Democrat Representative Steve Cohen Proposes Amendment to End Electoral College
“Distorting effect of the outdated Electoral College” or intentional mechanism to ensure Middle America has a voice?
As the first week of the new Congressional session began, the new Democrat majority in the House of Representatives immediately got to work. As reported by Daily Wire, Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN) introduced a bill on Thursday to Congress to effectively eliminate the Electoral College.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) introduced two bills on Thursday, one to eliminate the electoral college and the other to prohibit presidents from pardoning themselves or their family members.
A press release from Cohen’s office stated that the “senior member of the House Judiciary Committee, introduced two Constitutional Amendments today on the opening day of the new Congress. The first would eliminate the Electoral College and provide for the direct election of the President and Vice President of the United States. The second would limit the presidential pardon power by prohibiting presidents from pardoning themselves, members of their families, members of their administrations and their campaign staff.”
“In two presidential elections since 2000, including the most recent one in which Hillary Clinton won 2.8 million more votes than her opponent, the winner of the popular vote did not win the election because of the distorting effect of the outdated Electoral College,” Cohen said. “Americans expect and deserve the winner of the popular vote to win office. More than a century ago, we amended our Constitution to provide for the direct election of U.S. Senators. It is past time to directly elect our President and Vice President.”
Democrats have been complaining for decades that the Electoral College needs to be abolished . . . whenever a Republican president wins. The issue clearly came to a head with the election of Donald Trump in 2016 despite Hillary Clinton’s much ballyhooed popular vote victory. Naturally, this is nothing new as the issue has been floated since the 2000 Bush v. Gore election that Democrats still insist was stolen from them.
The call to abolish institutions and Constitutional Amendments for political convenience has become commonplace on the radical left. The establishment of hate speech laws that violate the First Amendment and repeated calls to abolish gun rights by undermining the Second Amendment are regular talking points of the contemporary left.
The only major such call on the right to abolish a standing Amendment is the infrequent call to abolish the Seventeenth Amendment that allows citizens to vote for Senators, but this effort reinforces, not undermines, the original Constitution. America is, by its construction, a Constitutional Republic, not a direct democracy. The Founders intended for citizens to vote for Presidents, Representatives, and local government. Changing the system to allow citizens to vote for Senators only served to make the Senate a hotbed of corruption and populism that undermined the intent for the two Houses.
The problem with these calls to abolish the Electoral College is that it’s ignorant of how the system works. The Electoral College was conceived as a means of evenly representing the interests of the electorate. Much to the chagrin of comedians like Adam Ruins Everything, it’s not a bad thing that Rhode Island and Montana are proportionally just as powerful as California. If they weren’t, there would be no incentive on the part of politicians to campaign anywhere but progressive bastions like New York and Los Angeles, and the entire nation would be forced to bend to the will of these relative anomalies.
The Founding Fathers could not have predicted that urban and rural areas would become synonymous with leftist and conservative values respectively, but the fact that they have isn’t surprising. In the current climate, much of the culture war tensions are between cosmopolitan libertinism and pastoral traditionalism, and the parties have become avatars for that struggle.
If the Electoral College were abolished it would give a massive advantage to urban progressivism and would essentially write the interests of rural America out of political discussion. The liberal retort might be that if it’s the desire of the majority electorate to do this than it should be embraced as the will of the people. This would be a far more powerful point if it wasn’t constantly being rattled by participants who just lost an election.
The United States isn’t a single country. We are a union of fifty different states with opposing interests and subcultures and trying to force them all under a singular will ultimately serves totalitarianism, i.e. today’s left. Not allowing the states to operate as separate entities places power directly in the hands of Washington DC to disabuse at its whim. The left already disregards the conservative working class in Middle America. Destroying the Electoral College would create a one party autocracy running on the same rules that drove Chicago and Detroit into the ground.
Thankfully this proposed amendment will more than likely flounder. There isn’t the required two-thirds support to pass the bill, and absent that, this bill is nothing more than sound and fury. It’s merely the unrepentant rage of a party that can’t abide its own failure and therefore signifies nothing.
Hillary Clinton’s hilarious memoir What Happened is evidence of this. Instead of looking inward and realizing the faults of the contemporary left, she’s pointed the finger at everything and everyone else including Russian collusion, fake news, racism, sexism, third party interference, and the lukewarm support of other Democrats who didn’t support their preferred candidate. Trying to break a foundational mechanism of our republic for ideological gain is little more than the screaming death rattle of a party of sore losers.
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Comments
That has about zero chance. But Democrat States like California can give Republicans their fair share by allocating electors proportionally. It’s just fair!!
It’s not just California. Of the 50 states … 48 of them apportion all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.
No states allocate their electors proportionally. Nebraska and Maine are just as winner-takes-all as the other 48 states, they just do it on a more granular level. In Nebraska Trump got less than 60% of the vote, but all five electors. In 1996 Dole got a mere 53.65% and still got all five electors. The only time Nebraska has ever split its electors was in 2008, when 0bama, with 41.6% of the vote, managed to get one out of five electors.
To follow up, even in a two-candidate race it is possible to get an elector from Nebraska with as little as 17% of the vote, or to fail to get one with as much as 49%. So it should be obvious that there’s nothing proportional about it. It’s winner-take-all, on a district basis.
Some states, like Washington, have decided to throw their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the popular vote regardless of how their state voted. Accomplishes the same thing.
That will last only until a Republican wins the popular vote. Then the electors will suddenly back out.
Let’s be honest, given the demographics, do you actually think that a “R” will win the popular vote, at least in the foreseeable future?I cannot see a “red” state agreeing to give all of its electoral votes to a “blue” candidate.
Not some. Of the 50 states … 48 of them apportion all of their electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.
To the popular vote of their state, not to the “winner” of the “national popular vote.”
Good grief. More political masturb****n to entertain the looney left base.
My response to these loons is always the same: If you want to eliminate (hated constitutional right du jur), then change the Constition.
All it takes is 13 states to say ‘No,’ and it’s a dead issue. Good luck finding only 12.
What waste of time.
Um, that’s exactly what he’s trying, so why the upset?
What we really need is an electoral college type arraignment for the states. In far too many states large cities with their large city hive mentality rule the rest of the state.
We used to have that. Then the Supreme Court decided that the people who wrote the state constitutions just like the federal constitution, where counties elected reps to the upper chamber and the lower chamber was by population, misunderstood that line in the Constitution that says “one man, one vote”. It’s in plain sight written in invisible ink. Never mind that oft times the same people who contributed to the federal constitution were contributing to the state constitutions; it’s obvious they didn’t know what they were doing.
Maybe it wasn’t invisible ink but one of those penumbras or emanations that can only be detected by oracles and seers wearing black robes.
Reynolds v. Sims is one of the worst decisions ever handed down from on high by the holy justices of the court. And that’s saying a lot. It’s why NY has such laws as The SAFE Act. Close to zero support for it my county- or any other rural county in the state.
Sigh. This again? One man one vote is the very definition of a republican form of government. States can divide themselves however they like, but each division must have the same population. The analogy to the USA is false because the USA is a federation of states; it is the creature of the states, not the other way around. A state is not a federation of districts; a state creates its districts and can alter or abolish them at its whim, so it has no right to make districts of unequal population and give them equal power, in order to deprive the people in the larger districts of their due power. That violates the republican form of government clause, and the equal protection clause.
Wrong. Where did you get that silly idea that the very definition of a republic is one man-one vote? We were a republic from the beginning. And the franchise was limited. It’s where terms like “Board of Chosen Freeholders” come from. Archaic now, but the term is still used for county representatives in NJ, who at one time had to be freeholders- and were elected by fellow freeholders. A Republic can be a Republic even if only a small number of residents meet the requirements for voting. You could limit the franchise to taxpayers. To landowners. To tradesman,. To married couples with children. To anyone who can pass a 100 question multiple choice test on the basic laws of the state.
The founders recognized states would have the same possibilities of cities lording it over the rural areas as the federal government would of large states lording it over smaller states, and thus designed state governments with the same safeguards. And it went on until 1964 when the emanations and penumbras were decoded by the seers of the court who revealed to us how ignorant the founders were to do that. Hey, you when state budgets started really getting out of control? In the 1960s. Pure coincidence, I suppose.
If both houses are population based it makes the two house system for state legislatures archaic, and we should all follow Nebraska’s lead and have a unicameral legislature. What’s the point? Eventually you’re going to get one party control of the state with the cities making the laws. I can just about guarantee none of the upper houses will pass legislation eliminating themselves….
However you restrict the franchise, each vote must be equal. Anything else is not an election, it’s a fraud. If a state wishes to divide itself into districts, and base the election of the state government on those districts, it’s free to do so; so long as the districts have equal populations. Even at the founding, with the very flawed republics we had, the principle of equal representation was supreme (with the exception of the 3/5 representation for slaves who were denied the franchise, which was very controversial).
And restricting the franchise does undermine the republican principle. Those “freeholders only” republics were not very republican; hence the Maine revolution. When the Maine rebels took their case to the Supreme Court it didn’t say they were wrong, it said it couldn’t do anything about it, because the republican guarantee clause can only be enforced by the president and congress. (There was no 14th or 15th amendment at the time.)
We have that. State legislatures are based on single-member districts of equal populations, so a majority concentrated in one area can’t overwhelm a minority that is more spread out. In principle one can get a majority of seats with only 26% of the vote, by getting 51% in a bare majority of the seats and nothing in the rest.
They pull this stunt every time they gain the majority. It is a dead-on-arrival ploy, a publicity stunt, a total sop and head-fake for their fellow-travelers.
The disturbing thing to me is how many people do not know the Constitution, do not understand why it is vital for a free nation, and how it protects all the states and gives them a voice – gives US a voice, who do not live in the population-dense cities like LA and NYC.
Blame it on education (read: indoctrination centers paid for by tax payers, which are failing to educate but are great at brainwashing children and turning them into non-thinking drones), on media lies and propaganda, or on our obsession with electronic devices and distractions vs. what is actually happening……
Disturbing it is, indeed.
If I want to live under the same laws as New York or California I’ll move there. Keep the Electoral College.
I have visited many large cities, and while they do have some interesting things, like museums, I cannot understand why anyone would want to live in what amounts to a big anthill.
Wanting to live in an anthill is different than having to … ya have to go where the jobs are after all.
Cohen prefers to deny civil rights through illegal immigration, and to gerrymander districts through immigration reform, redistributive change, and Planned Parenthood.
This is an attempt to get Southern California, large. If the Republicans are brute-force stupid enough to let this through, every Democrat state with mail-in ballots will suddenly see a massive surge in voter turnout (Dem, nach) as thousands of ballot harvesters go door-to-door in the hours after/before the election to ‘helpfully’ return those loose ballots to the voting booth. All marked D straight down the line. California by itself can cheat the Dems into presidential victory for the immediate future.
“If the Republicans are brute-force stupid enough to let this through…”
The Republican establishment (now with the face of that idiot romney) aren’t stupid – they are weak and they are wholly corrupt.
Let’s put this simply: the end of the Electoral College represents the end of our Republic, period. It would quickly lead to secession of smaller states, and likely civil war.
This is also the idiot that said Strzok deserved the Purple Heart for testifying to Congress.
Well, there you go: proposing the tyranny of the majority by a handful of states over the rest of us.
This guy isn’t stupid – he’s just a fascist in waiting.
The left’s corruption of our educational system (thanks, Crying Boehners), has left our young ignorant of the gift they received by our Founding Fathers. It has allows fascists like this fool Cohen to follow in hillary clinton’s canklesteps.
Racism against whites, bigotry against Jews and advocating tyranny has become mainstream, witness Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandra Cortez.
Cohen is a suicidal Jew and Vichy wanna-be. It’s only a matter of time till his inner ‘m——er’ comes blurting out.
We already have the situation where large urban areas, representing only a fraction of a state’s landmass, can decide every state-wide election.
So what happens when a single state, or small number of adjacent states grows so large, the “popular vote” could tip every national election?
Imagine some day that the west coast (CA/OR/WA) would become so populous and politically extreme, that their vote drove the outcome of national elections?
Might the other 47 states be thankful for the EC?
I think for the next 2 years I’m going to turn off the news and just pray … listening to the democrats is mind-numbing torment.
“I think for the next 2 years I’m going to turn off the news and just pray…”
You’d better stay active, you in 2 years you just might find yourself living in a dictatorship, and on the wrong side of your rulers.
Already there. The popular vote margin in California was large enough to tip the popular vote to Hillary. In total- she lost the popular vote in the other 49 states.
Out of 3100+ counties, she only won a bit over 500 of them
This isn’t going to end well, if the libs get too cocky
The states lost their senators in 1913; it’s only a matter of time before stupid overwhelms us.
Never underestimate the power of stupid …
Unfortunately stupid is part of the standard curriculum in most of our public schools and universities. It takes a lot of real world experience and growing up to overcome the harm that has been done.
Stupid is a synonym for GOPe. Witness mittens romney.
Pro tip to the Marxists: You need to fully implement your gun ban before you try this nonsense.
“Not allowing the states to operate as separate entities places power directly in the hands of Washington DC to /disabuse/ at its whim.”
Abuse, not disabuse. C’mon, Tyler.
The Dems want the mobocracy that our founders were so careful to protect us from. They have been chipping away at these protections for years.
Funny, when you think if it, the Electoral College is the only college not corrupted (thanks, Crying Boehners) by the left.
The founders feared the tyranny of the majority. The left demands it, except when the majority doesn’t do what it’s told. Then they sue, looking for the tyranny of the black robes. When that doesn’t work, they riot in the streets (mob rule).
Maybe it’s just me but I could almost swear there’s a pattern here!
The smaller states will never vote to make their votes count less.
Whatever. As long as these idiots are engage with crap like this, they won’t get around to the really dangerous stuff.
If the proposed amendment has a 50% run-off provision, I’m interested. Otherwise you risk having plurality winners, which is not the goal of a popular vote amendment.