Walter Williams has written a column defending the Electoral College in which he asks, “Is it ignorance of or contempt for our Constitution that fuels the movement to abolish the Electoral College?”
The answer is – yes. It is either ignorance of or contempt for the Constitution that fuels the anti-Electoral College movement. Whether it is ignorance or contempt depends on which leftist we’re talking about. I’ve never met a Democrat yet who didn’t believe the Electoral College should be eliminated. Not surprising since two of the last five presidential elections had the Republican losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College, making Democrats absolutely apoplectic. If the roles were reversed and it was the Democrat who won the Electoral College, you can be sure that they would be staunch defenders of it. But, they hate it.
But which of them are ignorant and which are contemptuous? I used to believe that Democrats at the grassroots level are mostly the ignorant and the leadership is mostly the contemptuous. But my theory may have taken a hit when Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez was speaking at the Indiana University Law School and said, “the Electoral College is not a creation of the Constitution.”
“It doesn’t have to be there,” Perez said. “There’s a national popular vote compact in which a number of states have passed a bill that says we will allocate our votes, our electoral votes, to the person who wins the national popular vote once other states totaling 270 electoral votes do the same.”
Does the chairman of the DNC really not know the Electoral College was created by the Constitution or is he lying about it to get the ignorant stirred up against it? He’s either ignorant or purposefully lying. He’s definitely wrong.
And, of course, Hillary Clinton wants the Electoral College eliminated since it cost her the election.
Newsmax – Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that the Electoral College should be abolished after Republican Donald Trump won the electoral vote, while she garnered the popular vote.
“I said that in 2000 after what happened with Al Gore,” Clinton told Anderson Cooper on CNN.
“I was elected to the Senate that same year,” Clinton said, “and if you look at our recent history, we’ve had several candidates, nominees, who have won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College. It says that an anachronism that was designed for another time no longer works, if we’ve moved toward one person-one vote. That’s how we select winners. I think it needs to be eliminated,” Clinton added. “I’d like to see us move beyond it, yes.”
Leftist disdain for the Electoral College has increased since the 2016 election. Everything happening in our country that lefties disagree with can be blamed on the Electoral College.
ExtraNewsfeed – Let me take a step back to remind you how the Electoral College is affecting you right now. Remember the recent celebrations of Senator John McCain’s no-vote on the ACA repeal? If we had a reasonable presidential election system, that vote wouldn’t have mattered in the slightest. Remember the aches you felt as our nation’s environmental protections were stripped from our country? That’s the Electoral College again.
Or remember the Muslim ban, the sharing of Israeli intelligence with Russia, the rollback of recession-preventing banking regulations, the appointment of Justice Gorsuch, the firing of Director Comey, the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, and the ban on transgender individuals in the military? You may ascribe these atrocities to racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, or just plain idiocy. And you may be right.
But also remember that every single one of these incidents was directly result of America’s use of the Electoral College. Every single one of them.
If we forget this fact and allow the issue to disappear from the public eye for years at a time, we will never have hope for a cure. Demagoguery will continue to reign, campaign financiers will prosper, corruption will flourish, and the Executive Branch of our government will remain unmoored from anything resembling even the debris of a citizen-selected-government.
The Electoral College — as we are currently using it — is a virus in the heart of our Executive Branch. If we don’t dispel the affliction from our political system before it comes time for the 2020 election, it won’t matter how far the President’s approval has plummeted, and it won’t matter how hated he is by progressives and liberals.
All that will matter is that he has the swing states.
Those who want to eliminate the Electoral College know they will never succeed in doing so through the required process – a Constitutional amendment, so they have come up with another method to get around it called the National Popular Vote or the Interstate Compact. Under this process, once enough states have passed national popular vote legislation in their state legislatures, the compact would be enacted. Under this system, all of the electoral votes in those states would be awarded to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of how the vote turned out in that state. For example, here in Oklahoma Trump received 949,136 votes and Clinton received 420,375. Under the national popular vote system, Clinton would have received all seven of Oklahoma’s electoral votes, in spite of the fact that she received less than 29% of the votes.
In spite of how ridiculous this would be, the proponents behind this system have managed to convince even some Republicans that the national popular vote system should be adopted. Here in Oklahoma, State Senate Republicans passed a bill a few years ago to enact this system but it was killed by the more conservative House after a public fury.
While there can be no guarantee that a free trip or junket to a ‘conference’ at a resort wouldn’t change an elected official’s vote, it might behoove those of us who elect people to represent us to inquire as to their views on the Electoral College. It would probably not be a question they expect at the state level if they were asked to explain their knowledge of the Electoral College and their views on whether or not it should be changed. It would be a political litmus test that could potentially eliminate some faux conservatives.
The contempt that leftists have for the Electoral College is elevated by their losses when winning the popular vote, but the core of their disdain lies in their love of a huge, powerful, central government. That states have rights is irrelevant to them. The Electoral College was designed to rest the power to elect the president in the states, not the people. Under federalism, states have a sovereign role in our political system and it is that role that leftists seek to eliminate.
In a refreshing bit of honesty from a Democrat, Bryan Dean Wright criticized his own party’s attempt to circumvent the Electoral College.
Fox News Opinion – It’s clear, though, that extremists in the Democratic Party aren’t keen on doing things right. Why? They know that passing constitutional reforms is tough. Indeed, amendments almost always fail.
For them, that means there’s only one solution: cheating. They’re willing to treat the constitution like a downed tree to be cleared in order to secure the White House in 2020.
But if that’s what it takes to win, this Democrat would rather lose.
If all Democrats were as honest as Wright, there would be no national popular vote movement. And if the Democratic leadership was honest, there probably would be no elected Democrats. Now that’s something I can get behind.
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