Counsel for petitioners seizing upon the expression found in the opinion of the Court in the case of Minor vs. Happersett, "that the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one," without reference to the connection in which it is used, insists that the voters in this case do not owe their right to vote in any sense to that instrument. But the Court was combating the argument that this right was conferred on all citizens, and therefore upon women as well as men.(!)
In opposition to that idea it was said the Constitution adopts, as the qualification for voters for members of Congress, that which prevails in the State where the voting is to be done; therefore, said the opinion, the right is not definitely conferred on any person or class of persons by the Constitution alone, because you have to look to the law of the State for the description of the class. But the Court did not intend to say that, when the class or the person is thus ascertained, his right to vote for a member of Congress was not fundamentally based upon the Constitution which created the office of member of Congress, and declared it should be elective, and pointed to the means of ascertaining who should be electors.
The Fifteenth Amendment of the Constitution, by its limitation of the power of the States in the exercise of their right to prescribe the qualifications of voters in their own elections, and by its limitation of the power of the United States over that subject, clearly shows that the right of suffrage was considered to be of supreme importance to the National Government and was not intended to be left within the exclusive control of the States.
In such cases this Fifteenth Article of amendment does proprio vigore [by its own force] substantially confer on the negro the right to vote, and Congress has the power to protect and enforce that right. In the case of United States vs. Happersett, so much relied on by counsel, this Court said, in regard to the Fifteenth Amendment, that it has invested the citizens of the United States with a new constitutional right which is within the protecting power of Congress. That right is an exemption from discrimination in the exercise of the elective franchise on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.
This new constitutional right was mainly designed for [male] citizens of African descent. The principle, however, that the protection of the exercise of this right is within the power of Congress, is as necessary to the right of other citizens to vote in general as to the right to be protected against discrimination.This legal hair-splitting is beyond the comprehension of the average lay mind and will be viewed by future generations with as much contempt as is felt by the present in regard to the infamous decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case in 1857. If it decides anything it is that the right to vote for Congressional Representatives is a Federal right, vested in all the
