So, you agree that the Electoral College is legitimate, and that the winner of that vote has greater legitimacy than the winner of the popular vote?
In other words, your only real quarrel with our current set-up is that the winner of the popular vote isn’t given a really nice consolation prize?
It should be easy-peasy! Thank god that the GQP is happy to help with the heavy lifting, and that the states they control will absolutely cede their legal rights to control elections if Joe Biden just asks nicely enough!
Do you work full-time as a political advisor, or is it a part-time gig?
Because there’s a lot going on in the world, and TPM isn’t the NYT? I don’t understand the number of people here who subscribe to a news organization they don’t actually like or respect.
Maybe people could have a whip 'round to fund the salaries of a few more reporters?
Great point!
New to my list is the reporting of so-and-so “doubling down” on some ludicrous point. We’re also subject to concerned reports of tripling and even quadrupling down.
That’s not just lazy reporting, it reflects a bias toward lunacy.
Right.
I get pretty frustrated with folks who like to compare the enviro-footprint of green energy or EV cars, etc. when they overlook one of the most obvious issues…contained vs dispersed pollution/waste.
Being stuck with a pile of waste/end product isn’t ideal, but it is 1000 times better than turning it into some form of smoke or mixing it into soil/water and kissing it goodbye. Also, every kind of burning turns breathable air into a poison at huge rates. Not only do you now have burnt hydrocarbons in the air (and who knows what else), but you had to burn 1000 times more oxygen than fuel to achieve the goal. We are not in an open-ended system.
No. Humanity is what it is, and other, arguably more democratic states have been happy to do the whole keep-political-forces-we-don’t-like-out-of-our-sphere-of-influence thing. Human beings are pretty awesome, but our darker nature is hard to control.
P.S. Define “democracy,” then explain why your definition is more correct than anyone else’s.
Maybe people could have a whip 'round to fund the salaries of a few more reporters?
Didnt TPM just have a journalism fund drive a few months back? TPM is a boutique site with diverse, informed, and amusing members. It will never grow beyond that, never be Mother Jones. And without the laughs there’s nothing special about TPM.
I’m supporting the service. I’ll listen to what the TPM folks have to say on this, thanx.
Wow. Actually, TPM has been special for a long time. It’s changed a lot. Many of the folks who actually pay for the service don’t bother commenting in these forums…
The Trump cult is a suicide pact . . . that may kill us all.
There is the usual caveat with Chump. At the final triumphal moment HE fakes taking his swig of the sacred KoolAid and ducks out the back door (with the collection plate)…
Some agreement. They are unionized, cover what they cover, and many of the staff go on to higher paying/visibility jobs.
I’m not sure wat that means, but never mind.
Not surprising.
So you were ‘‘going there’’’. But Timothy old boy, I am a dues-paying member.
Those are all nice ideas. Unfortunately, I don’t see any of them getting past the US Senate any time soon.
I agree, but those are the solutions, short of those we continue along the road to fascism (or civil unrest)
These at least only requires simple majority. The other remedies require amendments and that surely is not ever happening again.
So you think that if in 2016, Donald Trump had been made president and Hillary Clinton had been Vice President, that would have made everything hunkey-dorey? Also, in this case, it would have violated the rule that the President and the Vice-President cannot be from the same state (since this was before Trump changed his official residence to MAL).
And what would we have done with Mike Pence, who was, after all, actually running for VP? Say, “Sorry, man, but thanks for playing, and here’s a complimentary plane ticket back to Indiana.”?
Besides, that would all require the repeal of the 12th Amendment.
No, but no worse, more hilarious… theoretically one more senate vote in certain situations
I guess, it’s a thought exercise, not so much something that will actually happen requiring the ironing out of such kinks.
I think if the Trump campaign wanted to fly Pence home, that’s fine. More funny is that Trump would likely have stranded him…
Most hairbrained half seriou, half joking internet comments about fixing government usually have at least one constitutional conflict…
All I can say is, that after Jefferson got stuck with being Adams’s vice-president, the general consensus seemed to be that having a president and a VP of opposing parties was a BAD idea. Hence the 12th Amendment. I would much rather get rid of the EC altogether than to keep trying to “fix” something that was so badly broken from the beginning.
How to elect the president was one of the most contentious issues the Constitutional Convention dealt with, and one of the big difficulties for the people there in 1787 was that nobody had ever tried to launch a large-scale democracy before. There were no other countries at the time (maybe a tiny principality or two) who elected their political leader by popular vote. So the Americans at the Convention were afraid to trust that could ever work long-term. And they worried how voters would know enough about candidates from other parts of the country.
But we’ve now had a couple centuries of experience electing leaders by popular vote, and while sometimes it leads to lame-brain leaders, those can always be voted out. It certainly seems to be a better solution that hereditary leadership, and no worse than having leaders selected from a group of elites. And we now have nationwide media that solves the problem of people not knowing anything about those not from their own states. (Of course, we do have to deal with that nasty problem of disinformation coming out of some parts of that media…)
All things considered, I just see no reason to continue to hang on to the Electoral College. It’s the price we paid for being the first modern democracy; nobody else that came behind us had chosen to do things this way. We should ditch it; the only problem is the politics of doing that.