State Senator John Dunne Fought Barriers to Voting, Barriers Rising Again
When I told former state Senator John Dunne about my plans to return to the Adirondacks and publish a one-hundred-year-old summer newspaper, he was skeptical. “What will you do in the winter – chop wood?” he asked.
That must have been in the mid-1990s. Dunne was back at the state Capitol, lobbying his former colleagues to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws, which he himself had introduced in the 1970s. He had returned to private life after completing his most consequential – or at least most prestigious – term of public service: President George H.W. Bush’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
I thought of Senator Dunne as I read the reporting in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and elsewhere about a case currently before the U.S. Supreme Court: Louisiana’s challenge to Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which gives Blacks, historically denied the right to vote, a reasonable chance of electing the candidates of their choice.
According to press reports, attorneys for Louisiana argue that Section 2 places too much emphasis on racial identity, especially during reapportionment, when its state legislature must craft congressional districts from areas where the majority of residents happen to be Black.
As Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Dunne not only defended Section 2 in the courts but in the media, where it was attacked by conservative scholars such as Abigail and Steven Thernstrom, who argued that majority-minority congressional districts are products of “racial gerrymandering” and are, in effect, “entitlements” to offices.
(Department of “Lake George is the center of the universe” alert: Abigail Thernstrom was the stepdaughter of Bolton Landing artist Dorothy Dehner.)
Dunne responded by stating that his office was not in favor of “racial gerrymandering;” it was, however, opposed to district lines that kept Whites entrenched in office and deliberately – or, to put it charitably, inadvertently – disenfranchised Black voters.
“Our objective is not to maximize the number of minority elected officials by creating districts in which minority candidates are assured of victory,” Dunne stated. “Rather, we are attempting to remove the structural barriers which deny minority voters a fair opportunity to elect the candidates they prefer. The Voting Rights Act is intended to protect the rights of voters and not the ambitions of candidates. The increase in the number of Black elected officials is simply a by-product of those efforts.”
In most of the South, “voting patterns map onto racial patterns,” as historian and political commentator Heather Cox Richardson notes, so it is not surprising that majority-minority districts almost always send Democrats to Congress.
Nor is it surprising that the Trump administration has filed an amicus brief in support of Louisiana’s suit. White majority districts will resurface if the Supreme Court overturns the Act’s Section 2. And if, as appears likely, it does, as Nate Cohn of The New York Times writes, the Democrats could lose more than a dozen seats in the House of Representatives across the south.
President George H.W. Bush’s political appointee, obviously, was also aware that the Voting Rights Act often served the interests of Democrats more than it did Republicans. But that fact did not cause Dunne to compromise his oath to enforce the law and, for that matter, the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Nor did it diminish his opposition to “structural barriers” to the free exercise of the vote, such as racially discriminatory Congressional maps. John Dunne died in 2020. We have seen few public servants – and unfortunately, even fewer Republicans – like him since.
Hunting and the American Revolution
John Bird Burnham, Chief Game Protector for the state of New York in the early 1900s, once made an observation worthy of Alexis de Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy in America.’ “The union of monarchial game laws with an anti-monarchial sentiment make for an impossible marriage, and in America, drastic prohibitions on hunting can never be as effective as they are in England,” he wrote.
Burnham traced New York’s game laws to the democratic spirit. These laws hold that the people, and not the owner of the property on whose land the game is found, own the deer, the bear, the turkey, the ruffed grouse. The most dogmatic property rights activist is filled with righteous indignation if access to a buck is impeded by ‘no trespassing’ signs. There are restrictions, of course, but these restrictions are the game laws and regulations that we ourselves have adopted, and which protect the commonly owned property.
Compare our game laws and traditions with those of England at the time of the American Revolution.
The right to hunt was reserved for royalty and landholders who were granted the king’s favor.
One such royal preserve was in the neighborhood of Selborne, famous today primarily for its vicar, Gilbert White (1720-1793), the author of ‘The Natural History of Selborne.’ The red deer of Wolmar were descendants of those originally herded into the forest by William the Conqueror or one of his barons. Queen Anne, in the first years of the 18th century, “saw with great complacency and satisfaction” the whole herd, by then five hundred head. By George III’s day, the stock had been decimated by poachers. As a last resort, the royal owner ordered his huntsman and six assistants, “in scarlet jackets laced with gold, attended by the stag-hounds,” to round up the few remaining stags and hinds and take them in carts to Windsor.
According to Rev. White, poaching is such a problem because “the temptation is irresistible; for most men are sportsmen by constitution, and there is such an inherent spirit for hunting in human nature, as scarce any inhibitions can restrain.” However much harm deer may do to a crop, “the injury to the morals of the people (as a result of poaching) is of more moment…” It turns them into criminals. Robert Walpole, George I’s chief minister, determined that they should be treated as such. He was responsible for the Black Act. According to the stipulations of this law, poachers, or anyone caught blacking his face in as preparation for poaching, could be, and often was, hanged.
Americans have never been that harsh with poachers. In Warrensburg, once upon a time, one was even elected Town Supervisor. Still, we can get outraged when we learn that someone was caught jacking deer, from the Forest Rangers’ Weekly Reports or from a news article like the one that appeared in The New York Times in August about “King Louie,” a prize buck that was illegally taken in Fulton County. After all, poaching is theft, theft of property owned by we the people, in common. That is a legacy of the American Revolution that few have given much thought to.
How About Mere Civility?
“Disagree without being disagreeable,” President Barack Obama enjoined us at a 2010 Prayer Breakfast. Words to heed as we head into the 2026 gubernatorial election.
Rebuked by President Donald Trump for branding New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani a “jihadist,” the GOP’s presumptive choice for governor, Elise Stefanik, replied, “If he walks like a jihadist, if he talks like a jihadist, if he campaigns like a jihadist, if he supports jihadists, he’s a jihadist.”
According to Stefanik, Governor Kathy Hochul, invariably, is “the Worst Governor in America (who) at every opportunity turns her back on New Yorkers to bend the knee to the radical Far Left of the Democrat Party that puts illegals and criminals first and hardworking law-abiding New Yorkers last.” Hochul’s eloquent rebuttal: “(Elise Stefanik) is full of s**t.” We could go on, but you probably have heard enough as it is, and will no doubt hear much more, and much worse, before election day, 2026.
Far from being of recent origin, incivility is so endemic to political life that the founders of modern liberalism – Hobbes and Locke – and their American heirs – Jefferson and Madison – sought to manage it without suppressing the free and vigorous expression of political opinions altogether.
A democracy requires the discussion of contentious issues; it cannot afford the habitual use of provocative religious, racial or personal slurs. At the very least, it requires “mere civility,” a phrase used by Teresa M. Bejan, a contemporary political theorist, to signify a passive deference to the forms and formalities of generally acceptable speech.
Another political theorist, the late Judith Shklar, once suggested that liberal society may sometimes require hypocrisy – “a necessary pretense” – in order to maintain civility. We can conform to the expectations of society in relatively unimportant things – speaking politely to those with whom we vehemently disagree, for example – without conforming in the most important things – personal political beliefs or religious convictions, for example.
We’re under no illusions that Stefanik and Hochul will ever be as cordial as Trump and Mamdani were at their November 21 meeting, or as amiable as Stefanik herself was when debating Green candidate Matt Funicello during the 2014 Congressional race. It remains to be seen if the two can even reach the very low bar we set for “mere civility.”
Thus far, Stefanik has blamed Hochul for: the costs of energy; the price of food; “a mass exodus of people (from) New York State;” at least one murder; your taxes; and the price of housing, among other ills. “I am the ONLY candidate who will unleash an all-of-the-above energy policy in NY to LOWER energy, utility, and housing costs,” she asserts without, needless to say, explaining how she would accomplish all this. Campaigns based on an exchange of insults, on vulgar banter and outright lies are hardly conducive to a substantive debate about these issues or to democratic deliberation, generally speaking. “Mere civility” might just be.
