Wickham on Mississippi Governor Barbour’s Pardons

If you haven’t heard, outgoing Mississippi Republican Governor Haley Barbour pardoned a slew of criminals which would allow them to retain their right to vote. Instead of support from the very organizations fighting to restore voting rights these same groups have degenerated into opposing the Governor’s pardons and Mississippi’s Democratic Attorney General is trying to block it. 

USA Today’s DeWayne Wickham has it right in his recent column on the subject: 

Of the 5.3 million American felons who have lost the right to vote, nearly 2 million are black, the report states. Though Barbour’s pardons and clemencies won’t put a dent in that number, they could have an impact of a different sort. They are a break in the ideological picket lines between left-wing opponents of voter disenfranchisement and right-wing advocates of permanently stripping ex-convicts of the right to vote.

By resorting to an extraordinary use of executive power to return the right to vote to some of Mississippi’s citizens, Barbour seems to agree with the NAACP groups that in our democracy, voting is an immutable right. Whether that was his intended message or not, voting rights proponents should have scrambled to his side. Instead, they have remained silent.

That’s a pity.

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