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Lawrence Lessig Calls For The Electoral College to Choose Clinton Over Trump (washingtonpost.com)
Lawrence Lessig's new op-ed in the Washington Post argues against the idea "that the person who lost the popular vote this year must nonetheless become our president." (Paywalled version here, free version here.) Lessig points out that the electoral college results have already been ignored twice in U.S. history -- in 1824 and 1876.
The Constitution says nothing about "winner take all." It says nothing to suggest that electors' freedom should be constrained in any way...They were to be citizens exercising judgment, not cogs turning a wheel.
Complaining that the electoral college weights the votes in Wyoming roughly four times as heavily as the votes in Michigan, Lessig argues that the popular vote should be respected, and that the authors of the U.S. Constitution "left the electors free to choose. They should exercise that choice by leaving the election as the people decided it: in Clinton's favor."
Meanwhile, Politico is reporting that six electors, "mostly former Bernie Sanders supporters who hail from Washington state and Colorado," are already urging electors pledged to Clinton and Trump to instead coalesce around "a consensus pick like Mitt Romney or John Kasich." And the ethics lawyers for both President Obama and President Bush both told one liberal site "that if Trump continues to retain ownership over his sprawling business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19, they should reject Trump." Finally, from the original submission:
Even Donald Trump has called the Electoral College a "total sham." Is it time for the Electoral College to reflect the popular vote?
Complaining that the electoral college weights the votes in Wyoming roughly four times as heavily as the votes in Michigan, Lessig argues that the popular vote should be respected, and that the authors of the U.S. Constitution "left the electors free to choose. They should exercise that choice by leaving the election as the people decided it: in Clinton's favor."
Meanwhile, Politico is reporting that six electors, "mostly former Bernie Sanders supporters who hail from Washington state and Colorado," are already urging electors pledged to Clinton and Trump to instead coalesce around "a consensus pick like Mitt Romney or John Kasich." And the ethics lawyers for both President Obama and President Bush both told one liberal site "that if Trump continues to retain ownership over his sprawling business interests by the time the electors meet on December 19, they should reject Trump." Finally, from the original submission:
Even Donald Trump has called the Electoral College a "total sham." Is it time for the Electoral College to reflect the popular vote?
The problem isn't Trump, it is all the people who voted for Trump.
If we take the election back from Trump under the theory that the constitution is not a suicide pact, that won't address the issue of all the people who voted for Trump. In 1824, when electoral college did the same thing to Andrew Jackson (who was a similar combination of demagoguery, narcissism and ignorance) the result was counterproductive. Adams was selected by congress over Jackson. But was a very ineffective president because the circumstances of his selection negated any mandate to lead.
However the effect of "taking" the election from Jackson was to hypermotivate people who had previously been lukewarm or neutral and 4 years later Jackson won handily. He then went on to do all the terrible things people were worried about but now he had a lot of support not for his policies but as a reaction to what happened in 1824. So despite fucking up, he was still elected for a second term.
We are faced with no good choices with Trump. Just lesser evils. Nobody can see the future, but an unpopular Trump entering office today, with no honeymoon period and the press raring to hold him accountable could be a lot better than a popular Trump (or Ivanka) entering office 4 years from now.
I wish a knew for sure.
Trump meets the qualifications to be President (natural born citizen, over 35). There is no charge or proof he's beholden to overseas powers. Hillary? Well - she's committed actions (crimes, if it was anyone else) that cast strong doubt on her ability to operate as a President and there are certainly hundreds of millions of foreign dollars in her pocket - especially whilst she was Secretary of State.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
is how the media twists and contorts just about every news item lately to paint the President Elect in a negative manner. Either liberal views or an attempt to stay relevant in this day and age, either way it's just sickening.
Face the facts, the liberal opinion and political agenda doesn't work and the people have voted as such. Media as we knew it is just getting lost in the noise that is the internet. Intelligent people are able to see the difference between signal and noise no matter how much noise the liberal media produces.
Whereas our political system isn't perfect, its better than any in history and people are more intelligent than the media.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Sort of like some Democrats are now probably regretting Reid saying just a couple weeks before the election that Senate Democrats should exercise the nuclear option (get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees) if Republicans interfered with confirming Clinton's (oops...) SCOTUS nominees. I, however, look forward to Reid speaking out in favor of Republicans when they exercise the nuclear option to prevent Democrats from interfering with Trump's SCOTUS nominees (unless, of course, he happens to be a hypocritical scumbag).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
It is correct to point out that the electoral college is not constitutionally bound to elect the person on the ballot. That does not mean they must elect Clinton either.
If not Clinton or Trump then who? I don't know but it would be nice to see candidates that are a bit younger and healthier for one.
I know I'm not the first to point this out but this tendency for old professional politicians to run is likely a big reason why Trump won. Trump is just as old as Clinton but he appears to be in better health and hasn't been a politician for 50 years like his Republican primary competitors and the Democrat general election competitor. People don't like professional politicians any more, assuming they were ever liked.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Jill is in it to gather donor dollars (all leftovers go to the Green party, read the fine print).
She picked some weird states if it was just about the votes, as I discuss here.
I mean, MI has only PAPER ballots, so notions of hacking are purely delusional and you can find 538 arguing similar.
Stop bitching about how unfair the electoral college is. Go through the legal process to change/eliminate it so this it doesn't happen again, if that's what the people want.
Right! And also, it's bizarre how electors of a state, say ID, are supposed to turn against the voters of their state and vote for Hilary just b'cos CA has given Hilary a margin that erases Trump's margin in the rest of the country. If they wanna do that, increase CA's #electoral votes in future elections.
The Popular Vote doesn't mean anything. At all. For it to mean anything, there would need to have been a binding Popular Vote before the campaign started. The candidates campaigned based on the Electoral Vote system, and would have campaigned differently if the vote was a popular vote. Thus the 'popular vote' numbers are the result for an election campaign that never happened.
As it stands, the 'Popular Vote' is just something journalists do to get us to buy their publications and watch their 'shows.' It's just a gathering up of numbers from the elections, which are held in each state.
So what's wrong with chaos. We all came from chaos. Certain kinds of chaos is bad but not all chaos. #notallchaos
Unprecedented in that a candidate frugally ran an election with a singular focus on the electoral vote? That he eschewed votes in deep blue areas to save funds for places that it actually counted? Can you definitively say that the popular vote counts would have been the same had the rules been different?
As for me, my nightmare was Hillary nominating Supreme Court justices. She flat out stated she intended to nominate political activists and get cases heard for the express purpose of over turning past rulings. The court is supposed to be an arbitrator between Congress and the President, not an arm of the President.
On topic: Wealth should not decide elections. I am responding to the suggestion that the relatively small number of urban counties shouldn't count as much as the many rural counties, even though they have many people and drive the economy. Our system is roughly based on population, as it should be.
Off topic: Wealth can be used to acquire or produce food, just like anything else. As a nation, we could abolish our agricultural subsidies and be better off economically.
A fair post, so I'll respond in kind.
The way I see it, the EC diminishes a large problem at the expense of introducing a small one.
We're seeing the small problem manifest more in modern times because of effective universal communication, forcing both candidates to a central position. It's like two ice cream vendors serving a beach - people will gravitate to the vendor closest to them, so each vendor maximizes it's custom by being in the exact middle of the boardwalk. (In this simile the "middle" is any political position, and the voters will vote for the person who is "closest" to their personal beliefs.)
Looking at the responses here, it's clear that the EC is doing its job. If it were abolished, it's clear even from the replies to this article that the middle states would revolt (meaning: secede from the union) rather than be ruled by the most populous states.
One reason to *not* put Clinton into office is that it would result in nation-wide rioting at a level that might bring down the government.
Roughly half the population approves of Trump(*). The Clinton protests were small because fundamentally most people realize that Trump won fairly and there's no cause for grievance.
Make Clinton president and you've suddenly got a whole lot of people who have a legitimate excuse to protest, and a fair portion of Clinton supporters would probably agree - some would join in, a sizeable proportion would probably silently agree, and almost all of them wouldn't oppose the protests.
It sucks that Clinton lost, but please consider the situation.
Beyond any political leanings people have, people fundamentally believe themselves to be fair and honest.
Switching the election would violate that feeling in a whole lot of people, more than just the ones who supported Trump.
And as further info, note that 26 states rejected Obama's executive orders on refugees. That's very close to the 33 needed to force a constitutional crisis. It seems *highly likely* that putting Clinton in the president's chair would trigger such a crisis.
Obama backed down and essentially said "let the next president deal with it", and I think the states also held off because they knew they'd have a chance to vote in someone else. But put Clinton in that chair and we're threatening the extinction of our country.
Once again, it sucks that Clinton lost, but please consider the situation.
(*) You can extend the vote results to cover the entire country because it's a large enough sample.
The Clinton campaign announced today they're joining the recount process: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11...
I'm in favour of recounts in general, and for this election in particular. It tells us about the reliability of the election process, and hopefully might shed light on hacking and other skulduggery. The information will be used to fix future problems.
As to Clinton, she's joining because Jill Stein can't call for a recount. In at least one of the states (probably all of them) you can't call for a recount unless you are aggrieved, which means that you think the recount would change the outcome.
Jill Stein can't reasonably say that she might have won, so she officially can't be aggrieved.
Hillary most certainly *can* make that claim, since the margins for her loss are so slim in those states.
That's why she joined the process. For the recounts to happen, she's the one to request them.
... is the guy who ran for President on the "Elect me and I'll resign after I fix democracy" platform.
But then he changed his mind and decided to run for the full term.
Then he quit.
So it's not really about how much he knows as much as it is about just how delusional he is about the things he thinks he knows.
Cause if we are to base our judgment on the state of his delusion regarding political and issues revolving around elections - nothing he suggested will happen.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Agree 100% that it is utter madness. I'm a Republican and I'm aghast that the party chose Trump. Both parties chose terrible candidates, and the ones running in the primaries weren't all that great either.
However, I don't agree that there is something that can (or should) be done from outside the parties to reform them. I have to believe that sooner or later something will give. The problem is that more and more people are leaving both parties, with independent voters reaching the highest percentages ever. What that results in is the remaining members getting more and more radical, with the parties finding less and less common ground. And it doesn't appear that things will get better as the Democrats look to get more radical after the results of this election. It's going to be harder and harder for a candidate to appeal to the remaining party members to get nominated, and then appeal to the more moderate independents.
Each party needs to come back to recognizing that they need to also appeal to the independent voters. Instead the independent voters get left with a choice of two terrible candidates. It's hard to imagine the two party system breaking down, but I feel we are on that path. If the current parties keep getting more extreme I feel that there will eventually be a movement for a new more moderate party (I doubt that any of the existing third parties will fill that void). In my opinion, perhaps the "Rational Party" would be a good name. :)
Requiring Electors to vote a certain way is blatantly unconstitutional. It goes against the very purpose of the Electoral College.
That hasn't been tested in the Supreme Court. All that has been tested is requiring a pledge from each of the Electors. No one has tested holding them to that pledge because it's fucking insane and obviously illegal.
However, I wouldn't put anything past the current Supreme Court, unfortunately.
None of those cities have problems because of high taxes. In order:
Amusingly, California almost got into trouble the same way—by taking on too much debt without adequate stockpiles of cash to weather economic downturns. One of the better surprises in California politics was getting two fiscal conservative governors in a row—Schwarzenegger and Brown—who have pushed some useful reforms that will really help the state over the long term.
It's unfortunate that the Republican party has drummed out most of its fiscal conservatives in favor of Reaganite faux conservatives who are even more fiscally irresponsible than the worst of the Democrats. If there were a non-negligible number of actual fiscal conservatives in the Republican party, the red states wouldn't be in nearly as bad shape as they are. Both parties need more fiscal conservatives.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.