Kathleen Parker: The Electoral College Should be Unfaithful

Among the so-called conservative columnists Kathleen Parker has strayed more consistently from the GOP reservation than many.  That said, like David Brooks, Jennifer Rubin, and Michael Gerson, to name a few, she all too often nonetheless played the role of an apologist for the ugliest aspects of the Republican Party agenda and waited far too long to began calling the hate, racism and misogyny of the GOP base (which began to metastasize at least 20 years ago) for what it was and, in the process normalized what would become Donald Trump's main platform.  Now, in a column in the Washington Post, Parker calls for the Electoral College electors to do what responsible and morally decent Republican voters should have done during the election: reject Donald Trump.   Here are column highlights:

If you thought Donald Trump was the face of America’s anti-establishment movement, hold on to your chapeaus: A wild wind is rising.

Want to know what’s more anti-establishment than a president-elect who refuses to play by the rules? How about similarly spirited electors going AWOL and sending someone else to the Oval Office?

A movement headed by a mostly Democratic group calling itself Hamilton Electors is trying to persuade Republican electors to defect — not to cede the election to Hillary Clinton but to join with Democrats in selecting a compromise candidate, such as Mitt Romney or John Kasich. It wouldn’t be that hard to do.

Mathematically, only 37 of Trump’s 306 electors are needed to bring his number down to 269, one less than the 270 needed to secure the presidency.

On the Hamilton Electors’ Facebook page, elector Bret Chiafalo, a Democrat from Washington, explains the purpose of the electoral college. If you haven’t previously been a fan of the electoral system, you might become one.

Bottom line: The Founding Fathers didn’t fully trust democracy, fearing mob rule, and so created a republic. They correctly worried that a pure democracy could result in the election of a demagogue (ahem), or a charismatic autocrat (ahem), or someone under foreign influence (ditto), hence the rule that a president must have been born in the United States. We know how seriously Trump takes the latter.

Most important among the founders’ criteria for a president was that he (or now she) be qualified. Thus, the electoral college was created as a braking system that would, if necessary, save the country from an individual such as, frankly, Trump.

It is worth noting that 50 former Republican national security officials and foreign policy experts co-signed a letter saying that Trump would be a “dangerous president.” Do we simply ignore them?

Alexander Hamilton, suddenly a star on both Broadway and Main Street, wrote that the electoral college “affords a moral certainty that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”

Electors would prevent the “tumult and disorder” that would result from the candidate’s exploiting “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity.” Speaking of Trump. How wise our founders were. And how unwise are we to pay so little attention to their far keener insights.

It is, perhaps, a sign of these upside-down times that Democrats, usually preferring the popular vote, are suddenly genuflecting to the electoral college and Republicans, who so often defer to the founders’ original intent, shift principle so swiftly, presumably in hopes of taking the ultimate escalator ride in the golden palace of King Trump. Tut-tut.

Meanwhile, those on both sides who remain opposed to Trump are dismissed as either sorry losers or as dining on crow and sour grapes. But the stakes are too high — and the evidence of Trump’s presidential aptitude deficit too severe — for such trivializing designations. His demonstrated lack of judgment and impulse control should send shivers down the spines of all Americans in consideration of the nuclear arsenal he is poised to have at his fingertips.

Trump’s friends have told me they’re confident he’ll solemnly respect the burden of such power, but nothing thus far justifies their faith. After his election victory, Trump hasn’t much bothered himself with intelligence briefings. He ignored 37 years of diplomatic precedent by chatting with the president of Taiwan, upsetting China. He spoke like an inarticulate ninth-grader with Pakistan’s prime minister, according to that country’s readout. 

Electors are scheduled to meet Dec. 19 in their respective states to cast their final ballots. If there are 37 Republicans among them with the courage to perform their moral duty and protect the nation from a talented but dangerous president-elect, a new history of heroism will have to be written.  Please, be brave.

As noted in a post over the weekend, there were numerous times that Germans could have halted Hitler's rise to power.  Then, as I fear will prove true on December 19, 2016, courage was in short supply and too many decent individuals shrugged their shoulders and took the easy way out.  That easy way out proved catastrophic for Germany and the world. 

Is the GOP, the Party of Lincoln and Reagan Headed Toward Extinction?

As a former Republican and GOP activist and City Committee member, I have often noted that I do not see how the GOP can be reformed and reeled back into sanity given the manner in which Christofascists, Tea Party loons and white supremacist were voted onto local committees across America.  There simply is no way that the so-called GOP establishment can kill the monster that it cynically created as it looked at short term opportunism with no eye toward the long term agenda. Now, the cancer has fully metastasized in the form of Donald trump and his core supporters.  Some believe that the GOP is now set on a course for extinction much as happened to the Whig Party in the mid 1800's.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this growing possibility.  Here are highlights:

Staunch in its opposition to the Democrats but rived by fierce internal schisms, the American political party stumbled toward defeat, its members cursing their fate. “We are slain,” cried Lewis D. Campbell, a representative from Ohio. “The party is dead, dead, dead!”

That was the election of 1852, when the Whig Party, then one of the country’s two major political forces, began to crumble over bitter arguments about slavery. The Whigs would dissolve within four years, to be reborn as the Republican Party — the very party now engulfed by its own civil war.

As this year’s extraordinary election hurtles toward its climax, scores of Republican leaders have deserted their party’s presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump. A snowballing scandal over sexual harassment and assault allegations has caused Mr. Trump’s poll numbers to crater, and some of the party’s top donors have suggested abandoning him altogether. But a solid core of rank-and-file Republicans stands defiantly with Mr. Trump, flocking to increasingly raucous rallies where the candidate vents his rage toward and disdain for a party that, at least theoretically, still backs him.

The turmoil raises a bracing possibility: Is an American political behemoth — a 162-year-old party that has produced 18 presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan — about to fall apart like its predecessor?

“There is a real danger,” said William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, and an early critic of Mr. Trump. “But I wouldn’t panic yet. It’s very hard to know where we stand right now. A lot depends on the election in November.”

The Republican schism is in fact the culmination of simmering tensions within American conservatism. For years, the party has been an amalgam of factions: Christian evangelicals, free-marketeers, foreign policy hawks and more. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 helped spur the rise of a strongly conservative wing known as the Tea Party, with a brand of protest politics that fed off the anger of many white voters and created an opening for Mr. Trump this year.

Republican leaders have never been happy or comfortable with Mr. Trump . . . . But for months the leaders turned a blind eye to Mr. Trump’s verbal attacks on Muslims, Mexicans and women, hoping that even if he lost the presidential election, the party could retain its prime political asset: its majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Analysts predict that a crushing defeat for Mr. Trump could cost Republicans their advantage in the Senate and even their control of the House — a prospect that until recently was considered a distant possibility.

It is easy to forget that the Republican Party, now known as an anti-abortion and pro-gun stalwart, originated as the progressive face of American politics.

Founded in 1854 on a platform of opposition to slavery, the party was initially dominated by Northern states, which were more industrial.

In the years before and during the Civil War, the Democratic Party, which dominated the agrarian South, supported slavery. But the tables turned in the 1960s, when the Democratic Party championed an end to segregation and Southern states swung to the Republicans, increasingly the party of conservatism.

In the final weeks of the race, Mr. Trump’s scorched-earth campaign has exposed a yawning gulf between Republican leaders and much of the party’s base.

Some Republicans have had enough. At the party’s contentious national convention in July in Cleveland, I met Ryan Davenport, 25, a teacher from Dallas in a stars-and-stripes bow tie, who brimmed with fury at the ascension of Mr. Trump as the party’s standard-bearer. When I called Mr. Davenport last weekend, he said he had abandoned the party and would vote for Evan McMullin, a former C.I.A. operative who began a moonshot bid for the presidency as an anti-Trump independent.

Mr. Davenport said he took no pleasure in seeing the party he loved in disarray. But when fund-raisers for Mr. Trump called his house, he told them to leave him alone. “We have a predator running for president of the United States,” Mr. Davenport told me. “He’s radioactive.”

“Our views — the Republican intellectuals and think-tank people — differ from a significant chunk of the electorate,” said Avik Roy, a conservative strategist who likened Mr. Trump’s success to the rise of right-wing nationalist parties in Europe. “And it’s the electorate that decides.”

With several polling websites putting Mr. Trump’s chances of winning the election around 10 percent, he appears to be steeling for defeat, warning his supporters that the outcome of the election will be rigged. At a rally in Florida on Thursday, he struck an apocalyptic tone. “This is a struggle for the survival of our nation,” he said.  Or, at least, the survival of the Republican Party.