by MELVIN GOODMAN
“On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
– H.L. Mencken
“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”
– H.L. Mencken
We cannot blame the Founding Fathers for the “democracy” that we have because we don’t truly have a democracy. In fact, the Founding Fathers did everything they could to avoid the possibility that the entire citizenry would have an essential role in electing our government. After all, they created the Electoral College that placed Donald Trump in the White House in 2016…and could keep him there for another four years.
The delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 were antidemocratic and conspired to restrain the “turbulence and follies of democracy” and what a New York delegate referred to as “popular phrenzy.” The brilliant nationalist from New York, Alexander Hamilton, who has been lionized for all time in the popular play by Lin-Manuel Miranda, emphasized that “all communities divide themselves into the few and the many.” According to Hamilton, the few were the “rich and well-born,” and the many were the “mass of the people…who were “turbulent and changing” and “seldom judge or determine right.” Hamilton believed it was vital to give the “rich” a “distinct permanent share in the government.” James Madison prevailed; he believed it would suffice to create strong institutional filters on the powers of the ordinary citizen.
The most important “filter” was the Electoral College, which meant the President would be chosen not directly by the voters, but by electors chosen by the states. In Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, the Founding Fathers required each state to “appoint…a number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives” to select a president. Similarly, the Senate would be chosen indirectly, and the Supreme Court would be chosen by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate. Only Benjamin Franklin spoke up forcefully for the “virtue and public spirit of our common people.”
Over the past two hundred years, hundreds of bill have been introduced in the House of Representatives to abolish or reform the Electoral College, which the late Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN) in 1961 called a “loaded pistol pointed at our system of government.” The closest the Congress got to reform was in 1969 when it passed a constitutional amendment to create a binding national vote. It had the support of President Richard M. Nixon, but it died in the Senate where southern segregationists killed it.
We have known for two centuries that the Electoral College was a flawed institution. In the election of 1824, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and a plurality of the electoral vote. The election, however, was decided by the House of Representatives where John Quincy Adams gained the support of Henry Clay be offering him the position of Secretary of State. This was known as the “corrupt bargain,” and Jackson campaigned successfully on the basis of the corrupt bargain to defeat Adams in 1828. Then there was the mess of 1876, which wasn’t settled until several days before the inauguration, when the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, allowed his Republican opponent, Rutherford Hayes, to enter the White House in return for removing Federal troops from the South and thus putting an ending to Reconstruction.
Counterpunch for more