Posted on 05/27/2024 10:32:44 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Last week, Joy Behar of “The View” on ABC called the Electoral College “un-American.”
Oh my. Perhaps we could call her an “Electoral College dropout”?
The Constitution says that “We the people” are in charge of our country, but we act through our elected representatives. The provision for the Electoral College can be found in the Constitution in Article II, Section 1, Clause 2. It’s in America’s foundational document — despite Joy Behar’s claim that it’s “un-American.” The gist of it is that we don’t directly elect the president, but we do vote for those who do so. The Constitution provides a layer of protection — to spare us from would-be dictators.
I once produced a short video segment for Providence Forum called, “A Republic, Not a Democracy.” It includes comments on the Electoral College.
In that video, the late Dr. Walter Williams, who had been a long-time professor at George Mason University, noted: “The founders of our country did not intend for us to be a democracy or a majority rule, because the founders held democracy in utter contempt. They feared the idea of majority rule.”
So, said Dr. Williams, they came up with “the Electoral College as a way of electing the president, because if we did not have an Electoral College, then big states — highly populated states like California and New York and Florida — would decide who’s the president. Very few presidential candidates would campaign in Wyoming or Idaho, because the population is very small. They would put all their resources in the heavily populated states, and the founders were trying to, in their brilliance, they were trying to prevent that.”
We seem to forget these days that the states created the federal government, and not the other way around. The Electoral College is a way to let the little states have a say, as well as the big states. Because candidates have to win not just the majority vote, but the majority of the Electoral College votes, they cannot simply focus their presidential campaigns on population centers like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. They must also appeal to voters in less populous states to amass those electoral votes. If there were no Electoral College, states like Idaho, West Virginia, and either of the Dakotas might never be visited by a presidential candidate again.
For our video, I also interviewed Dennis Prager of PragerU, and he put it this way: “The Electoral College was a brilliant innovation of the founders, because they didn’t want a democracy, they wanted a republic.”
He noted, “The founders, being wise, understood people are not basically good. You can’t be wise if you think human nature is good. So, they understood they have to have as many checks and balances on human power as possible. That is why we have three branches of the government to be a check on one another. They didn’t trust human beings, and correctly so.”
And all of this bears directly on the Electoral College issue, notes Prager: “So, they understood that a simple direct election could easily end up with some demagogue getting a majority of the popular vote. So, there’s a check on the popular vote by the states, and that’s why they have the Electoral College. The popular vote is important, but it is not the only decisive thing. It was genius. If we get rid of the Electoral College, it’s the beginning of the end of America as it has been constituted.”
Speaking of Prager, one of the popular PragerU videos featured Constitutional scholar Tara Ross on this very issue. She is the author of The Indispensable Electoral College: How the Founders’ Plan Saves Our Country from Mob Rule and Enlightened Democracy: The Case for the Electoral College.
Having interviewed her on the radio before, I asked her for any comment to the idea of the Electoral College as supposedly being “un-American.”
She told me:
“The Electoral College is directly established by our Constitution and reflects the most basic principles of America’s founding charter. If the Electoral College is ‘un-American,’ then so is every other constitutional institution. Our Constitution creates a government that is a blend of democracy (self-governance), republicanism (deliberation & compromise), and federalism (national vs. state authority) because our Founders sought to ensure that the American government reflects all voices, despite our diversity and despite the varying sizes of our states.”
And Ross added, “The Electoral College is a reflection of these principles and simply ensures that large states and urban areas don’t tyrannize the rest of the country when it comes to selection of the President. Calling the Electoral College ‘un-American’ is nonsensical. If anything, the Electoral College is uniquely American.”
It would seem to me that people like Joy Behar have the opportunity to voice their opinions, no matter how seemingly inane, precisely because of the governmental structure the founders of America so cleverly laid for us as one nation under God.
Jerry Newcombe, D.Min., is the executive director of the Providence Forum, an outreach of D. James Kennedy Ministries, where Jerry also serves as senior producer and an on-air host. He has written/co-written 33 books, including George Washington’s Sacred Fire (with Providence Forum founder Peter Lillback, Ph.D.) and What If Jesus Had Never Been Born? (with D. James Kennedy, Ph.D.). www.djkm.org? @newcombejerry www.jerrynewcombe.com
No. But the people who want to get rid of it are.
No.
It’s absurd to think so.
It’s unAmerican to be against it, by definition pretty much.
They are against the US.
How can it be unAmerican when it is part of our Constitution and an integral part of our election process to ensure the federal system works for all states and citizens? Isn’t it unAmerican to suggest otherwise to undermine the federal system and empower the tyranny of the country’s several urban areas?
Joy,
The Constitution protects your right to be an idiot.
Not this crap again
What does this bitch know about being an American?
Were it not for the current method of voting - 14 counties would control every election is the US.
IOW, the people of Alaska, Wyo and other small States would be totally disenfranchised.
Allow ILLEGALS to vote and you get much the same effect.
Fight so-called motor voter and other ‘automatic’ voter registration schemes, they are part of the fraud machine built up by the Dems.
They redefine “American” like they redefine everything.
the Electoral College was one of the several checks and balances our Republic’s Founders set up to prevent the (extremely dangerous) excessive democracy as well known to history (Greece in ancient days, the bloody French Revolution in times near those of our Constitutional Convention, etc.)
it is very very American, our Founders worked hard to design it well (along with a state-appointed US Senate, alas now gone, and a prohibition on the federal govt assessing or collecting any individual income taxes, also alas now gone)
we should have stayed with the Republic our Founders designed for us! As Ben Franklin said, they gave us “a republic, if you/we could keep it.”
well, we didn’t. and now we have the consequences of, in effect, the very sort of dictatorship they feared
Joy Behar is un-American.
Should mentally deranged libtards be allowed on TV?
It’s designed to keep un-Americans from ruling.
You can’t get more American than being codified in the Constitution. Article II, Section 1, Clauses 2 and 3.
President AOC and Democratic Congress will pass a law banning the Electoral College in 2047.
First of all, there’s no such thing as a national popular vote. Without the electoral college, any dispute as to who won would require a national recount. Impossible. Find anyone who thinks that’s a good idea. Proponents of eliminating the electoral college have no idea that there is no such thing as a national popular vote.
Those who oppose the Electoral College want to hand America over to tyranny!
We must NEVER allow that!
They designated electors to each of the three political branches with the purpose of each institution in mind.1 As opposed to the House and Senate, whose members know their employers and thus whom they must satisfy, the Framers’ President was unbeholden to the people-at-large, states, Congress, faction, or collection of factions – what we know as political parties.
Our Framers discarded the ages-old methods of appointing chief executives. We cannot thank them enough! They devised a third body, neither popular nor aristocratic, a temporary electoral college to whom their choice, the President, owed nothing!
Thanks to a few electors, passing electors who did not hold federal office themselves, the Framers’ President didn’t owe his office to either the masses or elites.
He could do his duty to the Constitution and not to a political party.
They want those 14 counties to control elections.
They don’t want the Senate, either. Mob rule is what we have now, to a great degree. Once the EC falls it will get really crazy.
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