Posted on 10/11/2018 12:06:03 AM PDT by beaversmom
Now that the Senate has confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, some Democrats are turning their fire on the idea that each state should be equally represented in the upper chamber of Congress. "The idea that North Dakota and New York get the same representation in the Senate has to change," NBC national security reporter Ken Dilanian tweeted.
Others, like GQ correspondent Julia Ioffe, took issue with the Electoral College, which allowed Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump to place four justices on the Court, even though Bush and Trump lost the popular vote in 2000 and 2016, respectively.
One politician who endorsed Ioffe's argument is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the democratic socialist running to represent New York's 14th Congressional District:
It is well past time we eliminate the Electoral College, a shadow of slavery’s power on America today that undermines our nation as a democratic republic.
Ocasio-Cortez isn't the only high-profile Democrat to embrace this view. "I passionately believe it's time to abolish the Electoral College," Hillary Clinton wrote in The Atlantic last month. Clinton's view isn't surprising. After all, she earned nearly 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016, but still lost.
In their criticisms of the Electoral College, Ocasio-Cortez and Clinton fail to grapple with the reason we have such a system in the first place. By preventing the majority from getting its way all the time, the Electoral College ensures that views from every part of the nation are represented. That way, those in high-population states with large cities aren't the only ones who have a say. Instead, as David Harsanyi wrote in a November 2016 piece for Reason, the Electoral College helps "create moderation and compromise":
To some extent, the Electoral College impels presidents and their political parties to consider all Americans in rhetoric and action. By allowing two senators for both Wyoming, with a population of less than 600,000, and California, with a population of more than 38 million, we create more national cohesion. We protect large swaths of the nation from being bullied. We incentivize Washington, D.C.—both the president and the Senate—to craft policy that meets the needs of Colorado as well as New York.
This is especially important when considering that small states—even sparsely populated ones—play important industrial roles, particularly in agriculture. If those states "become marginalized and then coerced to embrace the policies favored by the people in urban areas, the nation loses valuable resourcefulness, imagination and brainpower," Harsanyi noted.
Abolishing the Electoral College in favor of a popular vote–based system might also have some unexpected results. Clinton won the popular vote in large part due to her margins in New York and California, where Republicans knew their votes didn't matter. Changing the system might motivate some of those Republicans who stayed home on Election Day to come out of the woodworks. Texas Democrats might do the same. It's impossible to know who would have won in 2016 absent the Electoral College, as both parties—to say nothing of both campaigns—would've likely had very different strategies.
It's easy to blame the system when you don't win. But that doesn't mean the system is actually broken, or that there's an objectively "better" one we should be using.
Marxist bitching about Democracy in a Republic.
Idiot.
And bring in more illegals , anchor babies .....and USA will be DONE .
Aiiright Occasion go home !
But btw you are priceless and pathetic .....very interesting !
Your “democracy” is actually LIBERAL-FASCISM
I went back to viewing some of her interviews and commentary (even before the primary election). After a while, you come to realize that she has the maturity of a 13-year old kid. They talk about university and a degree, but I think she just dozed through....reaching a worthless degree in the end.
Joe Crowley? Since he’s still in this race and running under another party...I suspect that he’ll win the race, and this Cortez-opera will end very quietly. Then everyone will admit that she just wasn’t ready for the prime-time.
Communist Cortez hates nature’s animals like the deer or horses.
How many horses and deer live in the Big City??
They wiped out the animals. The Big City put their animals behind bars. Animals are extinct in the City.
The Big City gets LESS representation for killing mother nature and her wonderful animals.
Wierd...there is no right to vote. We’re not a democracy and we’re not a democratic republic. We were a constitutional republic with a very limited democratic process to elect our representatives.
Now were just a banana republic thanks to the expansion of the voting franchise.
What is with the complete obsession over this one Democrat from a deep blue district in a deep blue state again?
That COMMIE PUKE was raised in the leafy vales of suburbia/exurbia and is no "city girl". And just WHAT do horses and deer have to do with anything?
I live in exurbia, HATE the damned deer ( the mammallian cockroaches and carriers of an almost deadly disease) and can happily do without a whole LOT of the wildlife and insects who have chosen to invade my property.
And as far as wildlife in big cities go...there actually is quite a LOT of it....all kinds of birds, rats, mice, racoons, rabbits, snakes, frogs, all kinds of birds,and insects. Used to be lots of horses ( people did ride in Central park, but that seems to have waned )as well as carriage horses, which de B. has seen fit to wage war against.
You forgot the alligators in the sewers.
If she understood the Electoral Collefe she would know it gives more people more say and more voice than direct election, and makes far more states and people in those states, relevant to campaigns.
If the Electoral college was abolished only the biggest cities would be targeted by campaigns and everyone else would be ignored. That means only big city issues, social liberal issues, would be discussed, amd everyone elses issues outside mega urban areas, ignored.
"..if dumb waz dirt,she'd cover an acre"
There's probably more "wildlife" in Central Park, alone, NOT COUNTING THE OTHER BIG PARKS IN THE OTHER BOROUGHS, NOR THE SMALLER PARKS, than have EVER been in cages, combined, in the history of the Bronx Zoo and the Central Park Zoo.
What I fail to understand is what wildlife has to do re the ELECTORAL COLLEGE, calling our REPRESENTATIVE REPUBLIC a "DEMOCRACY" ( which we aren't ), as well as the other stuff in the original article.
Brilliant post!
Ah come on. You know as well as I do: the dingbat is muy entertaining.
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