The Electoral College Should Block Trump, Not Enable Him

Peter Beinart, in the Atlantic, explains how the Founders devised the Electoral College to prevent demagogues like Trump from reaching power, not to enable them to.

"As Michael Signer explains, the framers were particularly afraid of the people choosing a demagogue. The electors, Hamilton believed, would prevent someone with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” from becoming president. And they would combat “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” They would prevent America’s adversaries from meddling in its elections. The founders created the Electoral College, in other words, in part to prevent the election of someone like Donald Trump.”

David Kaiser says much the same thing in TIME.

From Federalist 68, the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton:

"It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice... It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.”

Preventing a dangerous demagogue and liar and tax dodger and draft evader and con man and bigot like Donald Trump from seizing power is exactly why the Electoral College was invented. Trump’s whole life has been one of mischief. The Founders would be appalled.

Paul Abrams at Huffington Post cites the Russian spy agency's interference in this election as reason enough to use the Electoral College to block Trump––not to use it as a device to put him in the White House. After all, Hillary Clinton earned 1.7 million more votes than Trump did.

The Christian Science Monitor proposes some reforms to the Electoral College.

If the Russian interference isn't enough there is this: For 50 years the GOP’s game plan has included vigorous voter suppression.

ThinkProgress calls the Republican strategy a case study in voter suppression

How do we know the suppression and intimidation of voters has been central to the GOP playbook all along? They've boasted about it. They crow about each law they pass to disenfranchise voters. They boast about how it will elect Republicans if they can keep people from voting. This year's decline in voter turnout was the Republican Party's doing.

It's worth sharing this famous speech excerpt from the father of the modern right wing Republican Party, superchristian demagogue Paul Weyrich. Here, Paul Weyrich cheerfully derides Good Government. Over the past decades since then the Republican Party has done its damnedest to destroy Good Government and replace it with bad.

Is the Electoral College a Set of Rules or an Escape Clause?

I posted the other day about the outside chance the Electoral College could decide against validating the Trump election. I’ve heard some rebuttal from very important voices, ones that I respect. Notably this article in the Atlantic. I disagree with them, understanding they know many facts I don't. It’s important to recognize what they are saying. It’s also very unlikely that Electors from those traditionally blue states that went for Trump, even the ones narrowly divided, would become “faithless electors” and defy the state total. But they could. And the reason they still can indicates the flexibility of this system, a flexibility that was put there by the Founders for reasons that resonate today.

Here is a new article in TIME addressing this new possibility that Trump might be kept from office.

There is a group calling themselves Hamilton Electors.

The Founders were afraid of mob rule. In the North the rural people were suspicious of the urban mobs, in the South the elites were afraid of the white peasantry and especially of the slaves who outnumbered them all, and the more settled East Coast thought the people west of the Appalachians were an unruly irresponsible mob––they had, after all, left because they couldn’t get along with anyone there (actually, they’d left because they would only succeed where they could find free land to own, land given them by the government back in Washington.) James Madison wanted the Electoral College as an instrument to push back against the numerical disadvantages the South had because it disenfranchised most of its population for being black. This interview at VOX does a good job of explaining Madison's ploy. A lot of the rationale for it was antidemocratic and downright bigoted, not just against the slave population but against the general population. The Founders were afraid of the ignorant mob deciding things. The Founders would be appalled by Donald Trump. While they were watching their democracy work itself out they were routinely appalled by each other, Jeffersonians vs. Hamiltonians, the whole unfolding story was a bitter argument.

But I don’t believe any of the Founders would approve of an Electoral College that would validate Donald Trump’s presidency. This invalidation of an ignorant, inexperienced, corrupt and dangerous unpredictable candidate was exactly what the Electoral College was supposed to prevent. Would Franklin approve of a president who thought science was a Chines hoax? Would Hamilton or Washington approve of a president who was a massive and lifelong tax evader? Those two Founders put on their old army uniforms and led a column of troops out into the frontier to put down a tax rebellion by the ancestors of this year’s Trump voters. The Founders knew the necessity of government. They also believed in checks and balances; Donald Trump believes in autocracy.

It’s unlikely that any of the Electors in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Michigan will refuse to cast their vote for Trump. It shows their proper loyalty to their electorate. But it would also show their proper loyalty to their electorate if the Electors loyal to Philadelphia and Detroit and Columbus respected the fact that nearly half of the voters in their state voted for Hillary Clinton, and that Hillary Clinton won millions more of the popular vote nationally than Trump did. Would doing this violate the rules or simply defy the conventional way of doing things. Would it, in fact, correct an antidemocratic fluke? In the end, are we provincials or are we all Americans?

This defiance of dangerous convention might open the door for examining other conventions we haven’t examined, out of habit or laziness, for instance why small numbers of citizens in less populous states like Wyoming get to have two senators while many millions more citizens in New York or Texas have only the same two senators. Why do the citizens of Washington DC, who outnumber the citizens of Wyoming, have no Senators at all, and no Congressperson either. As preposterous a calculation, really, as the one that stated black people were worth 3/5 of a vote while not being able to vote. For over a century after Emancipation southern (and many northern) black citizens were denied the right to vote because of similar perfectly legal and ancient conventions.

I’d also like to ask how many of these blue states that flipped into the Trump column did so because the Voting Rights Act was suspended by John Roberts’ Supreme Court, enabling the suppression of 300,000 legal voters we know of in Wisconsin alone. A cynical legal convention enabled the Tea Party wave of 2010 to resegregate congressional districts nationwide into mostly safe Republican ones and fewer Democratic ones. This also suppresses votes. The biggest and most brazen vote suppressor is the requirement of state issued IDs and the simultaneous effort by officials to make those IDs difficult for some people to get, some people who tend to vote Democratic. The Voting Rights Act needs to be reapplied nationwide, not just in the South where it was first enacted.

This article from McClatchy describes the likelihood that voter suppression in 14 states tipped the scales toward Trump.

I recognize that the Electoral College is part of the system that both candidates signed on to. At least Hillary did. Trump repeatedly stated he wouldn’t abide by results he disliked. So Hillary could not try to undermine those rules. But Electors could. It is well within their range of traditional options to refuse to rubber stamp a second loser of the popular vote in recent years. They might see it as their duty. They might see it as the only responsible thing to do.

And it would result in a major upheaval.

There is already a major upheaval going on. As the final returns are tallied it appears likely that several millions more will have voted for Hillary Clinton than voted for Trump. Millions of women are planning to march on Washington on inauguration day to protest that inauguration. Millions would march if he isn’t inaugurated, and many of those marchers would likely be armed. So we have a choice: which upheaval do we listen to? Do we back down because one of these upheavals is heavily armed? We’ve seen that kind of back down already. Heavily armed white revolutionaries in Oregon were let off the hook for what our Founding Fathers would have called treason. Think of George Washington facing down those yahoos in Oregon. He would have. Andrew Jackson, who Trump most closely resembles (although the comparison is an insult to Jackson) would have too.

I think that is one of the calculations going on right now, not to upset the white, heavily armed and understandably angry minority who voted for Trump by refusing to seat him. Maybe it would seem less dangerous if in the next month before the Electors meet it were more evident how unwise it would be to choose Trump for our president. Is he in Putin’s pocket? What about the massive fraud he will be defending himself against in court this month? The plaintiffs are not rich people, they are regular blue collar Americans. What if Trump continues to back away from his key promises? He changes his mind every five minutes. Will his own supporters tolerate this once he is in office? How do retirees feel about what Trump’s election is doing to the bond markets? And Paul Ryan’s promise to profitize Medicare? This is the moment for the Trump voters to be asking “What the hell have we done?” It’s important that they face the consequences of their vote. The Electoral College offers a moment for the nation to reconsider, and it should.

FYI... here's the list of the 2016 Electors.

If reform is the goal, here's an article from CSMonitor about that. Likelihood diminishes as this second right wing wave in six years entrenches itself in Congress and the courts.

The Gingrich World of Aristocrats and Serfs

There's a very cynical calculation that goes through every Republican mind, a dollar calculation. If you're a rich Republican it's how long and hard you can get people to work for how little and how little you can get away with paying in Lincoln's hated income taxes on the earnings your underlings are sweating out for you. If you're a poor Republican you obviously can't do calculations.

John Nichols of The Nation magazine converted Gingrich's calculation about poor children and "overpaid" school janitors to a simple equation using Gingrich's income as a metric. What it boils down to is plain fat ugly rich man's greed and prejudice.

Nichols summation of Gingrich Mathematics is worth posting wherever you post things: "Even in a party where cruelty is now considered a political virtue, there is something unsettling about a man who collected $30,000 each month to offer an hour of historical counsel to Freddie Mac administrators attacking elementary and secondary school janitors who, according to fresh Bureau of Labor Statistics data, earn a mean wage of $13.74 an hour, or $28,570 per year."

So Newt, who earns $30,000 an hour to "advise" bankers and financiers about history thinks school janitors are overpaid. In the old way of things Newt imagines he would have been one of the overseers on a horse watching his peasants till his land, and his peasants' children too, preferably peasants of a different color and owned instead of paid.

In Gingrich's world of aristocrats and serfs with government regulations and taxes happily out of the way, we get back to the world that our Founding Fathers fought the revolution to overturn. The nasty brutish world of European aristocracies and poor people who fled in ships to these savage shores. This country wasn't founded to evade taxes or to "liberate" the rich. Those who think taxes are evil actually think society is evil, or are rich enough to think society is unnecessary. George Washington thought otherwise when he mounted an army to collect taxes from recalcitrant citizens in western Pennsylvania. Education? Jefferson left his presidency off his tombstone but included his founding of the University of Virginia. (He had no grand plans for making poor students work as janitors.)

Thomas Paine had this to say about citizens' obligations to the public good. He took a dim view of the very rich, of people like Gingrich and his clientele:

"All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came."

Lizz Winstead (the creator of the Daily Show, who by the way grew up in my neighborhood) takes a shot at laughing Gingrich out of the race. Which may be unwise. He's such a monster we could do worse than keeping him around.

The Demands of the 99%

Last night Keith Olbermann read a very articulate and comprehensive list of demands issued by the Occupy Wall Street group. It might be better to characterize them as a list of charges demanding redress or correction. A list of grievances. Naomi Klein addressed the protesters; her important speech is published in The Nation. Krugman wrote this morning that this is a watershed moment. We must seize it.

These individuals, working people, students, people who used to work until they were outsourced or downsized, teachers, nurses, engineers, communications workers, ministers, janitors, firefighters, neighbors, friends, are not radical. They are in a very important sense true conservatives. They are for restoring the rules and the rights and the public institutions that functioned well during the best half century of American history, the years following the New Deal. These rules and rights were honored and preserved by FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, Carter, even Nixon. But since the Reagan years these rights and rules have been systematically eroded or taken from citizens and given to corporations and corporations have been allowed to evade their obligations as members and leaders of our society. The corporation isn't a dangerous thing except when it works against the society and the people in it. Often corporations have been a strong progressive force in our lives, advancing civil rights, retirement security and other benefits, but without limits and reasonable regulation by the people and their democratic government corporations can be a dangerous thing.

The founders knew this. Contrary to what false conservatives say on television, the founders had concerns about the concentration of wealth. James Madison had this to say:

“[T]he day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be an impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of few. A Republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when the day comes...we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.”

The founders' beliefs and ideas resemble not only what is being expressed by the protesters on Wall Street but the ideas put forward by the president and the Democrats and shut down by the Republicans in Congress. Reasonable limits on corporate power is not a radical idea. Progressive taxation didn't make Eisenhower a communist. President Washington formed an army to go after tax evaders. Hamilton created the national debt not as a burden but to enable the American economy to grow and prosper. The Republicans in Congress and their wealthy and powerful allies on Wall Street need to be subject to reasonable restrictions and levels of taxation. It is the working and middle classes who need protection and help.