Susan B. Anthony Museum Publicly Rejects Trump Pardon Stunt

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This week, President Donald Trump signed a pardon for Susan B. Anthony, the women’s rights advocate who passed away in 1906 and, during her life, was at one point convicted for voting illegally after she cast a ballot prior to the passage of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote. The Susan B. Anthony Museum, which has “been interpreting her life and work for seventy-five years from her home and headquarters,” as they put it, objected to the pardon in a series of Twitter posts. For starters, as they explained, Anthony refused to ever pay any of the fine that was levied against her, because she did not want to in any way “validate” her conviction — although a de facto validation of the conviction is exactly what Trump’s pardon seems to do.

As the museum explained:

‘On news of a presidential pardon for Susan B. Anthony on August 18, 2020: Objection! Mr. President, Susan B. Anthony must decline your offer of a pardon today! Anthony wrote in her diary in 1873 that her trial for voting was “The greatest outrage History ever witnessed.” She was not allowed to speak as a witness in her own defense, because she was a woman. Judge Hunt dismissed the jury and pronounced her guilty. She was outraged to be denied a trial by jury. She proclaimed, “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty.” To pay would have been to validate the proceedings. To pardon Susan B. Anthony does the same.’

Poignantly, the museum also called for respect for voting rights in general, something that Trump and his team have definitely not been able to be counted on for.

Recently, Trump has been threatening the Postal Service through, for instance, suggesting he might hold up emergency funding for it, which would seriously curtail the effective handling of mail-in ballots. Separately, the Republican-led Senate has also refused to take up legislation passed by the Democrat-led House that would restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act to its full original power. In a 2013 case, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the legislation’s requirement for “areas with a history of voting discrimination… to convince the U.S. Justice Department or a federal court that any election changes they wished to make would not have a discriminatory effect,” as Reuters explains. In the time since that ruling, major election system updates have been undertaken.