This morning, a friend of mine forwarded me an email that he had received:
Shocking Senatorial Votes
"Never argue with an idiot; they'll drag you down to their level and
beat you with experience." ~ anonymous
The following senators voted against making English the official language of America:
Now, the following are the senators who voted to give illegal aliens Social Security benefits. They are grouped by home state. If a state is not listed, there was no voting representative.
SEND THIS TO ALL YOU KNOW. THE ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE UNITED STATES NEEDS TO KNOW THIS INFORMATION, UNLESS THEY DON'T MIND SHARING THEIR SOCIAL SECURITY WITH FOREIGN WORKERS who didn't pay in a dime.
Editorial here by me: I snipped the list of senators because it just takes up too much space, and is pretty irrelevant to the point of this blog. I will note, however, that the senators listed are almost entirely Democrats, which does tie into the point of this blog somewhat.
In any event, the prominence of all the Democratic senators led me to the immediate assumption that this was some sort of partisan rant by some Republican emailer (probably not even a pol, but just some shmoe at home wanting to stir things up by mass e-mailing everyone he could.)
Now, I was never terribly politically minded until 9/11, like, I imagine, many people in the country. Never even voted until after that (or registered to vote!) Since then, I've found myself somewhat interested in politics and the political process, and I'll freely admit to being rather a liberal (gasp!) in my leanings- I'm a registered Independent, and I'm not terribly impressed by the Democrats largely (or Republicans) and vote with my conscience and try to do my research. FWIW, my favorite US president is a Republican (Jackson).
In any event, I figured that something wasn't right about this email, and did a bit of research. Took me all of 5 seconds to Google up some info:
Social Security
English Language
Now, I was taught to never rely on just one source in school, so I didn't take these entries at completely face value (besides they could be run by liberals!!!!). I'm not positive, but Snopes may be one of those Wikipedia like beasts that rely on user input and have little to no editorial control/fact-checking, but it was a start. It provided me with some handy links to something that should be rather reliable- our own US governmental Senate pages.
Anyway, after about 10-15 minutes of research, I sent off a response to my friend:
Looked into the Social Security thing- from what I can tell, it's a misrepresentation of the actual issue (probably an email sent out by some right wing nut trying to stir up trouble ;)). The Social Security thing was an amendment to a larger bill that was supposed to be a comprehensive border/immigration issue. The vote was actually a vote to table the motion to amend, and not a vote in favor/against of the motion itself. You can read more about it here.
The actual vote, with tallies of who voted for/against what, and what the issue was (as well as links to the text of the discussion and the bill and proposed amendments is available from our very own government, here: Social Security vote)
Same thing with the English Language thing, almost. There were two amendments that were voted on, that were somewhat contradictory. *Both* amendments were intended to recognize English as the official language of the United States (a correction I make to the email writers notion of "America"- we are not America, we are but one of the Americas).
The first is the one your email cites- amendment 4064, which wanted to recognize English and wanted to make certain that "no person has a right, entitlement, or claim to have the Government of the United States or any of its officials or representatives act, communicate, perform or provide services, or provide materials in any language other than English." In other words, people couldn't expect that, say, schools might provide instructional materials to assist their Spanish-speaking and raised children to assist them in better learning, say, English. The same would apply to *legal* non-English speaking residents/immigrants, of any non-US country.
Now, it's arguable that anyone in the US should have any rights or expectations that anyone would attempt to accomodate their language, though it's certainly a jingoistic view that isn't really shared in many places in the world (such as the European countries), but this amendment would have provided a legal recourse for, essentially, discrimination based on language.
In any event, here's how the vote actually played out in the Senate:
4064 vote
Now, amendment 4073 was essentially the same thing, but instead of placing restrictions, this is what its purpose was: "The Government of the United States shall preserve and enhance the role of English as the common and unifying language of America. Nothing herein shall diminish or expand any existing rights under the law of the United States relative to services or materials provided by the government of the United States in any language other than English."
Still recognizing English as the language of the US (and I just noted that the amendment itself refers to it as America, and not the US- ugh.), still recognizing the language, but not providing any prohibitions on how the recognition of other languages might be performed. If nothing else, it could be perceived by the more cynical among us (myself) as a means of preventing a bunch more frivolous lawsuits in our overly litigious society whereby someone (under the first proposed amendment) might decide to sue a teacher who was speaking spanish to her spanish-speaking kids in class, and english to her english-speaking kids, in an effort to teach both.
4073 vote
Interestingly, 12 Republicans voted in favor of both amendments, while no Democrats voted against 4074 (as opposed to 4073, which was was more split). So it does seem to have been a partisan issue.
Also, the same three voters declined to vote in both issues:
(Those three were erroneously counted in the emails assertion that "38" voted against making English the "official language").
Now, since both votes on both amendments passed, I'm currently unclear as to exactly where that leaves things- still researching that. For all I know, the larger bill never was signed into law in the first place, making the issue sort of moot. If so, then both amendments are contradictory, so again, not sure what that means.
Anyway, just some further research on the topic to mull over.
Editorial- Once more, I've removed lists of voting Senators names. They're linked, for one, if anyone cares, and two, it's not relevant to my point. Which I'm finally getting to.
THE POINT (At last!)
It took me all of 15 - 20 minutes, including gathering my thoughts, typing, and editing, to do all of this research. That's it. Just a few minutes to figure some things out and see that someone was only presenting a skewed version of the "facts" with a very obvious agenda to push. Now, it is certainly a partisan issue, as the actual votes show, but the original email doesn't make nearly clear the grey areas of the actual issues.
The point is, how many people out there get outraged and upset by emails/comments, etc like this (on any side of the issue, any issue) and don't bother to check into things. My friend even pointed out that it might be worth looking into, but I'm sure that most people can't be bothered and just take things on face value, confident that someone else must have done the research and knows what they are talking about.
5 seconds to Google. 10 minutes (maybe) to read over the well documented and hyperlinked pages on the US Senate website (there are even transcripts of the actual sessions linked there to read over if you really want to get the lowdown on who said what/when/why/what they were wearing).
In this information era, there is absolutely no reason for people to not take a few seconds or minutes out of their day to try and get informed about things.
That's how wars get started.
