It is an established principle of the current political class, made up of mostly of abhorrent political party office seekers and bureaucrats that the Electoral College is not just obsolete, but apparently a fool’s errand. The Democrats, for now, are at the forefront of this thought. But then what can be expected of a group of people who think 16-year-olds and jailbirds should vote.
Interestingly, many of these politicians are trumpeters for the Founders and what brilliant men they were (though they were bad for being men). But these same politicians are openly hostile toward the Electoral College: the horrible system that breaches the wall of true democracy, they claim.
The Republican supporters cry in anguish at the thought (“the Democrats are dividing our country”), though ironically it was the Republicans who were responsible for making war against the Electoral College system in the bloodiest conflict in the history of the western hemisphere; the so-called Civil War. The war’s goal (no, not slave freeing or union-saving) was to end the states as sovereign peoples and claim them within a nonfederal, single national state, a democracy.
Now, this has come to fully haunt them as they attempt defenses by suggesting the Founders were simply trying to protect the smaller states from the large (population) states; as if the states were no more than counties within a state that needed protection.
Both Trent England of Hillsborough College and John Daniel Davidson both have been frequently on the Fox Channel to defend the Electoral College system.
But their defenses will always fall short as long as they defend a “national” government. And if the states can’t check the creature they created, the federal government, they will be subjected to changes like the 17th Amendment (they cannot secede as in 1776 nor tried again and failed in 1861) as well as the present attempt at certain states to collude to end the electoral college.
They will always fail in a defense of the Electoral College, as their Republican cousins or brethren will not let them refer to the unpleasantness of 1861-65 as anything but a war of national righteousness (read Yankee). In fact, it was a collision between the original Federalists (Nationalists) and Anti-Federalists (True Federalists). The result being the states became no more than counties.
But for now, the loudest purveyors against the system are not the wild-eyed, uneducated Trotskyites of the neocon Republicans but the Marist socialists of the other party.
Elizabeth Warren said that it should be done away with. She also stated that once elected she hopes to be the last one to be elected by such an undemocratic system. And her Democratic ilk, Hillary Clinton cannot cease whining about her “majority of the voters” of the country; even bringing forward the brilliance of characters like Howard Stern (good grief) to support her in her sour-puss loss.
For all her war-whooping, Warren is correct. It is an undemocratic system. And while it is true, as to the riposte most often hurled, that this is a republic, not a democracy, contemporary defenders of the Electoral College system often misunderstand their defense.
This is NOT a national republic, a single country, where a republican system bestowed a disproportionate percentage of voting power to the “smaller states” via the Founders’ wisdom in protecting them. Nor was it to impart some magical “check” to a mythical “check and balance” arrangement. The Founders did not create the states. The Founders were representatives of states that created the federal republic of states. The so-called check and balance ideology DOES NOT, CANNOT, exist within the three branches of a singular government. It exists as an ability of the states to say No to the federal government. This principle was seriously wounded (if not killed) at Appomattox.
The Electoral College system was established to allow the states to select a presiding officer (president) over the republican union. There was no intention, ever, to form a national democracy where the majority, in mob fashion elected anyone to anything. As waffling as he was, Madison was correct in his phrase: “The tyranny of the majority.”
But since Madison was just some despicable old white male we’ll need to listen to some diverse new Founders. Perhaps, AOC or Hillary Clinton, or that brilliant light of thought and wisdom, Howard Stern.
A show of hands for true federalism.
