May sound odd to those who think the United States is a democracy, but it is not. It is a representative Republic. And as Franklin famously said, we give you a “Republic if you can keep it”. There is a common thread in why our founders wanted senators to be appointed by the states and the electoral college process for determining the outcome of a presidential election, and why they preferred the caucus process to simply a pure democratic vote – one man – one vote or in the “woke” era one person/non-binary carbon based life form, one vote. They understood the inherent weakness of a pure democracy. You see, they studied history. The Federalist Papers penned by Hamilton, Madison and Jay noted the inherent weakness of the form of government in ancient Greece and Rome when they attempted to run their city states with a pure democratic vote. They understood that the end result inevitably led to tyranny, chaos and anarchy. As we have seen in recent elections where one party won the popular vote but lost the electoral college vote and the election, there are those who do not understand the genius behind the electoral college, why senators were to be appointed by states and not elected by popular votes, and even less understood is why the caucus system of choosing electors in a primary is also preferable to simply a popular vote. That is, if you are Democrat and you win the popular vote but lose the electoral college vote and lose the election, you are probably not happy.
Unfortunately, the Democrat Party may likely have a real difficult time winning a national election after the 8 year experiment of Barack Hussein Obama and their continued move to the far left. Although Obama and his media sycophants cast him as the first black to win the oval and a moderate, his community organizing past and ties to radicals such as domestic terrorist Ayers, radical Black Liberation preacher – “God damn America” Wright, his fundamental transformation was not to make us less divided, but more divided. As the “father of community organizers” Saul Alinsky stated in Rules for Radicals, the goal was to take from the haves to give to the have nots. And if you’re a “have” you may not feel so giving. But in practice, the ones punished were predominately the Middle Class. And that is exactly who Alinsky and his followers went after – as American middle class were said to be racists and war mongers as they clung to their “guns and religion”. So, the net result is that the key states in the heartland that determined the outcome of elections were the greatest victims of Obama’s policies. Although most voters probably did not realize Hillary Clinton’s radical past, they did understand her when she accused Trump voters as being a basket of “deplorables”. Hillary wrote such a glowing essay on Alinsky that he even offered her a job as a community organizer. With Bill, she had bigger fish to fry – becoming first lady of Arkansas, then first lady of America, then senator and then POTUS. But her campaign’s failure to understand that the electoral college and not the popular vote would determine the outcome of the presidential election – she lost. Ignoring the middle class and key states in fly over country doomed her fate. Rather than learn from this huge mistake, she and her party have decided that getting rid of the electoral college and caucuses would be the best way to ensure that Democrats win a presidential election. Then in the same breath they talk about how the Republicans and Trump are destroying the Constitution.
Now as the Democrats miscalculate the effect of their impeachment so close to the Presidential election, many independents and perhaps more than a few democrats are wondering why they were so keen on impeaching a president in such a hurry with such flimsy articles that the senate quickly dismissed the case, it is highly likely that whoever the Democrat nominee is, will suffer the same fate as Hillary. For those of us paying attention, the Democrat party has moved far to the left. The likely candidate may in fact be an avowed socialist – who honeymooned in Moscow. Funny how we hear pejoratives like “Moscow Mitch” – when Bernie the Bolshevik is much closer to reality. If the left were to be true to the facts, with a wife and family making money off of China – they might call him Beijing Mitch but it doesn’t have quite the alliteration as Moscow Mitch.
As for repealing the 17th Amendment that got rid of the states appointing senators, we have seen the genius of why the Framers wanted states and not the people to directly vote for senators. Now, popular politicians can move to any state they want to if they think they can win. So you get someone born in Chicago, first lady in Arkansas, becoming senator in New York? Huh? Or former Governor of Massachusetts becoming senator in Utah? Huh? We have self-serving politicians rather than senators that actually care about the states where they were elected. Not by chance that the 17th Amendment occurred in the time frame of Wilson the Progressive. The move to pure democratic process sounds great until you understand why the Framers thought otherwise. And with time we have seen the negative effects of pure democracy when senators fail to meet their obligation to represent their states but rather are more interested in promoting their own self interest or the interest of the party over the people of that state. Repealing the 17th amendment would do a great deal to make senators more responsive to the states and not party or self-interest.
And finally, we need not go any further than noting that Hillary Clinton was not too happy with the Iowa caucus rather than the pure democratic method of selecting a presidential candidate. She recently was quoted as saying in a Breitbart article: “It is a very undemocratic way of picking a nominee…it just makes no sense, and so who knows what’s going to happen.” And then she and her fellow Democrats would also drone on about how unfair the electoral college system is since she lost the election by a wide margin in the electoral college votes though she won the popular vote – essentially New York and California cities. The reality is that she lost almost all 3000 plus US counties and 30 of 50 states. If the Democrats like Hillary were successful in eliminating the electoral college, eliminating the Iowa caucus, the country would move into the realm of those Greek or Roman city states that found that pure democracy was not a blessing but rather a curse and the sure path to tyranny and anarchy.