Posted on 10/17/2018 6:41:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seeking to represent New York's 14th Congressional District, has called for the abolition of the Electoral College. Her argument came on the heels of the Senate's confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. She was lamenting the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, nominated by George W. Bush, and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, nominated by Donald Trump, were court appointments made by presidents who lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College vote.
Hillary Clinton has long been a critic of the Electoral College. Just recently, she wrote in The Atlantic, "You won't be surprised to hear that I passionately believe it's time to abolish the Electoral College."
Subjecting presidential elections to the popular vote sounds eminently fair to Americans who have been miseducated by public schools and universities. Worse yet, the call to eliminate the Electoral College reflects an underlying contempt for our Constitution and its protections for personal liberty. Regarding miseducation, the founder of the Russian Communist Party, Vladimir Lenin, said, "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." His immediate successor, Josef Stalin, added, "Education is a weapon whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed."
A large part of Americans' miseducation is the often heard claim that we are a democracy. The word "democracy" appears nowhere in the two most fundamental documents of our nation -- the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. In fact, our Constitution -- in Article 4, Section 4 -- guarantees "to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." The Founding Fathers had utter contempt for democracy. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, said that in a pure democracy, "there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual." At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Virginia Gov. Edmund Randolph said that "in tracing these evils to their origin, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy." John Adams wrote: "Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide." At the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton said: "We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty" is found not in "the extremes of democracy but in moderate governments. ... If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy."
For those too dense to understand these arguments, ask yourselves: Does the Pledge of Allegiance say "to the democracy for which it stands" or "to the republic for which it stands"? Did Julia Ward Howe make a mistake in titling her Civil War song "Battle Hymn of the Republic"? Should she have titled it "Battle Hymn of the Democracy"?
The Founders saw our nation as being composed of sovereign states that voluntarily sought to join a union under the condition that each state admitted would be coequal with every other state. The Electoral College method of choosing the president and vice president guarantees that each state, whether large or small in area or population, has some voice in selecting the nation's leaders. Were we to choose the president and vice president under a popular vote, the outcome of presidential races would always be decided by a few highly populated states. They would be states such as California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania, which contain 134.3 million people, or 41 percent of our population. Presidential candidates could safely ignore the interests of the citizens of Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Delaware. Why? They have only 5.58 million Americans, or 1.7 percent of the U.S. population. We would no longer be a government "of the people"; instead, our government would be put in power by and accountable to the leaders and citizens of a few highly populated states.
Political satirist H.L. Mencken said, "The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic."
I would say more a stroke of luck than a stroke of genius. The Electoral College was a compromise made late in the process of the Philadelphia Convention, and almost none of the Founding Fathers thought it was ideal.
Hamilton complained almost immediately, because he thought it could lead to the election of Adams over Washington through intrigue. Later in life, Madison favored an amendment providing for electors to be elected by district rather than by state, with the vote going to a joint ballot of both houses of Congress in the event of no majority. In 1816, Rufus King proposed an amendment for the President to be elected by national popular vote, but it did not pass Congress.
At the Convention, most delegates seemed to assume that, other than Washington, no one man would ever be able to garner the votes of a majority of the electors, and so the Electoral College would simply serve to nominate candidates for election by the House.
The Electoral College is not the product of the genius of the Founding Fathers. Instead, like much of our Constitution, it is the result of the series of compromises and bargains on which our Union is founded. Which is why we can’t just set it aside. The United States was not created by the fiat of a few smart men. It was created as a bargain between a group of sovereign states and their citizens, and mucking around with the Constitution goes back on that bargain.
Yes we are. (A Republic.)
The founding fathers were very wise by their decision.
You are correct, of course, if you think of her in traditional terms.
The bad news is she is an effective soldier of the left with a microphone. Her audience is the naïve and uneducated, which often describes the young.
One of Mussolini's top planks in his campaign was to lower the voting age to 16.
”... the care of the property, the liberty, and the life of the citizen, under the solemn sanction of an oath imposed by your Federal Constitution, is in the States, and not in the Federal Government [emphases added].” —Rep. John Bingham, Congressional Globe, 1866. (See about middle of 3rd column.)
”From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added].” —United States v. Butler, 1936.
Corrupt uniparty Democrats and RINOs are modern day pirates that want the feds to keep and continue exercising those stolen state powers, especially since the corrupt feds use those stolen state powers to steal state revenues in the form of unconstitutional federal taxes.
“Congress is not empowered to tax for those purposes which are within the exclusive province of the States.” Justice John Marshall, Gibbons v. Ogden, 1824.
"The smart crooks long ago figured out that getting themselves elected to federal office to make unconstitutional tax laws to fill their pockets is a much easier way to make a living than robbing banks." —me
"Federal career lawmakers probably laugh all the way to the bank to deposit bribes for putting loopholes for the rich and corporations in tax appropriations laws, Congress actually not having the express constitutional authority to make most appropriations laws where domestic policy is concerned. Such laws are based on stolen state powers and uniquely associated stolen state revenues." —me
Consider that the Founding States did not give ordinary voters the constitutional power to elect either senators or the president, thus protecting the federal government from mob rule.
But just as the Progressive Movement succeeded in turning the senate over to mob rule evidenced by the ill-conceived 17th Amendment, globalists now want to finish the job of globalizing the federal government by turning the Oval Office to mob rule by getting rid of the electoral college.
The remedy for unconstitutionally big federal government …
Patriots need to finish the job that they started when they elected Trump president.
More specifically, patriots need to vote Republican ticket in the upcoming elections to elect patriot lawmakers who will support Pres. Trump in draining the swamp and promote his vision for MAGA.
You know... Only recently in the last couple years did the population of urban areas finally exceed the population of suburban and rural populations, but rural is still 49% of the total population.
This makes the Electoral College even that much more important today than ever. Pretty impressive that they had the vision so long ago to see this finally happening and we are alive to see it come into effect as it is supposed to right now and benefit from their vision and wisdom.
It wasn’t implemented for then... It was implemented for right now... It is not outdated... It is just now coming into effect as intended.
The 17th Amendment was the worst constitutional amendment IMO because it removes the most powerful check on the power of Congress controlling everything. Look at all the options to make changes to our government, via Amendment, Convention, Laws, Court decisions, etc. and it comes down to who controls Congress. The Congress decides which offices require Senate confirmation. The Congress can impeach/remove any Executive/Judicial officer. The Congress decides whether there can be a Convention and all the rules associated with said Convention call. The Congress decides what Amendments can be sent to the States.
If we are to save our American Constitutional Republic for a few more centuries (and maybe longer) then we got to figure out how to put in place some realistic check on the ability for a small oligarchy to control everything by controlling Congress. Unfortunately such an Amendment would need to do some sort of grandfathering so that the current crop of Congresscritters (and their controllers) will actually allow the “Check/Balance” amendment to be sent to the States for ratification.
Our only alternative in the long run will be a bloody Revolution and I think we can prevent it.
My suggested language is as follows:
1. The most numerous branch of each of the State legislatures may pass a resolution anytime to immediately expel any Senator in Congress from their State to create an immediate vacancy.
2. For the first six years after this Amendment becomes valid as part of the Constitution this amendment shall not be so construed as to affect any Senator ever chosen before it becomes valid as part of the Constitution.
I’d really want to have another Amendment passed as well.
1. The Representatives, not counting the Speaker and other Officers of the House, shall receive a Compensation for their Services, to be ascertained by their State legislatures, and paid out from their States.
2. The number of people per Representative shall not be more than sixty Thousand per Representative whenever the Representatives shall be reapportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.
3. The provisions of this Amendment shall begin to take affect starting when the next reapportionment takes place at least six years after this Amendment becomes valid as part of the Constitution.
You will note that my reason for paragraph #2 in the first proposed amendment and paragraph #3 in the second proposed amendment is that the current power holders (and their power controllers behind the scenes) in Congress would never pass such Amendments unless they could be grandfathered in their current positions of power.
And she wasn’t complaining in 1992 when Bill only got 43% of the popular vote and won the presidency.
Why I’d like to see the House be about 6000 members is that it would dilute the power that any individual seat has and make the House members be more accountable to their individual constituents. It would also greatly reduce the risks of gerrymandering having much real impact. What we’d see is a Congress that convenes in-person once every 2 years, elect Speaker/Officers, and then hold House votes 1-2x per month with the members all voting remotely & generally getting together in their State capitols where they can coordinate things with their State legislature/executive branch officials. Sure there would be some budget for committees and special task forces. We’d still have various congressional agencies like CBO and the Capitol Police performing legislative branch functions. But the days of power being endlessly concentrated in DC without any real checks/balances would be over.
Having these battleground Congressional races costing tens of millions each has ensured that Congress has become the playground of the rich oligarchs where the informed people will not really have a voice as those thugs will just buy up their votes with their empty promises of utopia. For example, we have an idiot in Texas named Beto who has spent over 38M (mostly from oligarch-oriented powermongers out-of-state) goes around saying that “health care is a right” without any honesty about how we’ll pay for it. Many people, all uninformed, eat up such dishonest soudbites without really thinking about it. If a fool like this were to get elected then the Texas House of Representatives would need to be able to remove him in case he doesn’t really serve the best interests of Texas in the Senate.
I’d be all for the Electoral College being revamped where each Congressional District gets one Electoral Vote and each State gets 2 Electoral Votes. We have 2 States that already do this. But as long as we have the situation where California can have winner-take-all but Texas be split-up (or vice versa) then that’ll never happen unless it happens across-the-board.
Yep. That’s exactly the way Canada, Japan, the UK and almost every other parlimentary democracy does it. Our electoral college system simply puts a little more emphasis on the individual states because our constitution was a compact between 13 soverign states to form a union.
http://articlevblog.com/2016/07/donald-trump-the-echo-of-our-framers-uncorrupted-president/
http://articlevblog.com/2016/07/the-framers-president/
http://articlevblog.com/2016/08/the-framers-president-ii/
No, it isn’t going anywhere, but as with so much of the Constitution the Left is corrupting the EC. The National Popular Vote movement (12 states so far) has participating states punt their electoral votes to the national popular vote winner.
To Pack Knight, you fail to see genius in the collective deliberations of the wisest men of the age. You are especially wrong about the EC.
This will probably last until the first Republican wins both the popular and the electoral vote. Maybe even as long as 2020.
Yeah, I think some states are wanting to lower the voting age to 16 if I remember correctly.
The states determine how to allocate their votes. That’s in the Constitution as well.
You win some, you lose some.
‘Every district gets representation, yea Texas might lose a few but so will the big lib states like Cali, New York, Florida and Illinois.’
FL is not a big lib state; FL is why Trump is president today...
‘Should we now declare the Giants the “real” winner?’
you should check out the runs scored variance of the 1960 WS, Yanks and Pirates (I remember with great fondness the Yankee tears)...55 for the Bombers, 27 for the Bucs...
excellent post...
‘I’d be all for the Electoral College being revamped where each Congressional District gets one Electoral Vote and each State gets 2 Electoral Votes.’
that sounds great, but then a CD with 5,000 voters get representation equal to one with 50,000...the two states that do this now have grand total of nine EV’s, and thus insignificant; in a state like PA, this would have massive impact...the CD’s would have to have proportional electors as well, for this to work...
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