China News Service via Getty Images
New York Democrats have failed to legalize noncitizen voting, but may get their way by passing Proposition 1 on the Nov. 5 ballot.
The deceptively written “Equal Rights Amendment” doesn’t protect women or abortion rights — but does empower lawmakers to ignore the current language of the state Constitution in the name of protecting a whole host of new rights that it would create.
Let’s be clear: Abortion rights are not under threat in New York.
Citizenship and voting rights, however, are under attack.
The courts blocked the New York City Council’s 2021 law to let 800,000 non-citizens with green cards vote, since Article II, Section 1, of the state Constitution restricts voting in New York to US citizens who are 18 or older and have lived in the state at least 30 days.
But Prop 1 would undo that protection: Among the host of new rights it creates is a prohibition of discrimination on the basis of “national origin.”
That’s an open license for lefty judges to either OK a law that lets even illegal immigrants vote — or to simply rule that they have that right even without the Legislature doing a thing.
And progressives, over the feeble resistance of Gov. Hochul, have already created a working left-wing majority on the state’s top bench, the Court of Appeals.
Prop 1 is “a Trojan horse of epic proportions,” warns constitutional lawyer Bobbi Anne Cox.
Indeed, if it were truly about protecting abortion rights, it would simply say something like, “The right to abortion is absolute.”
Instead, it bans “unequal treatment” for a long list of categories — and then turns around in its second half and allows unequal treatment as long as it’s in the name of countering past unfairness.
Those categories include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as well as “national origin,” so if it passes the courts will definitely mandate the most radical reading of “transgender rights.”
Meanwhile, the second half of this constitutional amendment would empower madness like rank racial quotas for public-school and university admissions — indeed, for any law or government action that’s claimed to promote “equity.”
A much more honest name for it would be “The Unequal Rights Amendment.”
Proposition 1, in short, is a disgraceful, deceptive bid to milk New Yorkers’ pro-choice sentiments to empower the lunatic left that now dominates state politics to impose its agenda permanently, without any further chance for voters to protest.
If you have no other reason to vote, still take the trouble so you can deliver another NO to Prop 1.