Guest Opinion
Beginning with the contested 2000 election of George Bush, whenever a Republican wins the Presidential election, Democrats complain that the electoral college is unfair and undemocratic. Not only do they contend that Republicans have an advantage in the electoral college, they also believe the Senate to be unfair since small states have the same number of senators as large states, and argue for proportional representation in the Senate as well as the House. Many Democrats obviously believe that the Constitution itself is unfair and undemocratic, since it establishes the requirement for an electoral college and specifies that each state shall have two senators.
Democrat partisans would be well advised to acquaint themselves with the Federalist Papers in which the Founding Fathers described their rationale for drafting the Constitution as they did with its three branches of government and the system of checks and balances. Their reasoning on the electoral college and the Senate was clear, though it is evidently lost on those on the Left who see governance only through a political prism: the electoral college and the Senate ensure that small states have a say in Presidential elections and in how the country is governed.
This rationale is so simple and makes so much sense that one wonders why the Left keeps trying to undermine it. Clearly, they want to establish a system that virtually guarantees their control of government. Much like Oregon, where I live, is a one-party state, they want the US government to be under the firm control of their party. There is no more effective way to do this than to overturn the Constitution’s built-in assurances that large states like California and New York cannot dictate what happens to the rest of the country.
What is happening on the West Coast is the Democrat model for running the country. California, Oregon and Washington are governed by Democrats and the legislatures are solidly in Democrat hands, especially in Oregon where the Democrats hold a supermajority. Republicans are little more than speed bumps as Democrats ram through all sorts of taxes and regulations to exert more control over our lives and livelihoods.
The metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle are, for all intents and purposes, the decision makers for the three states, where the citizens of roughly 10 percent of the counties control the lives of those who live in the other 90 percent. The same political dynamic is at play in other parts of the country where Democrats hold the advantage in large metro areas. Fortunately, in “flyover” land like Idaho there are enough voters to frequently act as a block on Democrat aspirations.
Many Democrats believe that any Republican who succeeds in winning the White House is illegitimate, especially if the electoral college offsets the Democrat advantage in the national popular vote. Therefore, they want to amend the Constitution to ensure that states whose voters usually favor the Republican nominee will not be able to thwart the political weight of states with large Democrat voting blocs like California and New York. This would then lead to what the founding fathers described, correctly, as a dictatorship of the majority. A number of Democrat-controlled states are attempting to circumvent the Constitution by agreeing to give all their electoral votes to the popular vote winner.
What many Democrats forget is that the United States is not a democracy; it is a republic with the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. The framers of the Constitution had the foresight to anticipate the dangers of a pure democracy, i.e., mob rule, and instituted safeguards to prevent that from happening. They also made it difficult to amend the Constitution, a source of great frustration for the Left. A little civics education would be a wise prescription for Democrats who see the Constitution and institutions like the electoral college and the Senate as impediments to their aggrandizement of power.
Paul deWitt of Redmond, Oregon
Paul deWitt is a retired Navy captain with 24 years of service, including 15 years in intelligence. He has an MA in international relations from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. CAPT deWitt currently lives in Redmond, OR, with his wife Terri, where he has been active in Republican Party politics. He served as vice chair and chair of the Deschutes County Republican Party from 2016-2019.
