[Fact Bomb] Electoral College: Invented to Protect Slavery, Is Stupid, Is Broadly Opposed

response to Douthat at OTB:

https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/douthat-attempts-a-defense-of-the-electoral-college

 

Things are changing and there are way too many dividing factors. Does it really matter where your vote came from? If you claim farmers need more subsidies and explain why logicly and coherently then the average person will be supportive. One American vote is worth one vote.

 

You would be claiming the opposite if Hilary had won by EC. lol. I have to wonder if you are old enough to vote, based on the way to think and write.

 

Ouch. I sure hit a nerve with that one.

 

Must be hard for them to see someone outside their echo chamber...

 

That was me laughing at the predictable way you always respond, not expressing any anger. And you continue to not disappoint.

The other, next response in your tree is, "no, you are... " about whatever I say, but that seems to be the option of last resort.

Seriously, If you weren't what you are, I'd probably feel pretty bad about the whole thing.

 

I’m comfortable. I hope you feel the same about yourself.

 

Honestly, I don’t care that much. It just seems dated. Lots of things in us politics are dated and written for people in a different time.

 

Lol you are an anti-constitutionalist I guess. Cherry pick what you like and everything else is out dated. Tell me what else is out dated young blood? I bet those founders just didn't know anything did they?

 

Dude, I really don’t care about the electoral college. It does seem a little dated but I honestly don’t care if they change it or not.

Just because you disagree with me about a few things doesn’t mean you have to think my opinion is wrong in every single thread. My opinion about this is it is a little bit dated, but changing it now seems like a lot of work.

 

Just curious why you think it is dated?

 

Previous times the US Constitution was changed (you could also call it "amended") related to the way we selected presidents. Making fixes to the Constitution does not mean you are "anti-constitutionalists"

 

Amendments shouldnt be made for partisan reasons. Ie democrats harping about the EC.

 

My reasoning for suggesting the constitution be amended would be to address a significant imbalance between the # of EC votes to state populations (ie. California gets 55 electoral votes for 37.3 million people (2010 Census), or one electoral vote for approximately each 680,000 people. Wyoming receives 3 votes for its 568,000 people, or about one per 190,000.). Is there any mention of a political party in any of the above?

Now, of course, the significant imbalance that currently exists does happen to favor one party over another. But... if you look at the history of constitutional amendments, especially the ones that changed how presidents were selected as listed in David Frum's tweet ("The 12th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 22nd, 23rd, and 26th amendments to the Constitution each previously altered the system for selecting presidents"), you will see that addressed significant wrongs that also favored a political party. For examples, the 12th amendment addressed a wrong that hurt the Federalist party, whose VP votes were scattered and that allowed the Democratic-Republican candidate (Thomas Jefferson) who ran for President to become VP.

The 14th amendment, granting full citizenship and equal protection was even more partisan and divided.

 

Given how some of the other SCOTUS decisions have come down, can't see why they can't just stack the court and have it interpret the amendment however they want on this one too.

 

Sean Wilentz in the NYT this morning:

The Electoral College Was Not a Pro-Slavery Ploy
There is a lot wrong with how we choose the president. But the framers did not put it into the Constitution to protect the South.
By Sean Wilentz
Mr. Wilentz is the author, most recently, of “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding.”
April 4, 2019

I used to favor amending the Electoral College, in part because I believed the framers put it into the Constitution to protect slavery. I said as much in a book I published in September. But I’ve decided I was wrong. That’s why a merciful God invented second editions.

Like many historians, I thought the evidence clearly showed the Electoral College arose from a calculated power play by the slaveholders. By the time the delegates at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 debated how the president ought to be chosen, they had already approved the three-fifths clause — the notorious provision that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person to inflate the slave states’ apportionment in the new House of Representatives.

The Electoral College, as approved by the convention in its final form, in effect enshrined the three-fifths clause in the selection of the president. Instead of election by direct popular vote, each state would name electors (chosen however each state legislature approved), who would actually do the electing. The number of each state’s electoral votes would be the same as its combined representation in the House and the Senate.

By including the number of senators, two from each state, the formula leaned to making the apportionment fairer to the smaller states. Including the number of House members leaned in favor of the larger states. But the framers gave the slaveholding states the greatest reward: The more slaves they owned, the more representatives they got, and the more votes each would enjoy in choosing the president.

The framers’ own damning words seem to cinch the case that the Electoral College was a pro-slavery ploy. Above all, the Virginia slaveholder James Madison — the most influential delegate at the convention — insisted that while direct popular election of the president was the “fittest” system, it would hurt the South, whose population included nonvoting slaves. The slaveholding states, he said, “could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes.”Instead, the framers, led by Madison, concocted the Electoral College to give extra power to the slaveholders.

If you stop at this point in the record, as I once did, there would be no two ways about it. On further and closer inspection, however, the case against the framers begins to unravel. First, the slaveholders did not need to invent the Electoral College to fend off direct popular election of the president. Direct election did have some influential supporters, including Gouverneur Morris of New York, author of the Constitution’s preamble. But the convention, deeply suspicious of what one Virginian in another context called “the fury of democracy,” crushed the proposal on two separate occasions.

How, then, would the president be elected, if not directly by the people at large? Some delegates had proposed that Congress have the privilege, a serious proposal that died out of concern the executive branch would be too subservient to the legislative. Other delegates floated making the state governors the electors. Still others favored the state legislatures.

The alternative, and winning, plan, which became known as the Electoral College only some years later, certainly gave the slaveholding states the advantage of the three-fifths clause. But the connection was incidental, and no more of an advantage than if Congress had been named the electors.

Most important, once the possibility of direct popular election of the president was defeated, how much did the slaveholding states rush to support the concept of presidential electors? Not at all. In the initial vote over having electors select the president, the only states voting “nay” were North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia — the three most ardently proslavery states in the convention.
Slaveholders didn’t embrace the idea of electors because it might enlarge slavery’s power; they feared it because of the danger, as the North Carolina slaveholder Hugh Williamson remarked, that the men chosen as electors would be corruptible “persons not occupied in the high offices of government.” Pro-elite concerns, not proslavery ones, were on their minds — just as, ironically, elite supporters of the Electoral College hoped the body would insulate presidential politics from popular passions.

When it first took shape at the convention, the Electoral College would not have significantly helped the slaveowning states. Under the initial apportionment of the House approved by the framers, the slaveholding states would have held 39 out of 92 electoral votes, or about 42 percent. Based on the 1790 census, about 41 percent of the nation’s total white population lived in those same states, a minuscule difference. Moreover, the convention did not arrive at the formula of combining each state’s House and Senate numbers until very late in its proceedings, and there is no evidence to suggest that slavery had anything to do with it.

But didn’t the college, whatever the framers’ intentions, eventually become a bulwark for what Northerners would later call the illegitimate slave power? Not really. Some historians have revived an old partisan canard that the slaveholding states’ extra electoral votes unfairly handed Thomas Jefferson the presidency in 1800-01. They ignore anti-Jefferson manipulation of the electoral vote in heavily pro-Jefferson Pennsylvania that offset the Southerners’ electoral advantage. Take away that manipulation, and Jefferson would have won with or without the extra Southern votes.

The early president most helped by the Constitution’s rejection of direct popular election was John Quincy Adams, later an antislavery hero, who won the White House in 1824-25 despite losing both the popular and electoral votes to Andrew Jackson. (The House decided that election.) As president, the slaveholder Jackson became one of American history’s most prominent critics of the Electoral College, which he blasted for disallowing the people “to express their own will.” The Electoral College system made no difference in deciding the presidency during the 36 years before the Civil War.

There are ample grounds for criticizing the Constitution’s provisions for electing the president. That the system enabled the election in 2016 of precisely the kind of demagogic figure the framers designed the system to block suggests the framework may need serious repair. But the myth that the Electoral College began as a slaveholders’ instrument needs debunking — which I hope to help with in my book’s revised paperback.

Sean Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton and the author, most recently, of “No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding.”​

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/the-electoral-college-slavery-myth.html

permalink: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/the-electoral-college-slavery-myth.html

 

If blue/blue leaning states (Oregon, Nevada, Minn., Michigan, Penn. and Virginia) join the Compact, that get the Compact to 261 of the 270 needed.

 

81 electoral votes away...

 

Here's hoping we can get that 81 and take one huge step closer to permanently purging the republican party from our society.