Tuesday, March 19, 2019

Elizabeth Warren's call to abolish the Electoral College is part of a pernicious pattern - Monica Showalter


by Monica Showalter

Warren is effectively calling for a tyranny of the majority model of government. And she's not alone...

Unlike, say, Beto O'Rourke, who offers nothing upstairs, or Kamala Harris, who flits with the wind with regard to what she's in favor of, Elizabeth Warren is a Democratic presidential candidate with some specific ideas.

And they're not good ones. 

Here's what's probably her worst, from Twitter:

It's a programmatic call from the worst of the Democratic electoral operatives' dream book: to wipe out the constitution and replace it with riggings for Democrats. With Warren, it's now coming into the mainstream as a respectable idea.

It's also awful, an idea clothed in the California-style slogan of "count all the votes," which is the rationale used for the open practice of ballot-harvesting there. "Count all the votes." "Every vote matters..."

What it is is a bid to second-guess and smash up the wisdom of the founding fathers for the sole reason that Democrats don't like losing. Call it the Democrat Pacifier for Permanent Power Act of 2020.

Sounds so nice — who could be against it? But what we have here is a proposed dismantling of a founding constitutional pillar of our country, which is that every state matters. If the Electoral College is abolished, not every state is going to matter; just the big ones are. End the Electoral College, and candidates will adjust their platforms to advocate for the interests solely of large states. If tiny Vermont needs something, too bad. Democrats will campaign to scarf up the California and New York vote and not bother to go to...Wisconsin. And with the large number of Democrats over the age of 70 now running for president, that's convenient, given the energy required for campaign travel. 

There is a recent argument that as things stand now with the Electoral College, candidates actually spend most of their trip time in swing states rather than tiny states, but it still proves that size isn't necessarily the determinant — the competition of ideas (read: purple states), combined with the winner-take-all system, is. Purple states won't matter either if the Electoral College is abolished.

Democrats actually benefit from one aspect of the Electoral College as it is, given that in a state like California, its sizable number of Electoral College votes (their numbers inflated by the fact that a quarter of the nation's illegal aliens live in the state) all go to the leftist candidate of the majority, despite the fact that a sizable minority voted for the Republican. Every vote count? Well, not exactly. My vote as a conservative for President Trump or some other Republican is always translated into a blue Electoral College vote for a Democrat, and close to half of California voters' votes are, given the winner-take-all system, which is how it goes. But the state representation elsewhere remains, which is why our republic works and why we see political back-and-forth. Were California and New York to become the only games in town, there would be no pendulum swing — just a Mexican PRI–style rigged one-party "perfect dictatorship."

That was why the Electoral College was put there to compensate for the tyranny of the majority, something seen in every third-world hellhole calling itself a "democracy." It's important that smaller states and their interests matter, too.

Here's another thing about the Electoral College worth noting: at the U.S.'s founding, the College came as the result of a deal. The smallest of the 13 colonies, such as New Jersey, were squarely against joining the Union, because they knew that their interests would be swallowed up by much larger New York. The Electoral College was instituted in a compromise deal crafted by the founding fathers to get those smaller states into the Union. So if the deal is broken with the abolition of the Electoral College, and the U.S. goes to a tyranny-of-the-majority model, those states would have a reasonable legal case to secede, given the bargain that was struck.

Now, I get what Democrats are upset about: it's got to be tough to lose when the absolute popular majority of votes for president goes to a Democrat, while the presidency is won by a Republican. It's happened at least twice in our lifetimes. Maybe a clean-out of the near-million illegal votes, which is now Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton's estimate, would show a truer picture. But even if every vote were cast legally, what the results show is that Democrats fail to campaign for the interests of the small states that vote against them. Their problem is one of failure to appeal to enough regions, despite wanting to rule the entire region — they want to rule Iowa as if its interests were identical to coastal California's. They're unhappy because they've lost out by not working on their appeal to more than just a narrow slice of hip, coastal voters. Instead of changing their platforms to something less odiously socialist, they want to double down and marginalize North Dakota's sentiment as irrelevant.

Is this a pattern?

I think so. They lose a lot, so they want to change the rules.

They don't like the Electoral College.

They want 16-year-olds to vote.

They want non-citizens to vote.

They favor ballot-harvesting in California.

They are trying to nullify the Supreme Court by stacking it with their own.

They are all in for selective prosecutions of political opponents and censorship on social media to silence opponents.

It's as if they are at odds with all of the founding principles of how the republic works, from the First Amendment to the last. Warren's grim determination to destroy the Electoral College is just the latest of a bad pattern. The tyranny-of-the-majority model is not only a PRI model; it's a Venezuela model. Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez destroyed the integrity of the electoral system long before his country went into its current disastrous slide. Socialist meddling in the electoral apparatus is hell on a republican democracy. Elizabeth Warren is just promoting it with her latest bad idea.


Monica Showalter

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/elizabeth_warrens_call_to_abolish_the_electoral_college_is_part_of_a_pernicious_pattern.html

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