Free Republic

In the last week since Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in a stunning electoral blowout, there have been calls from many on the left to abolish America’s unique presidential election system.It still hasn’t been settled whether Trump or Clinton won the popular vote, but many Democrats are upset about the possibility that their candidate may have won more total votes, yet lost the election.Progressives are taking aim at the Electoral College and want to replace it with a national popular vote. This would both remove the indirect mediation of the electors’ votes, and more damagingly, eliminate the power of states...

The Electoral College remains in place over two centuries after the framers of the Constitution empowered it to select presidents. Though occasionally maligned, this system of electing a chief executive has been incredibly successful for the American people. Many modern voters might be surprised to learn that when they step into a ballot box to select their candidate for president, they actually are casting a vote for fellow Americans called electors. These electors, appointed by the states, are pledged to support the presidential candidate the voters have supported. The Electoral College holds its vote the Monday after the second Wednesday...

The new conventional wisdom in the aftermath of the 2012 elections is that Republicans face two challenges: first, that the United States is no longer a center-right nation, but a center-left one; second, that the country’s demographic shift away from whites will make it tougher for Republicans to win votes. The proposed solution is that Republicans must compromise on the party’s core policies, from immigration to taxation to social issues. The conventional wisdom is wrong. I once worked in South Africa for a centrist party, the Democratic Alliance, which faced the same challenges as Republicans do, only far more extreme....

All RINOs are not the same, even when they profess almost identical beliefs. All politicians try to appeal to their constituents, but not all politicians - by a long shot - have the same type of constituents. RINOs who try to win election by stating policies as conservative as the voters will allow are not the problem with the Republican Party. Democrats, shrewdly, have grasped in the last two election cycles the art of the possible in winning congressional elections. Blue Dog Democrats are congressmen who, if Republicans held their districts, have voted completely against the House leadership's health care...

Howard Dean is doing such a bang-up job as Chairman of the Democratic Party that many are convinced he is an operative of Karl Rove. Not since the days of the Carter Administration has any single Democrat made Republicans look so impressive. But when he isn’t claiming that George W. Bush had beforehand knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, or attacking members of the military as brutal thugs, or stating that some 61 million moronic Bush voters “haven’t worked an honest day in their life,” Dean is trying to convince America that he and his liberal elitist friends represent Mainstream America....

Professor Steven Calabresi of Northwestern University Law School maintains that the Democrats’ unprecedented filibuster of federal appellate-court nominees is driven by the party’s imperative to retain its political advantage with minorities and women. Professor Calabresi notes that nominees such as “Miguel Estrada, who is Hispanic, Janice Rogers Brown, who is African American, Bill Pryor, a brilliant young Catholic, and two white women, Priscilla Owen and Carolyn Kuhl.” are victims of Democrats’ determination “not to allow any more conservative African-Americans, Hispanics, women or Catholics to be groomed for nomination to the High Court with court of appeals appointments.” On the other...