by PAUL STREET
This might be a good time for Americans to stop masochistically worshipping at the feet of their nation’s authoritarian Constitution. A proto-fascistic genocidal racist maniac and anti-science eco-exterminist determined to kill two million more Americans with COVID-19 sits in the White House thanks in no small part due to the absurdly venerated 1788 United States Constitution.
How the Founders Put Trump In
For the fifth time in American history, a candidate who lost the national popular vote became president. Thank the holy charter’s Electoral College, which selects the president on the basis an archaic formula that vastly over-represents the nation’s most rural, white, and reactionary regions and reduces serious presidential campaigning to a relatively small handful of states where the winner-take-all Electoral College slates are contested.
In nearly every state, the candidate who receives the most votes statewide is entitled to the vote of all the state’s electors. If President Donald Trump receives 47.5 % of the vote in Ohio, and that former Vice President Joe Biden receives 47.4% of the vote there, all of Ohio’s 18 electoral votes would be allocated to Trump.
Americans do not elect “their” president – absurdly described as “our commander-in-chief” by talking heads liberal and conservative – on the basis of one person, one vote.
Simon, I mean “our” holy 18th century charter says.
(Try to explain the Electoral College to someone from another country, some day. It’s an entertaining exercise.)
The Democratic Party might have run a candidate who would have won enough votes in 2016’s contested states to get past the Electoral College hurdle to keep the child-separating, climate-denying, pandemic-spreading lunatic Trump out of the White House. But they didn’t, thanks largely to the shockingly unlimited role that concentrated wealth plays in the Americans candidate selection process. That plutocratic role has been as the law of the certified in two key U.S. Supreme Court decisions – Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and Citizens United (2010).
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