A letter
to the editor last week in the Baton
Rouge Advocate by Democrat state Rep. Randal Gaines
stumbled about in trying to defend the recent legal change allowing many felons
to vote. I think he filed it as a response to recent my column
about how Democrats had bamboozled Republicans into supporting that bad bill,
which does nothing to encourage reform of or overall political participation by
the felon population, but does give Democrats disproportionately the chance to
harvest more votes in elections.
That Gaines, willfully or otherwise, remains
ignorant of the literature that shows no link between greater civic involvement
and having the right to vote among felons showed clearly in the letter, which falsely
alleged that to oppose the law wouldn’t help to prevent recidivism. But he also
introduced a new creative reason to make the law acceptable.
Gaines wrote that it would empower veterans and people who experienced less-than-desirable childhoods. Follow his reasoning, if possible: the rigors of war and/or growing up in a household marred with violence made people with this background develop something like post-traumatic stress syndrome, which inevitably caused them to go out and commit felonies.
Of course, most veterans live as law-abiding
citizens and likely many of them have no sympathy for criminals. The same holds
true for people who lived in a dysfunctional environment as children. In just a
few words, Gaines not only makes the breathtakingly stupid rationalization that
serving your country and growing up poor turns you into criminals, but he also insults
everybody from those backgrounds.
He also mischaracterizes my column, completely fabricating
that I wrote that only certain parts of the community want to reduce crime, a sentiment
which appears nowhere in the column. And he demonstrated poor reading
comprehension when he alleged the column “adopted a vitriolic, click-bait tone
and neglected to inform the readers of pertinent facts,” failing to note that
at the bottom of that (and every) column resides a link for readers to access
giving other links to the data on which the facts related in the column are
based.
However, I suspect the “facts” in which he seems
interested derive from criminal justice legal changes passed into law in 2017, a
set of reforms that he then extolls virtuously – which have nothing to do with
the issue at hand. The column was about the law expanding felon voting, not
that package. Gaines may think that sleight of hand clever, but it’s so transparently
dishonest that it only discredits further his argumentation.
Perhaps the motive for his attempting such a
hatchet job comes from another column
of mine over a year earlier that noted Gaines’ hypocrisy in not initially supporting
a past candidate for Secretary of State, Democrat Derrick Edwards. Then, Gaines
claimed, as a party official (he’s Vice
“Chair” of Elected Officials) that the state party didn’t want to endorse the
physically-disabled Edwards because he couldn’t run a “viable” campaign, with
proof being that Edwards had incurred fines for late reporting. At the time, Gaines
himself had two outstanding fines which subsequently, whether from the embarrassment
instigated by the column’s appearance, he has paid off.
Voters in Gaines’ district should note that the
guy they elected produced this mess of a letter, and keep its lack of factual
information and poor reasoning ability in mind as he seeks reelection this
year.
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