When you’ve lived among like-minded neighbors on, say, the East Side of Milwaukee for a long time, voting is a friendly occasion. Folks down the street work at the polls every election. It may be a secret ballot, but there’s no real secret how most people you know are voting. I’m sure it’s much the same out in Waukesha.
It got a little nastier a few years back when grim-faced outside poll watchers started showing up in suits glowering at the voting riffraff to make sure all the latest Republican obstacles to voting were being strictly enforced. That’s when I got scolded for unconsciously committing a political crime: I’d actually forgotten I had a political button on my jacket. I don’t even remember what it said now. I wasn’t campaigning. I was just being an American citizen in a democracy.
That’s why I was happy to read about the brutal questioning from the U.S. Supreme Court about an extreme Minnesota law banning “political” clothing or buttons from polling places. I was amused the toughest questions came from conservative justices. I remember when conservatives used to hate free speech—especially when it came from long-haired war protesters wearing American flag patches on the seat of their torn jeans. In the closed minds on the right, freedom of speech was a Constitutional loophole that allowed radicals to burn the flag, publish pornography and support political ideas that made their blood boil.
Now suddenly, right-wing, Republican-appointed justices like Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch sounded like “card-carrying members of the ACLU”—the insult the first George Bush used to smear that notorious anarchist, Michael Dukakis. What’s behind this new-found conservative attraction to free speech? It seems Republicans have their own radical extremists to defend these days. Neo-Nazis. The Ku Klux Klan. It’s no surprise the case before the U.S. Supreme Court riling up conservatives didn’t involve anti-war protesters or civil rights groups like Black Lives Matter.
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Nope. It was a white guy who tried to vote wearing a yellow Tea Party t-shirt with the symbol of the Gadsden Flag created in 1775 during the Revolutionary War. That’s the one with a coiled rattlesnake ready to strike, warning, “Don’t Tread on Me.” For good measure, the guy also wore a button saying “Please ID Me,” even though Minnesota doesn’t have a voter ID law. Here’s the thing, though: Republicans may not have cared about the First Amendment until they wanted to be free to express their own obnoxious, in-your-face threats, but they’re starting to realize the Bill of Rights protects all Americans. So, good for Alito and Gorsuch for demonstrating just how absurd it is for a democracy to pass laws dictating how its citizens must dress on voting day.
You Know Us by Our Numbers
The Supreme Court decided 25 years ago that states could ban electioneering and distribution of campaign literature within 100 feet of polling places, and most states have such restrictions. But that’s very different from a mandatory dress code for voters that demands they hide any association with any group in their lives with any political point of view, whether it’s the AFL-CIO or the local Chamber of Commerce. Guess what? Voting is political and so are voters.
Alito and Gorsuch quickly tied the law’s defenders into knots by asking about the legality of other slogans and movements familiar to any politically engaged citizen. What about someone wearing a Colin Kaepernick jersey? Is that illegal on election day? Or an old Reagan/Bush ’84 shirt? What about more contemporary slogans like “Make America Great Again” or #MeToo? Or simple words or phrases like “Resist” or “Restrain Government Spending?” Can we really outlaw certain words in America on election day?
Alito asked Daniel Rogan of the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office if a shirt with a rainbow flag would be permitted. Rogan’s answer was painful: “A shirt with a rainbow flag? No, it would…yes, it would be…it would be permitted unless there was…unless there was an issue on the ballot that…that related somehow to…to gay rights.” So it’s not illegal to support gay rights unless there is a political issue or candidates on the ballot that could actually threaten gay rights (as is usually the case these days). Never mind that inclusion of a rainbow coalition of diverse populations in our democracy is fundamentally American.
At another point, Rogan said a t-shirt bearing the words of the Second Amendment would be banned because of political controversy, but the words of the First Amendment would not—even though that was precisely the political controversy he was arguing before the Supreme Court!
It’s absurd—and impossible—to try to cleanse elections of political opinions when that’s what they’re all about. Every decent American now knows the horrific consequences of failing to energetically participate in our elections, but you won’t need slogans or t-shirts to recognize us in November. You’ll know us by our numbers.
