{"id":208541,"date":"2019-07-02T21:58:02","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T21:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/?p=208541"},"modified":"2020-02-12T18:41:15","modified_gmt":"2020-02-12T23:41:15","slug":"abolishing-the-electoral-college","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/blog\/abolishing-the-electoral-college\/","title":{"rendered":"Abolishing the Electoral College"},"content":{"rendered":"
They\u2019re already talking about the possibility of President Trump winning a second term despite losing the popular vote; supposedly he could lose by as many as 5 million votes and still win the election. (That\u2019s even more than Hilary Clinton\u2019s 2016 margin of 3 million.) The explanation is that Trump\u2019s \u201cbase\u201d is concentrated in many small states, and small states receive disproportionate representation in the electoral college.\u00a0That\u2019s because the electoral college is apportioned based on combining the size of a state\u2019s congressional delegation with its senators, and every state has two senators regardless of its population.\u00a0Very Democratic California, with a population of about 40 million, has the same number of senators as very Republican Wyoming, with scarcely over half a million people. \u00a0So the problem isn\u2019t only the electoral college, it\u2019s the U.S. Senate\u2014people living in the most populous states have proportionately less say in our national government.\u00a0 And based on the existence of the electoral college, anyone who doesn\u2019t reside in one of a small number of \u201cswing states\u201d is as good as disenfranchised when it comes to electing our president.<\/p>\n
Like so many of our country\u2019s problems, this injustice originates with America\u2019s original sin\u2014slavery (well, along with wiping out the American Indian en masse).\u00a0 The only reason the senate was created was to help assure the Southern states, whose economies were based on the preservation and proliferation of slavery, that they could sign the constitution without having to worry that their \u201cpeculiar institution\u201d would ever be abolished by the more populous North.\u00a0 All that business about the senate being designed to make sure that small states received adequate representation is mostly bullshit.\u00a0 Like so many of the mistakes the founding fathers made, the origin of the Senate is based on their need to preserve slavery on behalf of a wealthy Southern minority, a hateful constituency for which I and so many others would die for in the Civil War.<\/p>\n
The electoral college should be abolished and the U.S. Senate should follow close behind.\u00a0 But given that abolishing either one requires amending the constitution, and amendments require a two-thirds majority vote in BOTH houses of congress and ratification of three quarters of the states (many of which stand to lose a good deal of clout if they do so!), unfortunately that seems highly unlikely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
They\u2019re already talking about the possibility of President Trump winning a second term despite losing the popular vote; supposedly he could lose by as many as 5 million votes and still win the election. (That\u2019s even more than Hilary Clinton\u2019s 2016 margin of 3 million.) The explanation is that Trump\u2019s \u201cbase\u201d is concentrated in many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":208936,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"Abolishing the Electoral College","_seopress_titles_desc":"Based on the existence of the electoral college, anyone who doesn\u2019t reside in a \u201cswing states\u201d is as disenfranchised when it comes to electing our president.","_seopress_robots_index":"","pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-208541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=208541"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":208545,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/208541\/revisions\/208545"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=208541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=208541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}