The Patriot Post® · The Dems' Electoral College Pipe Dream

At least they’re consistent. We’ll give them that.

The Democrats got whipped on November 5, any way you slice it. Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in the Electoral College vote, 312-226, but he also beat her in the popular vote by more than two million. Yet this week, a trio of Democrat senators — including one, Dick Durbin, who ought to know better — introduced a measure to abolish the Electoral College.

That would be the same Electoral College that’s been with us since 1787 — two years before our nation’s first president took office.

Said Durbin, whose delicious designations now include outgoing Senate majority whip and outgoing Senate Judiciary Committee chair, “In 2000, before the general election, I introduced a bipartisan resolution to amend the Constitution and abolish the Electoral College. I still believe today that it is time to retire this 18th century invention that disenfranchises millions of Americans. The American people deserve to choose all their leaders, and I am proud to support this effort with Senators Schatz and Welch to empower [sic] voters.”

Durbin was joined in this quixotic endeavor by Vermont Senator Peter Welch and Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz, who added, “No one’s vote should count for more based on where they live. The Electoral College is outdated and it’s undemocratic. It’s time to end it.”

The Electoral College is outdated? This guy has, er, schatz for brians.

Californians love this language, by the way. They love the idea of having an inordinate say in who wins our presidential elections. That’s because they have more than 39 million people, and because they don’t check voter ID, and because they take a month to count their votes. This allows them to “win” as many close House races as possible, and it would also allow them to “find” the votes necessary to tip the election in favor of future Democrats.

Durbin’s deep-blue Illinois is the sixth-largest state in our nation, with nearly 13 million people. Thus, its people would probably be inclined to support popular-vote presidential elections. But Schatz’s Hawaii has around 1.4 million people, and Welch’s Vermont has a measly 643,000. We wonder how those folks would like to know that their votes are being steamrolled by Los Angeles.

We call this effort to end the Electoral College a pipe dream, though, because that’s what it is. Durbin, Schatz, and Welch introduced it as a “bill,” but that’s both misleading and disingenuous. The Electoral College is spelled out in Article V of our Constitution, so simple passage of a bill through the House and Senate won’t make it law — not even close. No, what we’re talking about here requires a constitutional amendment, and constitutional amendments require a two-thirds majority vote from both the House and the Senate and passage by three-fourths of the states. Do these guys really think the citizens of 38 states, many of them deep red, are going to vote away the thing that protects them against behemoths like California, New York, and Illinois? Fat chance.

Hey, why have 50 United States at all if we’re not going to protect their individual sovereignty? Why not just one big California-driven blob?

“What’s next,” posted Utah Republican Mike Lee, “repealing the Constitution’s requirement that states be represented equally in the Senate? Luckily, a constitutional amendment to do that — even if it were somehow to succeed — still couldn’t take effect unless every state agreed to it. Article V makes that clear.”

Here, Lee has opened up another Democrat wound — that of their dwindling numbers in the Senate. Not much more than a decade ago, they held 60 Senate seats. Time was when the Democrats could poach a red-state Senate seat or two. Think about Tom Daschle and Tim Johnson from South Dakota. Or Byron Dorgan and Heidi Heitkamp from North Dakota. Or Ben Nelson from Nebraska. Or Max Baucus from Montana. But on November 5, we saw the last three red-state Democrat senators put out to pasture: Montana’s John Tester, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, the latter of whom chose to retire rather than face a certain thrashing at the polls.

Why does the Senate matter to Democrats? Two words: judicial power. Without control of the Senate, they can’t get their judges confirmed — not at the appellate level and not on the Supreme Court. The judiciary is the most confounding branch of government to the Democrats because it stands squarely in the way of their often unconstitutional agenda.

On the other hand, it’s hard to blame these Democrat senators. In the wake of last month’s electoral shellacking, they had to give the impression that they’re doing something. Even if that something is pure, unadulterated pandering.

Yesterday on Fox News, Karl Rove noted that the Electoral College does more than just protect the rights of the smaller states. “It gives us a sense of national Unity after close elections,” he said. How so? “Donald Trump won the popular vote by 1.9%, but in the Electoral College, he got 312 votes. … It helped give him a mandate to be the president.”

Rove noted that the same thing happened with John F. Kennedy, who won by a handful of votes over Richard Nixon in 1960 but won a more comfortable Electoral College victory. “We want the country to be unified after a presidential election,” Rove said, and the Electoral College has been a historically sound mechanism for doing just that.

And thus, to these three meddlesome senators, we say: Don’t just do something. Stand there.