Equal Protection Under The Law V. Providing For The Comon Defense

According to an Associated Press article in the state of Georgia, Democratic lawmakers vow to repeal a law requiring that voters have a valid drivers license or state ID. Their complaint is that the $35 it cost to obtain either of these is equivalent to a poll tax.

In October a federal judge blocked the law for just that reason. There is a precedent in the 1966 case Harper v. The Virginia Board of Elections. It is a lousy precedent put in place by activist judges who stated that "Notions of what constitutes equal treatment for purposes of the Equal Protection Clause do change". Fine if that's so, then it is up to the democratic process and not unelected federal judges to determine what the clause means. If the Justices arbitrary choose a meaning according to their own judgment instead of going by the original intend then they violate the Constitution by taking power reserved to the legislative branch. The James Hamilton warned us against just such a case in #78 of the Federalist Papers with these words.

It equally proves, that though individual oppression may now and then proceed from the courts of justice, the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from that quarter; I mean so long as the judiciary remains truly distinct from both the legislature and the Executive.

Despite what the deciding justices said about the notion for equal treatment purpose of the equal protection clause changing the original intent does not. The original intent was to stop the Jim Crow laws that were designed to keep blacks as second class citizens. If the Supreme Court had not misapplied the clause in the first place then these later Justices would not have to cover up their predecessors racism by muttering nonsense. The equal protection simply means that every citizen no matter their race must be treated equal by the law. The poll tax which had a grandfather clause did not treat everyone equal because if your grandfather voted you were exempt. The grandparents of people of color did not vote since it was illegal at that time.

The purpose of the law is to stop illegal aliens from voting which protects the legal citizens of the United States from foreign influence. The drivers license fee applies to everyone equally. If it was not equal it would be the drivers license fee and not the voter law that was unconstitutional. An argument could be made that it is excessive and so prejudices against the poor, but that argument can be used against the legal system as a whole and is best left up to the legislative branch to resolve. Canada tried to stop poor Chinese from legally immigrating to Canada by charging them $50-$500 a head in the 19th & 20th Century and it failed because the Chinese were willing to make the sacrifice. So if you want to vote you will scrape up the $35 to get a drivers license or state ID.

I went to the Georgia Department of Driver Services and looked up the fees. The fee for a Georgia driver license is $20 for five years or 4 dollars a year or $35 for ten years or $3.50 a year. It is the same cost to renew it. I also found they have a Georgia Identification Card for Voting Purposes Only which has no fee if qualified. Looks like this issue is fraudulent and for reasons know only to themselves the reporter was incompetent, biased or both. The judge who made the decision in October is either an activist, badly misinformed, or both.