Stacey Abrams: We Should 'Jerry-Rig System & Go Around Constitution' for Popular Vote
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just way too ignorant, she is. Just because they are enraged at losing the last pivot point crucial election, they want to hate the electoral college and go with the popular vote.
You can bet they hated the popular vote when this president won by popular vote:
Who was the last Republican president to win the popular vote?George W. Bush in his 2004 re-election was the last Republican to win the popular vote and the Presidency.
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True, but "W" couldn't have been re-elected in 2003 if the poplar vote was in effect in 1999... although in the case of '99 it damn near bled over into the next year...
Up for a fresh Electoral College debate, cal? Did you even bother to listen to what Abrams said? Hear her rationale for labeling the EC "racist"? It's pretty spot on...
She also labelled the North's motivation as "Classist", which is even easier to wrap a brain around.
Only takes a couple minutes thanks to Vambo posting the Twitter link.
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yes I did - it's stupid. It's stupid because back before the 17th amendment, it was racist in effect, NOT by intent. The point of the 17th amendment, was to make it NOT racist.
She's a liar - the claim of "it's racist" is just really stupid. and extremely dishonest.
The infamous “Three-Fifths Compromise” determined how the population would be counted, with each slave counting as just three-fifths of a person. This racist way of counting determined the number of congressional representatives in each state and thus the number of electors.
But the Three-Fifths Compromise was eliminated by way of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that “representatives shall be apportioned… counting the whole number of persons in each State… .”
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And as Allen Guelzo and James Hulme write in the Washington Post:
“The electoral college (itself) had nothing to do with slavery … the discussions of the electoral college and the method of electing a president never occur in the context of any of the convention’s two climactic debates over slavery.”
In other words, the Electoral College was not a racist conception, and the inequitable way electors were counted was remedied in the abolition of the Three-Fifths Compromise.
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Did you even bother to research the subject? Abrams is your kind of gal, Tour?
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furthermore:
If the Democrats want to make an efficacy or merit-based argument with respect to the Electoral College, then by all means make it. It ought to be based in history and fact not fanciful revisionist history, and it should be made not just during an election year because of discontent with the electoral outcome.
Having gone through the first three stages of the mourning process, Democrats are left with two remaining steps. They will soon sink into depression and, perhaps unwillingly, they will arrive at acceptance, accepting the fact that as of Jan. 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump is their president of the United States.
Kayleigh McEnany is a political commentator who recently received her Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School. She graduated from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and also studied politics at Oxford University.
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So counting the bodies of those in slavery for the purpose of gaining more political power while not allowing those bodies to participate in the process is not racist because it was not intended? Slavery was accidental?
No wonder you have no issues with voter suppression.
A for your Gulezo/Hume citation.... history.com disagrees. https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fathers-constitutional-convention
Clearly it makes sense that the census generated by the "Great Compromise" had to be considered in the distribution of Electors.
One group of delegates felt strongly that Congress shouldn’t have anything to do with picking the president. Too much opportunity for chummy corruption between the executive and legislative branches.
Another camp was dead set against letting the people elect the president by a straight popular vote. First, they thought 18th-century voters lacked the resources to be fully informed about the candidates, especially in rural outposts. Second, they feared a headstrong “democratic mob” steering the country astray. And third, a populist president appealing directly to the people could command dangerous amounts of power.
Out of those drawn-out debates came a compromise based on the idea of electoral intermediaries. These intermediaries wouldn’t be picked by Congress or elected by the people. Instead, the states would each appoint independent “electors” who would cast the actual ballots for the presidency.
Slavery and the Three-Fifths Compromise
But determining exactly how many electors to assign to each state was another sticking point. Here the divide was between slave-owning and non-slave-owning states. It was the same issue that plagued the distribution of seats in the House of Representatives: should or shouldn’t the Founders include slaves in counting a state’s population?
In 1787, roughly 40 percent of people living in the Southern states were black slaves, who couldn’t vote. James Madison from Virginia—where slaves accounted for 60 percent of the population—knew that either a direct presidential election, or one with electors divvied up according to free white residents only, wouldn’t fly in the South.
“The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States,” said Madison, “and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.”
The result was the controversial “three-fifths compromise,” in which black slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of allocating representatives and electors and calculating federal taxes. The compromise ensured that Southern states would ratify the Constitution and gave Virginia, home to more than 200,000 slaves, a quarter (12) of the total electoral votes required to win the presidency (46).
Thus the two were forever linked at inception. Even your article in The Hill acknowledges this fact. That slavery was repealed can not undo that linkage.
BTW... the Classist argument I have favored as the basis for the EC's existance is embodied in the first of the three rationales listed in the 2nd paragraph above. This was undone thru the 20th Century by most states as they passed legislation binding their Electors to the vote of the people.
It's long past time to complete the job and eliminate the EC.
If you swapped sides for a moment, you'd be the first to decry the silencing of millions of voters' voices as occurred in 2015.
In the alternative we could return to the days of unbound Electors... at least then there would have been a chance that they might have saved us from the utter shit-storm that is the Trump administration.
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oh, baloney. The electoral college was wonderful when you lefties won two terms for obaMao commie, and two terms for bill clinton...
one term for jimmy peanutbrain carter...
but let the left lose, THEN they want to get rid of the EC because they have flooded our country with illegals that will always vote for the dems if they could just get them legal to vote - they will win the popular vote every time.
THAT is why the left hates the electoral college. Going way, way back to the slavery days is bs. The reasons for the EC are far more important every election, every 4 years.
The EC just stands in the way of the illegal taint on our electoral system, for years designed to upend our ability to elect national politicians on a far basis, across all states' various populations.
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