Michael
Ramirez cartoon (via Bookworm Room)
"The US Election Without the Electoral College"
William Sullivan at The American Thinker has a good article on the subject, well worth reading in light of the ongoing temper tantrums we are seeing:
By now, you’ve heard the disgruntled
leftists parroting the sentiment that the Electoral College is an archaic relic
that is either racist (what
else?), or has obviously outlived any usefulness it may have once had.
Therefore, in the interest of progress, it must be abolished.
Outgoing California Senator
Barbara Boxer has recently introduced a
doomed-to-fail bill meant to do just that.
This argument is, of course,
painfully dim and tiresome. The Electoral College is one of many
safeguards against what de Tocqueville would later describe as
the “tyranny of the majority” that our Founders feared, or more specifically,
the threat of a concentrated majority in a state that happened to be more
populous than another. After all, it’s doubtful that Rhode Island would
have chosen to ratify the Constitution and join these United States if they
believed that their state’s unique desires at the federal level would be
perpetually overruled by the much more populous New York, for instance.
In the simplest terms, the
United States was conceived as a voluntary union of sovereign states which were
unified under the limited federal government which bound them -- one which
could only act within the very strict guidelines enumerated in our
Constitution. It is very much by design that the prerogative of each
sovereign state is influential in the election of our president, and the
Electoral College helps to ensure that.
But I won’t beat that dead
horse. There is ample reading material to inform interested parties about
the wisdom of the Electoral College, in contrast to a strictly popular vote
where highly-populated urban strongholds located in a minority of states might
disenfranchise the will of the large majority of other states in presidential
elections.
Read
the rest here.
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