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Priceless republican relic
Colin McNickle is the Trib's director of editorial pages. Ring him at 412-320-7836. E-mail him at: cmcnickle@tribweb.com.
"The Electoral College is an antidemocratic relic" (as in outmoded), The Times editorialized Tuesday last. "Everyone who remembers 2000 knows that it can lead to an election of the candidate who loses the popular vote as president.
"But the Electoral College's other serious flaws are perhaps even more debilitating for a democracy. It focuses presidential elections on just a handful of battleground states, and pushes the rest of the nation's voters to the sidelines," The Times writes.
Where does one begin with such nonsense, a balderdash so full of buncombe that even the "facts" proffered in support of the premise are wrong?
First off, kids, the United States is not a "democracy." We are a representative democracy better yet defined as a constitutional republic. Learned students of history that the Founders and Framers were, they knew a pure democracy was no better than anarchy.
Second, this notion that the constitutionally prescribed Electoral College (Article II, Section 1, Clause 3) "discourages turnout because voters in two-thirds of the nation know well before Election Day who will win their states" is pure fiction. Turnout in the 2004 presidential election -- more than 122 million votes, nearly 61 percent of registered voters -- was the highest in 36 years.
Prematurely released exit polls conducted by the media have far more to do with retarding voter turnout than the Electoral College.
Then there's The Times' notion that the Electoral College somehow, nefariously, "discriminates" against voters. To wit: Wyoming's population of 494,000 and its three electors mathematically carry greater weight than California's population of 34 million and its 55 electoral votes.
Well, if attacking a methodology designed to protect the minority from the majority now suddenly is in vogue, shouldn't we also (as others have argued before me) do away with the U.S. Senate? After all, those 494,000 folks in the Equality State elect the same number of senators as do those 34 million in the Golden State -- two.
What The Times is shilling for is a "reform" proposal that would amend the Constitution without amending it, a staple of liberals that The Times calls "ingenious." It would require that states "commit to casting their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote."
Oh, and voila! What a plan it is, automatically skewing the election to the nation's more highly populated and decidedly liberal urban centers at the expense of the more sparsely populated and decidedly conservative rural areas.
The Times says that "sidestepping the Electoral College" would be in the "worthy tradition" of giving women and blacks the right to vote and the direct election of senators -- "making American democracy more democratic."
Well, we legally amended the Constitution to do those things. And Americans haven't had much stomach for an amendment that tosses out a republican relic (as in esteemed and venerated) after 200-plus years.
As for the direct election of the president somehow making America more "democratic," The Times and its acolytes more likely only are looking to make America more "Democratic."
