Hamilton Speaks Today  by Tom Reynolds

Even before he had a Broadway Play about him, Alexander Hamilton was considered a really smart guy.  Amongst other things, his ‘Federalist Letters’ (along with James Madison and John Jay) helped secure passage of the Constitution.

On Wednesday, SCOPE wrote about the unconstitutional attempts to deny the American people the right to vote for the presidential candidate of their choice.  In a Letter from Phocion to the Considerate Citizens of New York On the Politics of the Day, Hamilton warned of something that sounds eerily familiar to what is currently happening. 

While he wrote this of the dangers of legislatures disenfranchising people, the principle also applies against government officials disenfranchising voters.  And when we are not allowed to vote for the candidate of our choice because he was illegally removed from the ballot, we are, in effect, disenfranchised.

Alexander Hamilton wrote:

Nothing is more common for a free people, in times of heat and violence, to gratify momentary passions, by letting into the government, principles and precedents which afterwords prove fatal to themselves.  Of this kind is the doctrine of disqualification, disenfranchisement and banishment by acts of the legislature.  The dangerous consequences of this are manifest.   If the legislature can disenfranchise any number of citizens at pleasure by general descriptions, it may soon confine all the votes to a small number of partisans, and establish an aristocracy or an oligarchy; if it may banish at discretion all those whom particular circumstances render obnoxious, without hearing or trial, no man can be safe, nor know when he may be the innocent victim of a prevailing faction.  The name of liberty applied to such a government would be a mockery of common sense. 

I wonder how many people seeing the play ‘Hamilton’ are appalled by current events?  Alexander Hamilton would be!