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.

Your Daily Trump––Torches and Pitchforks and Burning Crosses

Trump urges his angriest followers to intimidate voters in black and hispanic neighborhoods

Reported by SLATE

And those communities are preparing to face that

Reported by Reuters

We may have a defining moment of Trump the politician.

A revealing and chilling few seconds from debate 3 reported by SLATE

Not since Nixon have we seen a paranoid this close to power.

From SLATE, the paranoid style in Republican politics

Trump’s anger is less political than it is personal. It’s always been about him. He’s addicted to the attention. He enjoys having people afraid of him. The great primatologist says it reminds her of dominance behavior among chimps.

Reported by Alternet

Donald Trump’s lewd and offensively sexist talk has given new life to a bad old habit among men of keeping women down through fear and intimidation.

Reported by SLATE

This stoking of fear is a central theme of his campaign. Trump has been intimidating women, people of color, immigrants, employees, and every group that has experienced repression in the past. He seeks vulnerabilities he can exploit. Any group that can be conveniently and quickly marginalized and excluded is quickly targeted and instructions go out to his millions of supporters, who are mostly white men or people who see an advantage siding with the supremacy of white men.

Trump's voter intimidation strategy reported by VOX

And by the Boston Globe

And the news media has been complicit. They see a commercial advantage in stoking the ugliness. Fearful audiences watch cable news. Angry audiences are bigger than happy and contented ones.

Reported by Bill Moyers

“If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,” Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take. . . . I would do whatever I can for my country.”

Once again we find sheriffs among the leaders of this pitchfork mob

The Milwaukee sheriff and his pitchfork posse, covered by the Guardian

Is Trump campaign a cult?

Question asked by the New Republic

Beyond the talk of armed revolt, there is the sheer profanity and ugliness of Trump’s revolution.

Reported by the reliably conservative Wall Street Journal

Trump's post election plans may include 24/7 rhetoric on his own news network

Reported by the Christian Science Monitor

In the last debate Trump refused to say he would accept the results of the election. It is growing clearer he will lose and he hates losing. When he loses he needs to say he was cheated.

This is how Republicans and Democrats used to congratulate the winner.

The LATimes looks back on the more gracious politics of George H. W. Bush.

(Of course Bush first won the White House using the Willie Horton ad.)

In an even more disputed election in 2000 Al Gore, who had seen the presidency decided by a split Supreme Court, gave one of the most gracious and dignified speeches of his political life.

Al Gore's speech via CNN. What a different and better and safer world we might have had if Gore hadn't been barred from the presidency by the prejudices of five justices.

One Republican-appointed Supreme Court justice warned of the wave of ignorance and anger we are experiencing today.

Via MSNBC and the Rachel Maddow Show.

Your Daily Trump––Trump & Rudy

Is Trump’s Plan B to capture a large segment of America and imprison them in an endless loop of hatred and lunacy? He’d find lots of investors. I’m guessing Roger Ailes will run it for him.

Vanity Fair reports on Trump's plan to become a TV network

Does the First Amendment protect deliberate lies?

The Atlantic sorts out this tricky issue.

Are liberals to blame for Trump? You’re joking...

The New Republic debunks this notion.

What we’ve learned about Trump supporters this past week

Reported by the New Yorker.

Trump and Giuliani as you’ve never seen them before. (Shared by my old editor at SPY)

Trump and Rudy on YouTube, where else?

Trump is already ordering his stormtroopers to intimidate voters on election day.

Trump's brownshirt plan reported by the LATimes.

From a year ago: Scientific America’s three part series examining the psychology of Trump supporters

How the GOP is Taking Away Our Right to Vote

During Reagan's rise to power Paul Weyrich made a speech disparaging good government and urging Republicans to make it harder for Americans to vote because the fewer the voters the more Republicans get elected. Paul Weyrich shaped the modern Republican Party around this subversive idea, wrapped it in the flag and went on to found the Heritage Foundation and other antidemocratic groups.

It's still happening. Republicans are attacking voting rights with all the billions of their monied allies. The goal is to reduce our democracy to a plutocracy, in which only the rich can decide policy, in which the rich evade taxes and enact laws to take rights away from workers, suppressing wages as well as voting rights. Imagine a world before Theodore Roosevelt. The bookends of this Republican coup d'etat are voter suppression and billionaires dominating politics via the recent Citizens United decision of the Republican flank of the Supreme Court. Pure politics.

This short video tells the story of an elderly woman's long hard effort to get the GOP-mandated voter ID.

This well-known Tennessee Democrat who left office in 2011 was deleted from the voting rolls in the district he represented for years. If it can happen to him it can happen to anyone.

An 86 year-old veteran found himself barred from voting on Super Tuesday. One of the groups most targeted by Republican voter purges are the elderly.

Who's doing this and how is it being done? It's being done deliberately and concertedly nationwide. The GOP and its corporate allies, notably the multibillionaire Koch brothers and their organization ALEC, which writes voter suppression laws, invites state legislators on junkets to sunny resorts and instructs them how to get their laws enacted. Legislation by remote control.

The actual plan by ALEC to suppress voting state by state, as written by the Koch brothers and their corporate cronies.

A report from Mother Jones magazine

Voter suppression is being prosecuted in a few places, but the effort to hunt down nonexistent "fraudulent voters" is far more aggressive and widespread and it's been legislated and funded by Republicans. But voter fraud is a phony issue, a pretext.

This article is from Washington Monthly.

This is from American Prospect.

How big is this voter fraud boogeyman the Republicans are scaring everybody about? After an expensive investigation in Ohio, it turned out to have happened in fewer than one MILLIONTH of ONE PERCENT of all votes cast. and this is what the Republican Party and ALEC are using to disenfranchise millions of voters. Phantom crimes are useful to right wing politicians. imagined crime frightens people into giving away their rights. And again, there are billions of corporate dollars behind this.

This report from the Brennan Center lays out the pathetic and transparent cynicism behind the GOP's voter purges and voter suppression campaign nationwide. They want power back and don't care whose rights they trample to get there.

What's Happening In Wisconsin?

I've been following this story in The Nation, but also in Forbes, which isn't exactly a leftist Maoist Commie rag.

If you remember the 80,000 African American voters Kathleen Harris conveniently removed from the Florida voter rolls in 2000, helping deliver the White House to George W. Bush... it's happening again. This time it's Wisconsin. It's all part of the long term Republican plan to cut non Republicans, young people, old people, working people, brown people, new citizens and others out of elections.

They've already figured out how to hide vote tallies on personal laptops for easier manipulation.

And it's in the works in Florida, Ohio, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, Louisiana and elsewhere. First they make democratic government not work, then they kill it.

When a highly respected historian and UW professor got wind of their tactics and their aims, they came down on him hard. It's easier to do that if most people are too afraid or distracted to complain about what is happening. So complain. Worry. Send letters. Protest. Educate your friends.