called up to decide this election is Measure DD – whether or not to allow non-citizens to vote in Santa Ana municipal elections.
It’s a serious question. Allowing non-Americans – foreigners – to vote in American elections is a weighty matter that goes to the heart of the idea of citizenship and what it means to be an American citizen.
Measure DD’s proponents owe voters a serious discussion. Instead, what they provide are ideology, empty slogans – and an embarrassing display of their feeble grasp of American history.
Non-Citizen Voting Is Not The Next Civil Rights Battle
The progressive Left has a tendency to paint whatever is at the top of their political agenda as “the next civil rights battle.” It’s an attempt to perform a moral authority transfusion from women’s suffrage and the Civil Rights Movement into whatever entitlement they’re pushing.
Councilman Johnathan Hernandez, for example, explicitly attempted this linkage at a city council meeting last year.
Letting foreigners vote in American elections is the opposite of those past movements…because the purpose is allowing foreigners to vote in American elections.
Women’s suffrage was about securing the right to vote for American citizens who happened to be women.
The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was about securing the right to vote in reality for American citizens who happened to be black.
In other words, those movements were about securing the right to vote for women and African-Americans because it was their due as citizens.
Measure DD is the opposite of that. It would extend a privilege of American citizenship – indeed, a defining characteristic of American citizenship – to people who aren’t American citizens.
If Measure DD passes, a citizen of a foreign country could arrive in Santa Ana 30 days before an election, register to vote, and cast a ballot in Santa Ana city elections without having any ties to the community, or any understanding of the issues or even what the basis of our system of government is. And that vote would negate the vote of a Santa Ana resident who is a citizen.
Opposing such a measure is not anti-immigrant, or a judgment on the moral worth of non-citizens living in Santa Ana or elsewhere. No one doubts that illegal immigrants came here seeking a better life. Opposing Measure DD is a defense of the traditional understanding of citizenship. To oppose Measure DD is to oppose draining citizenship of meaning.
Measure DD Is Not About “Taxation Without Representation”
According to Measure DD proponents – like Councilman Hernandez or progressive special interests like VietRise and the Harbor Institute – not allowing non-citizens to vote amounts to “taxation without representation” because illegal immigrants pay taxes.
This line of reasoning only proves these young leftists have a poor grasp of our nation’s history – as if “taxation without representation” is a slogan they vaguely remember from their high school US History class.
Or they see it as clever manipulation of a storied rallying cry of the Revolution which they know has meaning to voters who instinctively resist extending the franchise to foreigners.
Neither explanation is reassuring. And either way, Measure DD proponents’ appropriation of the slogan serves to illustrate their historical ignorance.
When the colonists of the Revolutionary Era objected to “taxation without representation” – i.e. being taxed by Parliament without having representation in Parliament – they were protesting that their rights as British subjects were being traduced. It wasn’t the taxation per se (although they did oppose the particular taxes being levied) but their belief that their rights as Englishmen – as citizens – were being violated by Parliament.
That is a far cry from the reasoning of Measure DD proponents. Their logic is that the payment of taxes of any kind in Santa Ana entitles that person paying the taxes to cast a ballot in Santa Ana municipal elections (although under Measure DD’s provisions, a non-citizen need not be a taxpayer. They need only have a pulse and claim to live in Santa Ana).
It’s not difficult to see where this logic leads. If payment of taxes to Santa Ana constitutes a moral claim to the right to vote in Santa Ana elections, then anyone who owns property or shops in Santa Ana should also be allowed to cast a ballot for mayor and city council.
One might wonder if this has occurred to Measure DD proponents – but that would assume they take the matter of “taxation without representation” seriously. They don’t. For them, it’s just a slogan they hope will resonate with voters who associate it with the American Revolution. And it’s an especially cynical ploy since the twisted view of Councilman Hernandez and the face-mask wearing radicals at VietRise, The Harbor Institute and ChispaOC toward the Revolution is it was a racist war waged by white settler colonialists to preserve slavery.
Misguided Historical Precedents
Another trope trotted out by Measure DD proponents is that during the 19th Century, some American communities allowed noncitizen voting.
So what?
“We used to do it” is hardly a compelling rationale. While those same communities were allowing foreigners to vote in their elections, many were also denying the vote to women and Blacks. In fact, during the era to which Measure DD proponents reach back for moral justification, women and Blacks were commonly denied the vote on a de jure and de facto basis. They also hanged people for offenses that would barely merit incarceration today and allowed child labor.
Do the bright minds at VietRise want to resurrect those policies, as well? This species of reasoning is worse than useless, and one suspects even the radicals pushing Measure DD understand as much.
Measure DD Is About Building Political Power – For Radical Special Interest Groups
But they are radical revolutionaries with the concomitant view that truth is shaped by power, and that securing and applying power is the end of politics. Look at the websites and communications of these groups: they’re replete with references to “power” and “building power” but nary a reference to the purpose of American government, which is securing our freedoms and natural rights.
But this should surprise no one, because that is what Measure DD is about: “building power” – and not for non-citizens but for radical special interests like VietRise, ChispaOC and the Harbor Institute and the deep-pocketed progressive organizations and individuals who finance them. They’re really talking about building power for themselves by extending the franchise to groups of people whose votes they believe they can exploit and manipulate and control to advance their own ideological agendas.
A final point: it says something that Measure DD’s presence on the ballot is not due to any popular movement by Santa Ana residents. It is on the ballot because the City Council’s ideological majority exercised its political power to place it in the ballot.
It’s telling that VietRise and ChispaOC and The Harbor Institute – which constantly remind us they are on the side of “the people” – did not turn to the people to qualify this radical measure for the ballot, but instead to their political allies on the city council.
