Liberals Declare War on the Electoral College and the Senate

On day one of the 116^th Congress, liberals declared war on the Electoral College.  Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee introduced a Constitutional amendment that would abolish the Electoral College and award the Presidency to the candidate receiving the highest share of the popular vote nationwide.  In all honesty, liberals began declaring war on the Electoral College the second President Trump won the 2016 Presidential Election by capturing 306 electoral votes while losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton; making him the second Republican President to win the Electoral College and lose the popular vote in less than two decades. 

Liberals act as if the Electoral College gives Republicans an unfair advantage; apparently forgetting that liberals, in fact, always start out with an enormous mathematical advantage.  The Democrats can always count on winning California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Washington, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, Oregon, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Delaware, Vermont, and the District of Columbia.  All of these states voted for Hillary Clinton by double digits in 2016 and have voted Democratic in every Presidential election since at least 1992.  Based on the 2010 Census, these states boast a combined 182 electoral votes.  In the past three Presidential elections, Democrats have won Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia; all of which seem to favor the Democrats now, thanks to our immigration policies.  Adding these states to a Democratic “head start” in the Electoral College would give them 215 electoral votes.  Republicans, on the other hand, can only count on winning Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri, Alabama, South Carolina, Kentucky, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Utah, Nebraska, West Virginia, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.  All of these states, which voted for President Trump by double digits in the 2016 Presidential Election, boast a combined 123 electoral votes. This means that Republicans have to run the table on the remaining states if they want to have any hope of winning the Presidency.

Had President Trump relied on President George W. Bush’s path to re-election, which went through the solid red states listed above, Colorado, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, and Virginia, and the perennial swing states of Florida, Ohio, and Iowa; he would have lost.  However, President Trump managed to take the White House by capturing the “rust belt” states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; a feat no Republican Presidential candidate had accomplished since 1988.  

If, however, President Trump won every state he won, excluding Texas, he would have lost.  Texas, which Republicans have relied upon as their biggest prize in the Electoral College, only voted for President Trump by nine points in the 2016 Presidential Election.  Subtracting 38 electoral votes from President Trump’s column would have brought his total down to 268, and adding those electoral votes to Hillary’s column would have given her the magic number of 270 electoral votes.

Maybe liberals forgot this but the Democratic Presidential candidate has won the Electoral College in four of the past seven Presidential elections.  Every time the Democrat has won the Electoral College, he has won with significantly more Electoral Votes than the Republican Presidential candidates have won with.  President Clinton won 370 electoral votes in the 1992 Presidential Election and added to that total in his 1996 re-election bid; by capturing 379 electoral votes.  President Obama won 365 electoral votes in the 2008 Presidential Election and 332 electoral votes in his 2012 re-election.  In all of these elections, had just one state voted Democratic instead of Republican, the outcome of the election would not have changed.

Republicans have won the Electoral College in three of the past seven Presidential elections.  Each time the Republican has won, the election would have turned out differently if just one state voted for a Democrat instead of a Republican.  As mentioned above, the 2016 Presidential Election would have gone to Hillary Clinton had President Trump lost Texas.  Had President Bush lost Texas, Florida, or Ohio in 2004; he would have lost the election. All of these states had 20 or more electoral votes following the 2000 Census and President Bush only won 286 electoral votes in his re-election bid.  In 2000, had he lost any of the states that voted Republican, he would have lost the election; as he only secured a narrow Electoral College victory of 271 electoral votes.  

In a more recent series of developments, liberals have also declared war on the United States Senate.  Former Congressman John Dingell of Michigan wrote an op-ed advocating for the abolition of the Senate while an article in The Atlantic complains that the Senate lacks “diversity” when compared with the House of Representatives because “the current Senate allocation is heavily biased in favor of small states with predominantly white populations, and against large states where whites are in the minority or close to it.”  The Atlantic article, written by University of Pennsylvania Professor Eric Orts, does not take into account that two of the smallest states have enormous non-white populations, Hawaii and New Mexico; and that several of the larger states, including Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; have a higher proportion of whites than the United States population as a whole. Unlike Dingell, who calls for the total abandonment of the upper chamber, Orts argues that the Senate should remain in place but suggested throwing out Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution, which states that “The Senate of the United States shall be comprised of two states, chosen by the legislature thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote.”

Orts’s op-ed outlines a scheme where 26 states would have only one Senator, 12 states would continue to have two Senators, eight states would gain one or two seats in the Senate, and the four largest states would gain a substantial number of Senate seats: “California gets 12 total, Texas gets nine, and Florida and New York get six each.”  Orts’s master plan would increase the number of Senate seats from 100 to 110. 

Maybe liberals have bad memories, but they actually held the Senate during six of President Obama’s eight years in office.  With the exception of 2010, Democrats did very well in the Senate elections from 2006 to 2012.  They did so well in the 2008 election that they ended up with a filibuster-proof supermajority during President Obama’s first two years in office.  Even as they became a minority in the Senate during the last two years of the Obama Presidency and remain a minority in the Trump Presidency, Senate Democrats have had some degree of success in blocking conservative legislation passed in the House.  This led me to dub the Senate “the graveyard of conservatism.”  Because of the filibuster rule, which Alexander Hamilton specifically warned against, most legislation needs 60 votes to pass.  The Democrats have definitely enjoyed using the filibuster or at the very least the threat of it, most recently by blocking funding for the border wall. 

Based on the results of the 2016 Presidential Election, where President Trump won 30 states and Hillary Clinton won 20 states; it would make sense that Republicans would have 60 seats in the Senate, while Democrats would have 40.  After all, every single state that voted for President Trump voted for a Republican Senate candidate in 2016 while every single state that voted for Hillary Clinton voted for a Democratic Senate candidate.  The Democrats had the arduous task of defending ten seats in states President Trump won in 2016.  They ended up holding up remarkably well; only losing in four of the ten states, while picking up a Senate seat in Arizona, which President Trump won in 2016, and Nevada, which President Trump lost.  The Democrats should definitely pat themselves on the back for their successful defense of seats in red states as voters across America increasingly vote for members of the same party for President and the Senate.

Liberals’ declarations of war against the Electoral College and the Senate come in the context of a broader war on the Constitution itself.  Liberals demonstrate little respect for the actual provisions of the Constitution, while demonstrating sacrosanct reverence to the imaginary provisions of the Constitution guaranteeing the rights to abortion and birthright citizenship.  Don’t just take my word for it.  Listen to what the Democrats have actually said.  2020 Presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke recently sat down for an interview with The Washington Post, where he asked  “can an empire like ours with military presence in over 170 countries around the globe, with trading relationships…and security agreements in every continent, can it still be managed by the same principles that were set down 230-plus years ago?”  Those “principles” O’Rourke speaks of refer to the founding principles laid out in the Constitution.  Some of his fellow Democrats and liberals have already answered O’Rourke’s question for him.  The New York Times’s resident “conservative” Bret Stephens and former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford, have argued for the abolition of the Second Amendment.  Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu of California expressed his desire to regulate “the content of speech” while begrudgingly admitting that the First Amendment of the Constitution would prevent his fantasy from becoming reality.

It remains very unlikely that liberals’ declarations of war against the Electoral College and the Senate will go anywhere.  After all, Cohen’s proposed Constitutional Amendment to abolish the Electoral College would need to secure the support of two-thirds of both Houses of Congress before heading off to the states for ratification.  Even if two-thirds of Congress signed off on the Constitutional amendment, three-fourths of the states would need to ratify the amendment for it to take effect.  Liberals appear to have an easier path to achieving their dream of abolishing the Electoral College in the form of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.  Eleven reliably Democratic states, along with the homogeneously Democratic District of Columbia, have signed the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact; an agreement to award all of their states’ electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote nationwide regardless of whether or not the candidate won their state.  The states who have signed onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact have 172 electoral votes between them; the agreement would not become law until that number rises to the magic number of 270.  Supporters of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact argue that it does not violate the Constitution because Article II of the Constitution states that “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”  In other words, the Constitution does not explicitly mandate that states award their electors to the candidate who wins their state. 

As for the idea to abolish the Senate, get real.  Does anyone really think that the Senate would vote to abolish itself? Dream on, liberals.