Anti-Trump Forces Launch Attack on Electoral College

As a number of posts have discussed, the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College as a safety value, if you will, to protect the nation from a would be president who embodied the worse aspects of a shameless demagogue who could sway the popular vote.  Never would the Founders have envisioned the Electoral College working exactly opposite to their envision role, in this case electing the utterly unqualified, morally bankrupt Donald Trump over the popular vote winner who also is uniquely qualified.   Given this reality and the clear and present danger that a Trump presidency poses for both America and the world, opponents of Donald Trump have begun a full blown attack on the Electoral College.  A piece in Politico looks at the phenomenon.  Here are article highlights:

Anti-Trump forces are preparing an unprecedented assault on the Electoral College, marked by a wave of lawsuits and an intensive lobbying effort aimed at persuading 37 Republican electors to vote for a candidate other than Donald Trump.

It’s a bracing stress-test for an institution that Alexander Hamilton envisioned as a safeguard against popular whims, and a direct challenge to the role that the Electoral College has evolved to play in picking the president: constitutional rubber stamp.

Behind the overt anti-Trump push is a covert agenda: If the courts establish that individual electors can switch allegiances, supporting candidates other than those who win their states, it would inject so much uncertainty into the process that states may be willing to junk the Electoral College in favor of a popular-vote winner.

“There might well be a clamor to get rid of the Electoral College altogether, a move that would have some disadvantages (like eliminating Hamilton’s safeguard) but many advantages as well,” wrote Laurence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard University, in an email. “Anyhow, clamor and anger have become par for the course in this loony election year.”

Leaders of the effort, mainly Democrats, have plans to challenge laws in the 29 states that force electors to support their party’s candidate. Those laws have never been tested, leaving some constitutional experts to argue they’re in conflict with the founders’ intention to establish a body that can evaluate the fitness of candidates for office and vote accordingly.

Several sources involved with the legal planning also confirmed that they’re preparing to roll out a coalition of lawyers prepared to defend, pro bono, any electors who vote in opposition to their party’s candidate on Dec. 19, when the Electoral College meets to cast the official vote for president.

Those efforts are parallel to a drive by at least eight Democratic electors in Colorado and Washington state who are lobbying their GOP counterparts to reject their oaths — and in some cases, state law — to oppose Trump when it comes time to cast their votes.

[Trump's] detractors are seeking 37 Republican defections — just enough to keep Trump below the threshold, which would send the final decision to the House of Representatives.

The below-the-radar campaign to encourage and organize those so-called faithless electors has largely been ignored by Trump and his team. But if even a handful of Republican electors join their long-shot effort — they already claim to have one firm commitment and have made contact with a slew of others — it would raise alarms by disenfranchising millions of voters and invariably fuel a renewed look at the Electoral College’s place in the modern era.

The electors spearheading the effort, like Colorado’s Polly Baca and Washington state’s Bret Chiafalo, say they aren’t explicitly attempting to unravel the Electoral College. They argue that they’re merely returning it to its historic function as a safety valve in the event voters choose an unfit president. But they wouldn’t mind if radical reform is one of the byproducts of their work.

Already, Democrats frustrated that Clinton won the national popular vote — by more than 2.2 million as of Monday — only to lose the Electoral College, are offering legislation to amend the Constitution and abolish it altogether. But advocates for a more modest, bipartisan solution — a statewide compact to elect the president by popular vote — say the renewed attention to the drawbacks of the Electoral College could help their effort.

I hope and pray that something happens to block Trump/Pence.  Whatever happens, #NotMyPresident. 

A Legal Argument of Why the Electoral College Should Reject Trump

I like man find it maddening that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by more than a 2 million vote margin, yet the dangerous and unqualified loser, Donald Trump will be president unless the electors in the Electoral College do their job and confirm Clinton as president.   A Harvard professor makes the argument of why the Electoral College electors should over ride the Electoral College results and confirm the winner of the popular vote as the next president of the United States.  Yes, there would howls and screams from Trump and his would be fascist and/or Klan member supporters.  Here are highlights of the argument via the Washington Post: 

Conventional wisdom tells us that the electoral college requires that the person who lost the popular vote this year must nonetheless become our president. That view is an insult to our framers. It is compelled by nothing in our Constitution. It should be rejected by anyone with any understanding of our democratic traditions  — most important, the electors themselves.

The framers believed, as Alexander Hamilton put it, that “the sense of the people should operate in the choice of the [president].” But no nation had ever tried that idea before. So the framers created a safety valve on the people’s choice. Like a judge reviewing a jury verdict, where the people voted, the electoral college was intended to confirm — or not — the people’s choice. Electors were to apply, in Hamilton’s words, “a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice” — and then decide. The Constitution says nothing about “winner take all.” It says nothing to suggest that electors’ freedom should be constrained in any way. Instead, their wisdom — about whether to overrule “the people” or not — was to be free of political control yet guided by democratic values. They were to be citizens exercising judgment,  not cogs turning a wheel.

Many think we should abolish the electoral college. I’m not convinced that we should. Properly understood, the electors can serve an important function. What if the people elect a Manchurian candidate? Or a child rapist? What if evidence of massive fraud pervades a close election? It is a useful thing to have a body confirm the results of a democratic election — so long as that body exercises its power reflectively and conservatively. Rarely — if ever — should it veto the people’s choice. And if it does, it needs a very good reason.

So, do the electors in 2016 have such a reason?

Only twice in our past has the electoral college selected a president against the will of the people — once in the 19th century and once on the cusp of the 21st.

In 2000, George W. Bush lost the popular vote by a tiny fraction — half a percent — and beat Al Gore in the electoral college by an equally small margin — less than 1 percent.

In both cases, the result violated what has become one of the most important principles governing our democracy — one person, one vote. In both cases, the votes of some weighed much more heavily than the votes of others. Today, the vote of a citizen in Wyoming is four times as powerful as the vote of a citizen in Michigan. The vote of a citizen in Vermont is three times as powerful as a vote in Missouri. This denies Americans the fundamental value of a representative democracy — equal citizenship. Yet nothing in our Constitution compels this result.

Instead, if the electoral college is to control who becomes our president, we should take it seriously by understanding its purpose precisely. It is not meant to deny a reasonable judgment by the people. It is meant to be a circuit breaker — just in case the people go crazy.

In this election, the people did not go crazy. The winner, by far, of the popular vote is the most qualified candidate for president in more than a generation. Like her or not, no elector could have a good-faith reason to vote against her because of her qualifications. Choosing her is thus plainly within the bounds of a reasonable judgment by the people.

Yet that is not the question the electors must weigh as they decide how to cast their ballots. Instead, the question they must ask themselves is whether there is any good reason to veto the people’s choice.

The framers left the electors free to choose. They should exercise that choice by leaving the election as the people decided it: in Clinton’s favor.