Tag: U.S. Constitution

Minority Party Holds on to Power with the Electoral College

By Chase Wheaton

The Electoral College is a relic. A fossil of sorts. An outdated artifact that belongs in history books, only, and an archaic remnant of our original democracy, where the only light came from candles and news was delivered by horse-drawn carriage. And it’s about time we update our presidential election process to be aligned with the 21st century needs of our country and its citizens.

The original reason for the Electoral College’s existence is not relevant anymore. In the late 18th century, when the Electoral College was created, it was uncommon for the average American to be fully literate, and the means of communication that existed were much slower and more limited, making it exponentially more difficult for that common citizen to be informed and educated about the candidates running for president. Therefore, our founders deemed it appropriate to establish the Electoral College as a group of upper-class elites that were meant to use their education and knowledge to vote for who they thought to be the most qualified candidate for office. In fact, originally in presidential elections, Americans voted for an elector who was then free to debate, discuss, and vote for whichever presidential candidate they felt was most qualified for office, and it wasn’t until many decades later that Americans were able to vote directly for the presidential candidate of their choice, who then still needed to be formally voted for by the electors of that state. In the 21st century, however, with national news media, 24/7 access to information through television, social media, and the Internet, and our current education system, it’s absurd to believe this system still has a place in modern-day democracy.

If the history behind it doesn’t convince you, mathematically speaking, the Electoral College simply isn’t fair, and it does away entirely with the principle of “one person, one vote.” Take Wyoming, California, Florida and Texas for example. By doing some quick math with populations and numbers of electoral votes, you’ll find the ratio of people per electoral vote for each state, and you’ll see quite the disparity. Wyoming, for example, gets one electoral vote for every 192,920 people, but California gets one for every 718,182 people, Florida gets one for every 740,690 people, and Texas gets one for every 763,157 people. That means that one person in Wyoming has 3.7 times more voting power than someone in California, 3.8 times more voting power than someone in Florida, and 4 times more voting power than someone in Texas. The numbers don’t lie, and these numbers show us that the Electoral College diminishes the voices of Americans that live in more populous states during presidential elections, while unfairly amplifying the voices of those living in less populated states.

Facts and history aside, even public opinion supports abolishing the Electoral College. A Gallup poll released in September 2020 shows that 61% of Americans support amending the Constitution to abolish the Electoral College and instead use the national popular vote to determine the winners of our presidential elections. Unfortunately, if you dive deeper into the results of this poll, you’ll see a deeply partisan divide that spells out a longer future for the Electoral College than most Americans would seemingly like. While an overwhelming 89% of Democrats wish to abolish the Electoral College, only 23% of Republicans would like to do the same, and sadly, the reason for that couldn’t be clearer. If we abolished the Electoral College and used the national popular vote to select our president and vice president, the current GOP would never again win another presidential election unless they realigned their values and beliefs to be more representative of those of modern-day America.

So, unless we expect the GOP to relinquish its hold on American politics in favor of progress (which seems as likely as fish learning to fly), we can expect to continue seeing the Electoral College rear its ugly head every four years. Still, we eventually transitioned from candlelight and horse-drawn-carriage to light bulbs and cars, so in time, I believe we’ll see the progress that Americans want.

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Click on “Forum” to read Stephen Macaulay’s commentary on former President Trump’s ethics policy.

The Lessons of Electoral Reform: Becoming President Should be Hard

By Nic Woods

It seems the Electoral College has no friends these days. 

Whether on the left (miffed as popular vote winners have not always become president) or the right (who seem to have forgotten that this system allows them to punch well above their weight, power-wise) everyone seems to want to dump the Electoral College into the garbage and set it on fire, including members of the Electoral College themselves.

Not so fast.

The Electoral College is misunderstood, mostly because we still put so much weight on what the framers of the U.S. Constitution originally intended, but not enough weight on what those framers would not have possibly understood.

Whatever the framers intended, it may not necessarily extend to, say, electric vehicles, as even Ben Franklin had not so much as envisioned horseless carriages or enough available electricity to juice up an electric vehicle, much less a fleet of them. 

They may have been brilliant men for their time, but their imaginations were limited to what they knew, so they created systems that could be changed to reflect a future they could not envision.

Americans tend to conveniently forget that.

The Constitution can be, and has been, changed. It is difficult, but not impossible. The parts of the Constitution that address the Electoral College has been changed a couple times – once with the ratification of the 12th Amendment in 1804, and one other time since, as any book with the actual Constitution in it strikes out part of that amendment.

The first step here is to admit that the Electoral College, as envisioned and even as amended, may still be outdated. Much of the assumptions embedded into it no longer hold true – that suffrage is limited to white male landowners, there are no political parties, that the redistricting process is not gamed by one party or the other to benefit it, that only the best men run for office, and they must rely on regional publishers to promote them, as self-promotion is too gauche.

Despite all that, the Electoral College has only failed to reflect the popular vote four times in our history – 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 – a pretty good track record for an outdated concept.

Valid arguments say there is no reason to throw it out completely, but there are plenty reasons to drag it into the 21st Century and make changes that reflect near-universal suffrage and gerrymandering, as well as offset greater partisanship, a national but hyper partisan media landscape, misinformation and disinformation. 

While the Electoral College needs to be reformed, most of us do not understand enough about it to know where to start. The next step could point toward raising the bar to become president just a bit higher. 

Any Electoral College reform should encourage a candidate to work for every vote, whether it is from an urbanite, suburbanite, or exurbanite, from a swing state or a state that solidly votes for one party or another. This would require states to eliminate gerrymandering. To date, 32 states already have “faithless elector” laws (15 of them with the teeth to punish) that prevent their electors from going off-script. The U.S. Supreme Court has declared these faithless elector laws constitutional, they should be easy to spread to the remaining 18 states.

Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist Papers, advocated for a “vigorous” executive. One way to figure out how vigorous a future president will be is to support a system that will make him work to earn his office.

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Sources:
“Meet the Electoral College’s Biggest Critics: Some of the Electors Themselves” — The New York Times, July 6, 2020
“Supreme Court Rules State ‘Faithless Elector’ Laws Constitutional” — NPR, July 6, 2020
The U.S. Constitution Explained – Clause by Clause – for Every American Today, Annotated by Ray Raphael
The Constitution of the United States of America
The Federalist Papers No. 68
Heather Cox Richardson’s History & Politics Chat, July 7, 2020
“Beau of the Fifth Column” Let’s Talk about the electoral college, power and Jules Verne

Cracked Lens of the Shining Beacon

By Stephen Macaulay

At 3:44 am, January 7, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, President of the Senate, took the gavel in hand and closed the joint session of Congress that certified the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as the President and Vice President of the United States.

Was anyone surprised at the outcome?

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“Schoolhouse Rock” Revisited

The process is one that most of us probably missed during “Schoolhouse Rock”: the procedure for certifying the presidential election. The Electoral College was established under Article II and Amendment 12 of the U.S. Constitution. States choose electors based on the results of the general election. 

The electors create what are known as Certificates of Vote, which are sent to Congress, which then sits in joint session to certify the election.

There is a second place they are sent: The Office of the Federal Register (OFR), which is under the National Archives and Records Administration.

The OFR puts these electoral documents on public display for a year. Then they go to the Archives of the United States.

You might wonder why there is this tutorial.

Several reasons.

To point out to some people who were involved in Wednesday’s national embarrassment that there is a U.S. Constitution. That there is a careful process of certification. That this entire procedure is part and parcel of what has made the United States of America a special place for more than two centuries.

Maybe they skipped civics.

And to let some of these people know where they can spend their time now it is established that the man from whom they took their marching orders is no longer in office: Gazing at the documents that show that the people of the United States of America and their designated electors have made Joe Biden and Kamala Harris the President and Vice President, respectively.

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That was written Wednesday before an angry mob, goaded on by the angry man who lost the election, attacked the United States of America. Extreme? Not if you see the photo of the law enforcement officials, guns in hand, behind the barricaded doors of the House of Representatives. 

While I had thought about deleting that explanation, when Mike Lee, Republican Senator from Utah, took to the floor of the Senate last evening to make his remarks regarding the curious claims of Ted Cruz, Republican Senator from Texas, that there needed to be a commission that would run for 10 days looking into the security of the election, he cited Article II, Section 12.

In Lee’s words: “Our job is to open and then count. Open and then count. That’s it. That’s all there is.”

Lee had proffered a booklet containing the Constitution when he made those remarks. I wonder if there are any copies at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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The most-telling admission of the lack of seriousness of the results to overturn the election (let’s call it what it was) came from Kelly Loeffler, Republican Senator from Georgia, who had signed on with the Hawley/Cruz Putsch Planners. Realize that Loeffler, that very day, had been handed a pink slip by the voters of Georgia. Arguably, she would have nothing to lose politically were she to maintain her allegiance to something — or more accurately, someone -- other than the flag.

But Loeffler, who would undoubtedly be one of the many who’d have angry tweets written about her were it not that Donald Trump’s Twitter account had been given a time-out, appeared shaken to realize that words have consequences, and when those words are not true, when they are about fanciful conspiracies, then there can be things like angry mobs attacking the U.S. Capitol.

She saw the consequences. She withdrew her support of the efforts to, as she had it on the homepage of her website (probably to be taken down by now), “give President Trump and the American people the fair hearing they deserve and support the objection to the Electoral College certification process.”

She knew there was nothing there. And she probably knew that had the Senators not been escorted out of the chamber earlier in the day by armed police, the mob wouldn’t be discerning: she would have been in the same danger as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. That would have been real.

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A word about the rule of law.

Rudolph Giuliani is the former associate attorney general in the Reagan administration. He was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he prosecuted the likes of Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken for financial fraud, organized crime figures, and other people who broke the law. He was lauded for his forthright efforts to uphold the rule of law. After the horrible events that occurred on September 11, 2001, Giuliani, then mayor of New York City, became “America’s mayor,” as he stood up to the forces that were attacking the core values of the United States.

Shortly before the Capitol was stormed, Giuliani, now Donald Trump’s personal attorney, told the crowd at the “Save America Rally,” “Let’s have trial by combat.”

The personal attorney of the President of the United States.

“Let’s have trial by combat.”

That’s not in the Constitution, either.

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Trump is the Most Conservative Republican President of Our Time

By Andrew Boyd

The question at hand, is Trump a conservative, is an interesting one for sure. Stephen argues first and foremost that it’s family values and fiscal conservatism. It’s certainly arguable that the conservative movement put a lot of its eggs in these two baskets over the past several decades and has largely failed to deliver on either. But I think there are greater fundamental issues at play. More on that later. Let’s first unpack the stuff in Stephen’s argument.

In character, I'd agree that Trump is not a conservative. In his deeds, he most certainly is.

On the fiscal front, Trump is a mixed bag. He’s not taken on the systemic issues of government bloat and out-of-control federal spending (yes, it’s a spending issue), but he has installed pro-growth tax and regulatory policies that led to a booming post-Obama, pre-COVID economy the likes we’ve never seen. Sadly, I’m not sure there’s a serious political player on the national stage who’s willing to go to bat for a balanced federal budget or the reeling in of the welfare state. These are cans virtually everyone seems happy just to kick down the road. I’d say that, systemically, our body politic is in something akin to a persistent vegetative state on the debt and deficit thingy, which is certainly not ideal from this conservative’s point of view, but not something particularly attributable to Trump.

But what about free and fair trade? asks Stephen. Yes, it could be argued that Trump stepped over the line on the Canadian aluminum tariffs, but I don’t think there’s anything inconsistent in a conservative’s appreciation for the free exchange of goods at home and nationalistic international economic policy. Trump was elected to represent the people of Peoria, nor Paris, after all, and I’m mostly down with that. Tariffs are lousy, long-term structural tools, but they can come in handy at the negotiating table, which is by and large how the administration has used them, in my estimation. 

But what about family values? Seriously, in Washington, Stephen?  Surely you jest.  Personal peccadillos of the Trumpian sort have been baked into the swamp cake since the dawn of the republic. Do I wish he was less like JFK and more like Obama in the category of marital fidelity? For sure. But you work with what you’ve got. And in the new age of a leftist, socialist-slouching Democratic party, I think an increasing number of conservatives are inclined to take a more macro view.  

At the macro level, Trump, I would argue, is the most conservative president in my lifetime.  Drawing down the 15-year Afghanistan fiasco, taking the hard line with China, appointing textualist Supreme Court justices, delivering American energy independence and leveraging the same in foreign policy, supporting Israel, the Middle East’s only functioning Democracy, putting Hezbollah and the Iran mullahs on their heels and calling out the leftist media establishment for their gross journalistic malfeasance. 

The only blind obedience I’m aware of within my Republican circles is to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and the ideals these documents embody. Trump isn’t perfect by a long shot, but he’s drawn the party back toward its genuine center of gravity, motivating its base and drawing a stark contrast with the socialist, globalist, identity politics dogma of the unhinged left.  

If time and space weren’t issues, I’d take another thousand words to explain how Obama was, by contrast, the least traditionally liberal, least inclusive president in my lifetime, by a long shot, but that’s a column for another day.

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