October 29, 2024
The liberal faction in America has an annoying tendency to want to change everything that gets in the way of its drive for total control of the country that will last forever.
This tendency includes such radical actions as packing the Supreme Court with liberal justices who will essentially ignore the basis for our laws and Constitution and ignore existing laws and the terms of the Constitution and substitute their political preferences, without going through required processes to make such changes.
They also would like to abolish the Senate filibuster that has played such an important part in preventing bad measures from getting easily passed in that body.
The filibuster promotes compromise and protects the minority party’s voice and function. It also protects purposeful debate, which is the intended purpose of the Senate. And it provides a safeguard against political extremism and corporate influence.
And they want to abolish the Electoral College. Criticism of this element of the government includes that it is not a mechanism of direct democracy, or as a voice of the people, since it replaces the popular vote result with a different process. But the United States of America is not, and has never been a direct democracy. It is also called a weapon of slavery. But that has been effectively proven wrong.
The Founders deliberately created the Electoral College as a mechanism of federalism. Federalism recognizes the states as important elements of the nation with a degree of control over what does and does not happen.
“Doing away with the Electoral College would breach our fidelity to the spirit of the Constitution, a document expressly written to thwart the excesses of majoritarianism,” in the opinion of John Samples, Vice President of the Cato Institute.
“First, we must keep in mind the likely effects of direct popular election of the president,” Samples wrote. “We would probably see elections dominated by the most populous regions of the country or by several large metropolitan areas.”
“Second, the Electoral College makes sure that the states count in presidential elections. As such, it is an important part of our federalist system — a system worth preserving. Historically, federalism is central to our grand constitutional effort to restrain power,” he wrote, “but even in our own time we have found that devolving power to the states leads to important policy innovations,” such as welfare reform.
Another opinion on the Electoral College’s importance comes from Allen Guelzo and James Hulme in, of all places, The Washington Post. “Abolishing the electoral college now might satisfy an irritated yearning for direct democracy, but it would also mean dismantling federalism. After that, there would be no sense in having a Senate (which, after all, represents the interests of the states), and further along, no sense even in having states, except as administrative departments of the central government.
“Those who wish to abolish the electoral college ought to go the distance, and do away with the entire federal system and perhaps even retire the Constitution, since the federalism it was designed to embody would have disappeared.”
By the way, replacing the Constitution is a goal of more than a few of the political left in the country.
“Without the electoral college, there would be no effective brake on the number of ‘viable’ presidential candidates,” Guelzo and Hulme add. “Abolish it, and it would not be difficult to imagine a scenario where, in a field of a dozen micro-candidates, the ‘winner’ only needs 10 percent of the vote, and represents less than 5 percent of the electorate. And presidents elected with smaller and smaller pluralities will only aggravate the sense that an elected president is governing without a real electoral mandate.”
The number of people who do not understand the function of the Electoral College and its value to the nation is shockingly enormous. It has provided a high degree of stability in our presidential elections, and therefore must be left alone.
Guelzo and Hulme added that while the Electoral College appears to be an inefficient process to many, “the Founders were not interested in efficiency; they were interested in securing ‘the blessings of liberty.’ The Electoral College is, in the end, not a bad device for securing that.”
Recently, there has been much attention focused on and many references to “our democracy.” And there is so much finger-pointing at former President Donald Trump, and other Republicans and conservatives, accusing them of trying to harm or destroy the democracy.
What is truly interesting, however, is how determined the liberal Democrats and Marxists are to dismantle our democratic processes piece by piece. A bright future for them is a country which they will control in perpetuity.
The references listed earlier — stacking the Supreme Court, ending the Senate filibuster, and abolishing the Electoral College — as well as making the District of Columbia and some US territories into states, are nothing more than mechanisms to alter our democratic republic, with its guarantees of personal freedom and high degree of state independence, and turn it into a direct democracy.
Converting our current very successful system into one where government has absolute control is not an improvement for the people. Only for some people.
No comments:
Post a Comment