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Killing the
Electoral College Would Alienate Half the Country
Walter E. Williams
October 17, 2018
Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seeking to represent New
York’s 14th Congressional District, has called for the abolition of the
Electoral College.
Her argument came on the heels of the Senate’s confirming Brett
Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. She was lamenting the fact that Chief
Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, nominated by President
George W. Bush, and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, nominated by
President Donald Trump, were court appointments made by presidents who
lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College vote.
Hillary Clinton has long been a critic of the Electoral College. Just
recently, she wrote in The Atlantic, “You won’t be surprised to hear
that I passionately believe it’s time to abolish the Electoral College.”
Subjecting presidential elections to the popular vote sounds eminently
fair to Americans who have been miseducated by public schools and
universities. Worse yet, the call to eliminate the Electoral College
reflects an underlying contempt for our Constitution and its
protections for personal liberty.
Regarding miseducation, the founder of the Russian Communist Party,
Vladimir Lenin, said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the
seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” His immediate successor,
Josef Stalin, added, “Education is a weapon whose effect depends on who
holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”
A large part of Americans’ miseducation is the often-heard claim that
we are a democracy. The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the two
most fundamental documents of our nation—the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution. In fact, our Constitution—in Article
4, Section 4—guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form
of Government.”
The Founding Fathers had utter contempt for democracy. James Madison,
in Federalist Paper No. 10, said that in a pure democracy, “there is
nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an
obnoxious individual.” At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Virginia
Gov. Edmund Randolph said that “in tracing these evils to their origin,
every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.”
John Adams wrote: “Remember democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes,
exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet, that did
not commit suicide.” At the Constitutional Convention, Alexander
Hamilton said: “We are now forming a republican government. Real
liberty” is found not in “the extremes of democracy but in moderate
governments. … If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot
into a monarchy.”
For those too dense to understand these arguments, ask yourselves: Does
the Pledge of Allegiance say “to the democracy for which it stands” or
“to the republic for which it stands”? Did Julia Ward Howe make a
mistake in titling her Civil War song “Battle Hymn of the Republic”?
Should she have titled it “Battle Hymn of the Democracy”?
The Founders saw our nation as being composed of sovereign states that
voluntarily sought to join a union under the condition that each state
admitted would be coequal with every other state. The Electoral College
method of choosing the president and vice president guarantees that
each state, whether large or small in area or population, has some
voice in selecting the nation’s leaders.
Were we to choose the president and vice president under a popular
vote, the outcome of presidential races would always be decided by a
few highly populated states. They would be states such as California,
Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, which contain
134.3 million people, or 41 percent of our population.
Presidential candidates could safely ignore the interests of the
citizens of Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota,
Montana, and Delaware. Why? They have only 5.58 million Americans, or
1.7 percent of the U.S. population.
We would no longer be a government “of the people”; instead, our
government would be put in power by and accountable to the leaders and
citizens of a few highly populated states.
Political satirist H.L. Mencken said, “The kind of man who wants the
government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man
whose ideas are idiotic.”
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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