Jac VerSteeg
Civics question:
If a male lawmaker is sent to jail for having an affair with an underage girl and then decides to seek re-election, voters will:
A: Laugh
B: Scoff
C: Re-elect him
While the answer should be A or B, in real life this month it was C. Virginia voters in the Richmond area re-elected Joe Morrissey to the House of Delegates even as he was serving a six-month sentence for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
The takeaway lesson from this example is that voters sometimes are pretty stupid. It’s just one civics lesson not likely to be explicitly taught in the civics courses that will be springing up across the country in the current trend toward requiring students to pass a basic civics test before they can graduate.
My Context Florida colleague Steven Kurlander suggests that such an exam should be required of adults as well, if they want to exercise the privilege of obtaining a passport or driving a car. I’m all for civics and citizenship education. But I don’t want it to be just so much flag-waving. And I don’t want it to be just rote facts such as the number of Supreme Court justices or how old someone must be to serve as president.
I want students to understand just how messy the whole thing can be. While I cited Virginia above (which also has just had a governor sentenced to prison for abusing his office), Florida provides a bonanza of potential civics case studies to boggle the mind of any student.
This extends from the current controversy surrounding Gov. Rick Scott’s dismissal of FDLE Commissioner Gerald Bailey to the kind of local scandals that earned Palm Beach County the title of Corruption County. (Bailey alleges Scott’s political team pressured him to falsely implicate a local official in a criminal probe. In my home county of Palm Beach, a series of scandals saw three commissioners go to prison and a fourth resign in a plea deal.)
And anyone who follows Florida politics can name many, many more such examples. In fact, Florida could provide an entire textbook series.
Florida, by the way, already requires middle school students to pass a one-semester civics course that “includes the roles and responsibilities of federal, state, and local governments; the structures and functions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government; and the meaning and significance of historic documents, such as the Articles of Confederation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United States.”
The Legislature passed the requirement in 2010 as the Justice Sandra Day O’Connor Civics Education Act.
Mention of Justice O’Connor of course leads to the most historic example of just how messy citizenship can be. Justice O’Connor was on the Supreme Court and sided with the majority when it ruled in Bush v. Gore, which stopped the Florida recount and declared George W. Bush the elected president of the United States.
After she retired, Justice O’Connor had second thoughts and admitted that “probably the Supreme Court added to the problem at the end of the day.”
Yikes.
Even if you can answer every question on every canned civics test concocted to prove that students or immigrants are worthy to call themselves Americans, you’re not going to have every answer to every civics problem the real world is going to throw at you.
When even the Supreme Court can get the answers very wrong, civics is messy indeed.
Jac Wilder VerSteeg is editor of Context Florida. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
