![]() If you had no national parties, and if you didn’t want the House to choose the president directly, the crazy elector plan perhaps has some appeal. House from among the top three finishers on that electoral ballot. If no one received a majority of the votes for president, the final choice would be made by the U.S. And, if anyone was named on a majority of those ballots, that guy would be president and the runner-up would be vice president. Each of those electors would vote for two men (of course they would be men, and white ones), both of whom they thought were worthy of consideration to be president (and at least one of whom had to be from a state other than the elector’s own).Īll of those named by such electors would be pooled together in the capital. They wanted an elected national executive, but, in the absence of national parties, how would that person be chosen (after George Washington, the one unifying leader of that moment, passed from the scene)?Īccording to Baker, the original vision was that the voters of each congressional district would elect someone from their district as an elector, perhaps a member of the elite who had the confidence of the masses and who was familiar with the national scene in a way that ordinary voters were not. There were no national political parties at the time of the framing, nor were the Framers able to foresee the takeover of the entire political system by two big parties that would soon develop. But, here again, it’s not fair to blame the Framers for what it has become. The one more is the ridiculous Electoral College system. I’ll just do one more, and then saddle up my high horse and ride away. (And I suppose if I were a small state, back then, I would have understood their concern.) But Baker seems to understand that however deeply undemocratic and violative of the basic principle of one-person-one-vote that provision is, the Constitution would never have been ratified if that guarantee to the small states had not been included. (Ironically, one of the fathers of gerrymandering and the guy for whom it was named was Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who was at the Constitutional Convention, refused to sign the final document and campaigned against its ratification, but later figured out how to take advantage of the power over district boundaries to favor one’s own party.)īaker also attacks what might be called the permanent and most extreme malapportionment in our system, the equal representation of all states in the U.S. This horrible, anti-democratic, hyper-partisan practice - certainly an affront to the notion that all votes should be given equal weight - was unknown and unintended when the Framers came up with their plan. It developed after the Constitution was ratified. But it wasn’t invented by the Framers, nor foreseen by them. Take gerrymandering, which gets considerable attention from Baker, and which certainly deserves bashing. The three-fifths compromise, for example (according to which slave states were given credit for 3/5 of a person for each slave when calculating how many seats the state would get in the House of Representatives), is hideous, as were several other provisions designed to protect the interests of slave owners.īut the Constitution stood no chance of being ratified in a country divided almost evenly between slave states and free states, if the white males who completely controlled the South thought the Constitution would end the abomination of legalized human bondage.Īlso, many other suboptimal aspects of our system that are rooted in our Constitution were not even intended by the Framers. I’m not sure Baker supplies enough of that sympathy. I’ve spilled a lot of ink (and now pixels) on Constitution-bashing myself, but I try not to cross the line into blaming the Framers, who were limited not only by the unprecedented nature of their task, but also by the political realities they faced. ![]() Baker does a great job of lining them up and shooting them down. ![]() ![]() ![]() Senate and foolishness of the Electoral College system. You might guess, and you wouldn’t be wrong, that the first few aspects of our constitutional system (as evolved) that get bashed are those that brought us Trump and gerrymandering and the permanent malapportionment of power in the U.S. But I think if you haven’t read any Harper’s piece online for a while, you can get at least this one, if you want to see some fairly high-class Framer-bashing. And you could do worse than subscribing to the great old monthly publication launched in 1850. Harper’s limits online access for nonsubscribers. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |