Repealing the 19th?

Yes, a movement exists

This is part of a series I’m writing analyzing the Constitution of the United States. You can find the start of the series here.

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I’m not opposed to women voting. I am a woman and I vote. But….

The very fact that so many American women voted for Kamala Harris when they could have voted for Micky Mouse or someone in a vegetative state says modern American women might not be mentally suited for voting in this era…and this is coming from—the last I checked my private bits—a woman.

And no, I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I’m 0 for 3 in voting for him. Not everything is about him and he wouldn’t be in office if either party would mount an alternative candidate who was at least not in a coma. He looks good compared to “the basketful of deplorables”, the guy who kept getting lost on stage and trying to shake hands with a flagpole, and the woman who often gave speeches that made the flagpole look intelligent.

If you’ve been on the Internet in the past few years, you may be aware that some people support the repeal of the 19th Amendment. We’ve had the female franchise for over a century and this movement started to pick up steam when Hillary Clinton ran for president. Why?

Analysis from the 2016 election showed that if only women had voted, Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton would have won the popular vote by a large majority. On the flip side, this same statistic was drawn with only men voting, and Republican candidate Donald Trump would have won by a far greater margin than he did.

A similar analysis from the 2020 election showed a disturbingly similar pattern. Most women voted for Joe Biden while more men voted for Trump.

Worse, most women voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and most men voted for Trump. While Hillary Clinton was annoying and deeply corrupt as well as a product of nepotism, she at least had a brain (well, not when she was calling one-third of the country “deplorables” but she could occasionally mount a decent argument for her platform). Would we have gotten into a dozen wars under her presidency? Probably. Might the economy have tanked as she took over the medical care industry and relegated doctors to the status of poorly paid civil servants? Very likely. Would she have run roughshod over civil rights, especially during the Covid era? Absolutely. Would someone have assassinated her just to stop her annoying voice? It would be tempting!

But she could at least communicate without drooling.

Biden was clearly in cognitive decline during the 2020 election and we never really knew who was in charge of the country during his presidency. Whoever that was got us affiliated with two wars with global implications and gifted us with monumental inflation. Kamala Harris, a prime example of why we disparage people who sex their way into positions of power, was probably at least aware of the unconstitutional cabal running the country.

Whether she was aware that letting someone other than the elected President conduct the duties of the presidential office was unconstitutional will have to wait for a future trial.

Her entire campaign consisted of promising more of the same and suggesting proposals the country can’t economically or politically afford. And women voted for her overwhelmingly.

The Solution to Insanity?

This thrice and expanding insanity sparked a gender debate in which those who believe in rational voting began to suggest repealing the 19th Amendment. If women are going to vote emotionally (because a woman is running or because they don’t like Donald Trump) rather than intelligently, maybe they shouldn’t vote. Hence, #repealthe19th became a hashtag often used to mock feminists and stir an already boiling political cauldron. Now the trend is back again, but it seems to be more serious for some. Why is this happening?

Electoral Politics

The most obvious reason points to the fact that the two main parties keep running (how to put this civilly?) less than stellar candidates at a time when the country is in serious trouble economically, governmentally, and culturally. I didn’t vote for Donald Trump, or the other three bozos, but it was clear to me that he was a better choice in all three of those matchups than his opponents, particularly Biden and Harris.

But American women voted for three deeply flawed candidates anyway. I’m not saying Donald Trump isn’t a deeply flawed candidate, but his governance (even during Covid) was demonstrably better than Biden’s, who was clearly suffering the early stages of dementia in 2020. And Kamala Harris — really, seriously. It was laughable when Hillary’s supporters proclaimed her the most qualified candidate in decades, but she was running against a man who had never held political office. It was mind-numbingly insane to claim Kamala was qualified for the position since she’d publicly failed at every initiative the cabal gave her while Vice President, the first adult job she’s had that didn’t rely on Willy Brown’s admiration of her, uh, assets.

Women voting for her shows a cognitive dissonance problem. When the country is on the verge of collapse after two decades of reckless spending, congressional dysfunction, and presidents who seem unfamiliar with the Bill of Rights, we really need a president who is reform-minded and perhaps has done the job for four years before. Trump, Covid excepted, did a pretty good job in that term (remember the economy?) and his handling of Covid was better than the Biden cabal’s, which might have included Kamala. Yet, women keep voting for presidential candidates who promise more of the same…when they’re not falling asleep during a presidential debate.

I know a lot of the reason women vote for idiots is that the Democrats keep running idiots, but if you can’t figure out to ignore your party and vote for someone more competant, maybe you shouldn’t be voting. Maybe, after the last three elections, we should be suspicious of my gender’s ability to vote rationally.

Looking at the Facts

Some argue repealing the 19th would completely undermine democratic and fair elections. When entire graveyards in New Jersey and Illinios vote in elections, I’m not sure you can make a case for democracy. When illegal aliens can get REAL IDs and then become eligible to vote in elections, our elections begin to look rigged. When courts ignore evidence of fraud, the concept of electoral fairness becomes a joke.

I’m not saying there was fraud enough to effect the outcome of the 2020 election, but that the courts simply ignored hundreds of afidavits alleging fraud should concern all of us. And, how did that possible fraud work out for us? Did we get a better president through those mechanizations.

I would submit we didn’t.

By noting that a greater majority of women tend to vote for Democrat and progressive candidates, more conservative voters also point out that women tend to ignore facts and vote according to their feelings. “Kamala makes me feel better about myself,” a friend of mine told me. That’s not a reason to vote for her. My Labrador Retriever makes me feel better about myself, but I wouldn’t vote for her for president. It is not misogyny (uh, still a female) to point out that since women gained the franchise, we seem less able to govern ourselves as a nation.

I don’t think the problem is the female franchise. I’m one of many women I know who vote according to facts and try not to bring our feelings into the voting booth. I don’t fall for the promises of free avocado toast for breakfast and taxpayer supported college tuition for life. I’ll be looking at how the Progressive Amendments, taken as a whole, have harmed American governance in unanticipated ways.

For now, let’s just look at one example of failed female franchise.

A Paragon of Incompetance

Jacinda Ardern served as prime minister of New Zealand from October 2017 to 2023 and served in NZ’s Parliament for nearly a decade before that. A narrow victory in 2017 was followed by a landslide win in October 2020, amid the Covid crisis. That’s right, her grossly overwrought response to Covid inexplicably boosted her popularity, especially after she took full advantage to seem compassionate after the massacre of 51 people and the injuring of others at two mosques in Christchurch in March 2019. Savvy leaders tend to gather support if they are seen handling a national tragedy well. The pundits lauded George W. Bush for his response to 9/11, for example.

Adhern remains a paragon of feminine virtue to the international Woke brigade after her opposition to free speech at the UN.

But now, she’s stepped down from her prime minister role, claiming she wanted to finally find the time to marry her fiancé, Clarke Gayford, father of her young daughter, and admitting she no longer had “enough in the tank to do [the job] justice.”

Yeah, her decision to step down had nothing to do with her and her party’s slide in the polls. Like most socialists, cognitive dissonance sets in when their grand plans don’t work out because people resist their authoritarianism. Unable to cope, they often seek an escape to a sanctuary.

Luckily for Kiwis, Ms. Ardern chose the escape route. Though it would be a mistake to think replacement Prime Minister Chris Hipkins will be a champion of liberty. As New Zealand's health overlord, he competed with Dan Andrews of Victoria Australia for most outrageous totalitarianism during Covid lockdowns. Expect more of the same from him. Big government. Green delusions. Sucking up to China. Lockdowns should anyone develop the sniffles.

Ms. Arden’s plans centered around housing the poor. Fittingly for the ex-president of the International Union of Socialist Youth, she put poverty and homelessness down to “a blatant failure of capitalism.” She promised in 2017 to build 100,000 new affordable houses for first-time home buyers over the decade ahead. You can look up KiwiBuild. Even some New Zealanders saw this was a disaster in the making. As of today, two years shy of the deadline, only 2,335 have been built and New Zealander homelessness is worse than ever.

Meanwhile, crime rose to the level of an election issue, inflation increased, interest rates rose, the economic outlook seems unpromising, and more people are leaving the country than are coming in. Moreover, the Ardern administration decided to tax the emissions from both ends of cows and sheep in a country with the highest per capita population of sheep and second highest per capita of cattle in the world.

She apparently didn’t want to win the last election since she left the country in worse shape than when she ascended to power.

There have been other women in political history who did fine jobs as leaders of their respective countries, but Ardern’s exit from the ranks of world political leaders, leaving a shambles of constitutional freedom and human rights in her wake, provides an opportunity for us to reconsider the passage of the 19th amendment.

I know, New Zealand isn’t covered by the US Constitution. She’s just an example.

Voting Isn’t a Right

I pointed this out when we looked at the 16th Amendment. There is no intrinsic right to vote enumerated in the Constitution. Eligibility was left to individual states. Voting is neither a civil right nor a God-given natural right but an earned privilege to be granted under certain circumstances or after an individual has satisfied various specified criteria such as attaining the age of his majority, being a male, a property owner, not convicted of a felony, etc.

This grows from the original conception of the United States as a voluntary alliance of individually sovereign states, each ceding some portion of its autonomy to the new federal government while reserving all other rights to itself. The 10th Amendment explicitly states this: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

The federal government didn’t create the states. The states created the federal government. That should make all the difference in the world, but somehow it no longer does.

I think it’s fitting Wyoming — a tough frontier enclave — was the first place to give women the vote. Facing hardship, wrangling cattle, possibly fighting off Indians, women of the frontier were tougher than most men in the eastern states. They couldn’t afford to get emotional because their lives were challenging. Many a widowed frontier woman continued on in her husband’s stead. They EARNED the vote.

Was that true for the other women living much softer lives in the east? Was it wise to give the vote to people who often had no stake in the decisions their candidates would make?

One signal suggesting this concern arose during the suffragette movement was the cause’s abandonment during the Civil War. The country had more important things on its mind, such as the survival of the nation. Apparently, women's suffrage wasn’t deemed important enough to consider during that turbulent era. In fact, it didn’t come up for a vote for nearly 50 years, until after the 1st World War was over. Interestingly, no one advocated for putting women in the fighting military in order to win the right to vote. Women balked at even being considered for fire brigade in their local towns.

No, the 19th Amendment came into being as part of the Progressive Amendments. There is considerable resemblance in the creation of the 18th and 19th amendments. Both came about in a long-delayed backlash against the great wave of immigration, which would soon end with the Immigration Act of 1924, effectively shutting down legal immigration until 1965. Prohibition was meant to target the men of suspect ethnic groups (Irish, Italians, Germans) who held legendary fondness for fermented grape, hops, and grain, and those merchant urban Jews who readily sold it to them. While the 18th Amendment was simply punitive, the 19th was passive-aggressive, meant to dilute the immigrant vote, and keep the Anglo-Americans from being out-voted in the short-term since their wives’ votes effectively doubled their voting power.

There is no logical comparison between the extension of the franchise to African-Americans via the the 15th Amendment and women's suffrage. Once legal slavery was abolished there was no philosophical or historical reason not to allow black men to vote. Many of them had fought heroically for their freedom in the Union Army and free black men had been able to vote in northern states since the Revolution. By contrast, there was no historical precedent for allowing women to vote on a national level.

Rejecting the superficial arguments offered by Jane Addams and her ilk, many women opposed female suffrage. There was even a National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage.

The electorate has doubled but it has also become widely skewed, adding new value via the phenomenon of unmarried, sexually exploited women of a certain age who fell for the siren song of "feminism" and the "sexual revolution" and are now approaching retirement from a pointless career, while nursing grudges against males for their barren, empty, childless lives. Foolishly seduced by the Sexual Revolution into providing easy sexual access to their bodies in the name of "empowerment" and by the feminists who lied that they could "have it all," they’re now angry and resentful for their meaningless lives and show it by voting a “blue no matter who” ticket, looking to the federal government to be a surrogate lover, husband, and offspring.

The results are startlingly bad!

Government, most especially the federal government, is now the employer of last resort for the otherwise unemployable. Many women consider it the sugar daddy of first resort. The nuclear family is on life support, the military is ineffective, police forces are cut to the bare bones and officers run at the first encounter with a raging street madman, and raging misandry is common from "fourth wave" feminists.

Young men have dropped out of the academy and the work force after realizing the deck is stacked against them. They’ve also withdrawn from society into video games, drugs, and pornography, punctuated by occasional outbursts of random, horrific violence as Woke society has become intolerable. History shows disempowered men eventually take to the streets. Will female cops and transgendered social workers be able to stop them?

If your answer is “yes, why not”, you may not be smart enough to vote.

That’s a whole lot of imbalance building up to a dam burst. Nature always corrects an imbalance, sometimes violently. Based on current voting patterns, if women didn't vote, there would never be another Democrat president. Would that mean men would feel like coming out into society again?

That would be a good thing!

I’m not saying that we should repeal the 19th Amendment. I’m saying there are cogent arguments for doing so that we ought to look at. I’m also saying that until women are willing to take the same risks in society men take, they might not have enough skin in the game to allow them to vote.

For example, I’d show up for the fire brigade if it was a requirement for voting. Ladies, how many of you would?