If supporters of the popular election of the executive have their way, the next thing to go would logically be the present form of the U.S. Senate.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton once famously said, "It’s not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting. It’s that it has never really being tried." Part of the reason is that too many folks feel that Christianity — with its moral absolutes and especially its prohibitions — is outdated and unworthy of modern interest. One might also apply this gem of wisdom to those who rail against the U.S. Constitution; another apparently obsolete belief system.
One such of those is Sanford Levinson, a law professor at the University of Texas and the author of a book called, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It). Mr. Levinson, it seems, is feeling a bit hostile toward some of the foundational aspects of the law of the land, calling it, “a distinctly 18th century document that inflicts significant damage upon our 21st century reality.”
In an opinion piece for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Levinson laments the veto power of the President: “We are long overdue for a national discussion of whether we are well served by our peculiar form of government that places such a power in the hands of a single individual.” This alone should be enough to send shivers down the spine of those who revere our unique system of checks and balances. But there’s more.
When the Founders wrote and ratified the Constitution, many were dead set against the enumeration of specifics rights listed in the Bill of Rights. The thinking was, if we only set out certain rights as inviolate, a future government might trample at will on the rest. Sadly, we have seen that this is all too true. Even the beautifully and plainly written 9th and especially the 10th Amendment — The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people — have not stopped the carnage.
In fact, many of our current problems are a result of too much monkeying with the Constitution. For example, Levinson and others complain about the dangers of a ‘lame duck’ president with veto power, but had the 22nd Amendment not interfered with the process, this fear would be practically non-existent.
The idea of electing the president popularly instead of using the Electoral College is one of the main planks of liberals everywhere, and one that is planted even in the minds of our schoolchildren. Levinson writes:
Lest one believes that presidents, at least, represent the country as a whole, one must realize that our bizarre system of electing presidents through the Electoral College assures that almost no candidates any longer run truly national campaigns. So even if first-term presidents are held accountable via having to run for re-election, they focus only on a mixture of their "base" and "battleground" states, which leads to remarkable pandering to the latter and an almost total disregard for "wrong-color" states.
Surely the professor realizes that if the Electoral College were scrapped, candidates would only need to campaign in areas of concentrated population; namely, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and other liberal strongholds. But, isn’t that the point?
And if supporters of the popular election of the executive have their way, the next thing to go would logically be the present form of the U.S. Senate. After all, the principal that gives the less populous states a say in the election of the president, is the same which sustains their equality in the upper house.
What Mr. Levinson and others like him fail to acknowledge can be summed up in the very title of our nation: the United States of America. In other words, the Constitution was set up to loosely govern a federation of smaller governments, those of the individual states. The president was meant to be elected by the states and not by purely democratic means. The Founders were well acquainted with the dangers of direct democracy.
That is why the noxious 17th Amendment, which called for the popular election of senators, so upset the delicate balance between the states and the federal government. Senators, as opposed to representatives in “The People’s House,” were intended to be chosen by state legislatures to protect the interests of those states against federal power, not to add to it.
Just as the cure for our wounded public morality is more religion, not less; so too, the only cure for our governmental woes is greater adherence to the Constitution as written, and not its constant dilution. Because, just as religion reigns in sinful human behavior, the restrictions placed on Washington by the Constitution should similarly curb governmental abuse. It’s not the U.S. Constitution that has been found wanting; it is those who have sworn to uphold it.
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Other antiquated ideas contained within the Constitution are the democratic process of amending it when necessary, by consensus of all the states. How crude! Shouldn't there be a more efficient way, like the liberal illuminati acting directly through the judicial system? I mean, the people should directly control their government through the almighty democratic process, right? Well how can they do that when their elected state officials are off voting on some Constitutional amendment instead of doing the work of the people. Power to the people!… who agree with us.
Comment by Patrick Mulligan | April 10, 2008
Patrick Mulligan:
“Shouldn't there be a more efficient way, like the liberal illuminati acting directly through the judicial system?”
I love your humor. What amazes me is that the liberal mind is miles wide but only a millimeter deep and consequently can’t see what will happen to them when someday the worm turns, as it inevitably does, and “a new pharaoh arises who knows not Joseph” and is an active conservative court. The court ruling against them in the election of 2000 should have raised a few flags in their heads, but no. History started this morning, according to liberals, so they screamed like a stuck pig and blamed a cabal of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Halliburton.
Et al:
“…one must realize that our bizarre system of electing presidents through the Electoral College assures that almost no candidates any longer run truly national campaigns.”
And nothing exemplifies this more than the current primary process. Bill Clinton, who never got a majority of the popular vote in either election, would never have been president if all the primaries were on the same day. As it is, a few small Northeastern states decide who the candidates will be, absolutely guaranteeing us candidates the rest of the country won’t like. They need to fix this long before they tinker with the electoral college.
You can bet your sweet bippy that if in 2000 Al Gore had gotten the most electoral votes and George Bush the popular vote, liberals would be singing to the high heavens their praises of the electoral college as the greatest gift of our Founding Fathers. And by the way, we heard nary a peep from liberals about Bill not getting a majority of the popular vote. But if liberals are that concerned about democracy, they would be supporting something like what Robert Bork suggested: allowing a Supreme Court decision to be overturned by a majority of the House and Senate. Out-of-control courts are a much bigger problem than a system that keeps a few populous cities from crushing the rest of the country and permits a coalition of small states to temper the tyranny of the big ones.
These arguments are all moot anyway because changing to a popular vote would require a Constitutional amendment, and the small states are not about to slit their own throats.
“…the noxious 17th Amendment, which called for the popular election of senators, so upset the delicate balance between the states and the federal government.”
An observation by de Toqueville is in order here. During his 1830s tour of the young republic, he wrote in his Democracy in America that the House of Representatives was full of every kind of scalawag you could imagine, but the Senate was full of real statesmen. He attributed this fact to the indirect election of senators and predicted that the country would move toward more indirect election to increase the quality of our elected representatives. Sadly, we moved in the opposite direction; and as anyone can see, we have gotten worse politicians.
Comment by sedonaman | April 12, 2008
[…] I found an interesting article on Intellectual Conservative today by Lisa Fabrizio, concerning the desire by Democrats (a desire even more pronounced since 2000) to abolish the electoral college in favor of a purely popular election. Read the article here. […]
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