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07-26-2021, 07:06 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-26-2021, 07:21 AM by Anthony '58.)
[color=var(--primary-text)]This comes from my "award-winning" -  - facebook blog, "The Fourth Way" - described as dedicated to those who are neither liberal, nor conservative, nor libertarian:
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"These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation" - Justice David Brewer, Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892
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07-26-2021, 07:16 AM
(This post was last modified: 07-26-2021, 07:23 AM by Anthony '58.)
Congratulations, Maine and Nebraska. You were right all along.
The entire country needs to follow the example of these two states when it comes to allocating their electoral votes - and that involves giving the candidate that wins a given congressional district one electoral vote for doing so, with the candidate winning the state as a whole receiving the state's other two electoral votes.
This would render the conservative argument that reforming the Electoral College would amount to "mob rule" totally inoperative - because rural congressional districts would then be placed on an equal footing with urban ones.
For proof, look at what would have happened as regards California, New York, and Illinois.
In California, instead of Joe Biden winning all of the state's 55 electoral votes (it will be 54 starting in 2024, because the Golden State lost one House seat pursuant to the results of the 2020 Census), he would have won only 44 electoral votes, to Donald Trump's 11, presuming that Trump would have won the 11 House elections that the Republicans won in 2020.
In New York State, this would have meant that instead of Biden winning all of the Empire State's 29 electoral votes, he would have won only 21 of them, while Donald Trump would have won eight - and in Illinois, instead of Biden capturing all 20 of that state's electoral votes, he would have won only 15 of them to Trump's five.
These changes of results alone would have narrowed Biden's 306 to 232 margin in the Electoral College to 282 to 256, essentially analogous to his margin of victory in the national popular vote - and that does not even include Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Had the electoral votes of these states been allocated by congressional district instead of winner-take-all, it would have resulted in a further narrowing of Biden's margin of victory, tempered by Democratic congressional-district victories in such states as Florida and Texas.
The final tally would have been 275 electoral votes for Biden to 263 for Trump - and better yet, that polarizing map of blue states vs. red states, reminiscent of the map of free states vs. slave states in the run-up to the Civil War, would be a thing of the past..
The proverbial bottom line is that so long as essentially any members of the "Cold War Bloody Shirt Generation" - those born in 1945 or earlier - are still alive (and their power is greatly magnified by such things as Citizens United, lifetime felony disenfranchisement of almost exclusively poor men of color, the holding of elections on a workday, gerrymandering, which will once again come into play as redistricting is proceeded with over the next month, and the increasingly-popular "voter ID" laws, which are poll taxes in everything but name), the Electoral College will never be abolished altogether.
But this safe and sane compromise - proposed by a member of a generation that is more inclined to deal than to argue - does have a chance of becoming the law of the land.
"These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation" - Justice David Brewer, Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892
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(07-26-2021, 07:16 AM)Anthony Wrote: Congratulations, Maine and Nebraska. You were right all along.
The entire country needs to follow the example of these two states when it comes to allocating their electoral votes - and that involves giving the candidate that wins a given congressional district one electoral vote for doing so, with the candidate winning the state as a whole receiving the state's other two electoral votes.
This would render the conservative argument that reforming the Electoral College would amount to "mob rule" totally inoperative - because rural congressional districts would then be placed on an equal footing with urban ones.
For proof, look at what would have happened as regards California, New York, and Illinois.
In California, instead of Joe Biden winning all of the state's 55 electoral votes (it will be 54 starting in 2024, because the Golden State lost one House seat pursuant to the results of the 2020 Census), he would have won only 44 electoral votes, to Donald Trump's 11, presuming that Trump would have won the 11 House elections that the Republicans won in 2020.
In New York State, this would have meant that instead of Biden winning all of the Empire State's 29 electoral votes, he would have won only 21 of them, while Donald Trump would have won eight - and in Illinois, instead of Biden capturing all 20 of that state's electoral votes, he would have won only 15 of them to Trump's five.
These changes of results alone would have narrowed Biden's 306 to 232 margin in the Electoral College to 282 to 256, essentially analogous to his margin of victory in the national popular vote - and that does not even include Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Had the electoral votes of these states been allocated by congressional district instead of winner-take-all, it would have resulted in a further narrowing of Biden's margin of victory, tempered by Democratic congressional-district victories in such states as Florida and Texas.
The final tally would have been 275 electoral votes for Biden to 263 for Trump - and better yet, that polarizing map of blue states vs. red states, reminiscent of the map of free states vs. slave states in the run-up to the Civil War, would be a thing of the past..
The proverbial bottom line is that so long as essentially any members of the "Cold War Bloody Shirt Generation" - those born in 1945 or earlier - are still alive (and their power is greatly magnified by such things as Citizens United, lifetime felony disenfranchisement of almost exclusively poor men of color, the holding of elections on a workday, gerrymandering, which will once again come into play as redistricting is proceeded with over the next month, and the increasingly-popular "voter ID" laws, which are poll taxes in everything but name), the Electoral College will never be abolished altogether.
But this safe and sane compromise - proposed by a member of a generation that is more inclined to deal than to argue - does have a chance of becoming the law of the land.
As long as we count Senators in the Electroral Vote count, the system will alwasy be rigged against the larger states. Since the low-population states tend to be conservative (Vermont and Delaware being the outliers here), your accommodation won't fix anything. It may actually make it a lot worse.
The right path: enough states agreeing by law to assign their electors to the popular winner of the election.
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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(07-26-2021, 07:16 AM)Anthony Wrote: Congratulations, Maine and Nebraska. You were right all along.
The entire country needs to follow the example of these two states when it comes to allocating their electoral votes - and that involves giving the candidate that wins a given congressional district one electoral vote for doing so, with the candidate winning the state as a whole receiving the state's other two electoral votes.
The Congressional districts of Maine and Nebraska make geographic sense. With larger states in population, gerrymandering is a certainty. The fault is that one Party is always tempted to do "pack-and-stack" apportionment in which the other Party gets a small number of districts predictably 70-30 while the rest of the state is packed into districts more like 53-47. Because Republican pols are typically on the extreme right in social and economic policies, and political life for now is so polarized that quality of performance matters far less than does ideological identity, the 47% of Democrats in still safe-R districts get the shaft.
Winner-take-all is severely flawed as a concept, as many states, some large, seem to never deviate from a pattern set around 2000. It would make more sense to split the vote in accordance with a proportion of the vote in states with more than six electoral votes.
This would render the conservative argument that reforming the Electoral College would amount to "mob rule" totally inoperative - because rural congressional districts would then be placed on an equal footing with urban ones.
Quote:For proof, look at what would have happened as regards California, New York, and Illinois.
In California, instead of Joe Biden winning all of the state's 55 electoral votes (it will be 54 starting in 2024, because the Golden State lost one House seat pursuant to the results of the 2020 Census), he would have won only 44 electoral votes, to Donald Trump's 11, presuming that Trump would have won the 11 House elections that the Republicans won in 2020.
In New York State, this would have meant that instead of Biden winning all of the Empire State's 29 electoral votes, he would have won only 21 of them, while Donald Trump would have won eight - and in Illinois, instead of Biden capturing all 20 of that state's electoral votes, he would have won only 15 of them to Trump's five.
These changes of results alone would have narrowed Biden's 306 to 232 margin in the Electoral College to 282 to 256, essentially analogous to his margin of victory in the national popular vote - and that does not even include Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Had the electoral votes of these states been allocated by congressional district instead of winner-take-all, it would have resulted in a further narrowing of Biden's margin of victory, tempered by Democratic congressional-district victories in such states as Florida and Texas.
The fault is that millions of voters recognize that their votes do not matter in a Presidential election, as in Massachusetts or Tennessee. Splitting the vote proportionally would make the votes of agrarian interests in New York and the black or Hispanic vote in Texas more relevant -- and worth seeking .
Quote:The final tally would have been 275 electoral votes for Biden to 263 for Trump - and better yet, that polarizing map of blue states vs. red states, reminiscent of the map of free states vs. slave states in the run-up to the Civil War, would be a thing of the past..
The proverbial bottom line is that so long as essentially any members of the "Cold War Bloody Shirt Generation" - those born in 1945 or earlier - are still alive (and their power is greatly magnified by such things as Citizens United, lifetime felony disenfranchisement of almost exclusively poor men of color, the holding of elections on a workday, gerrymandering, which will once again come into play as redistricting is proceeded with over the next month, and the increasingly-popular "voter ID" laws, which are poll taxes in everything but name), the Electoral College will never be abolished altogether.
But this safe and sane compromise - proposed by a member of a generation that is more inclined to deal than to argue - does have a chance of becoming the law of the land.
Gerrymandering. Just look at Ohio.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
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Were it not for the hippie, Boomer left, a compromise like this would not be necessary.
Same goes for health care, whose compromise would entail abolishing the money-losing penny (which costs 1.6 cents to produce) and rounding up all retail purchases to the next higher nickel, which costs 11 cents to produce, so its composition needs to be changed to its current 75/25 copper-nickel alloy to much cheaper stainless steel (as Canada did two separate times in the middle of the last century). The revenue these two changes would raise would be enough to reimburse hospitals and free clinics for the charity care they still provide to the estimated 30 million uninsured that remain even with ObamaCare. Further revenue can be added by legalizing marijuana for all purposes in all 50 states and imposing a stiff tax on it, and also stiffly taxing "remittances" sent out of the country by illegal aliens, and also on other items that are bought almost exclusively by the underclass, most notably "throwaway" cell phones and their refill minutes - a favorite of drug dealers in particular.
A four-point compromise will also be needed to deal with the problem of excessive force by the police against people of color: First, allow cops to "knee-cap" unarmed, fleeing suspects, instead of always shooting to kill; second, as above, legalizing marijuana, which will cut contacts between the police and communities of color greatly; third, repeal the blatantly racist, classist confiscatory gun laws, like New York State's infamous Sullivan Law (95% of all inmates serving time under that law are African-American or Latino), which will also abolish "stop and frisk" en passant because what the police would be looking for in a "stop and frisk" would no longer be illegal to possess; and fourth, implement same-race policing - only African-American cops patrol African-American-American neighborhoods, only Latino cops patrol Latino neighborhoods, and so on; and if you think that this is "radical," Boston did this very thing in 1850, after the city's Irish Catholics complained of the brutal treatment they were receiving from WASP cops. The resulting mass hiring of Irish police officers directly led to the tradition of the Irish civil servant - which quickly spread not only to other cities, but to other uniformed services as well, particularly fire departments.
Instead of an Age of Aquarius, we are stuck with an Age of Compromise.
"These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation" - Justice David Brewer, Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892
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