Quote of the week
Universal adult suffrage on a common voters roll is one of the foundational values of our entire constitutional order. The achievement of the franchise has historically been important both for the acquisition of the rights of full and effective citizenship by all South Africans regardless of race, and for the accomplishment of an all-embracing nationhood. The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and of personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts. In a country of great disparities of wealth and power it declares that whoever we are, whether rich or poor, exalted or disgraced, we all belong to the same democratic South African nation; that our destinies are intertwined in a single interactive polity.
August and Another v Electoral Commission and Others (CCT8/99) [1999] ZACC 3
There is something surreal, absurd even, about the US supreme court’s recent three-day hearings on President Obama’s healthcare law. In essence, nine people, all appointed by presidents of the United States and not elected by nor accountable to the American people, will have the power, come June, to determine whether the president’s landmark 2010 legislation will stand as is, be ruled unconstitutional and done away with entirely, or be ruled unconstitutional in part and so be hobbled and in doubt. It is surreal and absurd that we are even having this conversation again, given that the crux of the matter is that 50 million Americans do not have health insurance. Wasn’t the point to make sure the richest and most powerful nation on the planet could protect its own people, as other nations do, including Canada, our neighbor to the north? – Kevin Powell on The Guardian website.
