The Patriot Post® · Democrats Throw Electoral Tantrum

If you’ve ever played a game with a three-year-old, you know he tends to have fun provided he’s winning. But turn the tables, and suddenly the game is stupid or the rules need changing. Three-year-olds on one hand, leftist elites on the other — sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference thanks to the Left’s arrested development.

Now that the Electoral College has officially elected Donald Trump as our 45th president, the game isn’t so fun anymore for crybaby leftists. And the rules the Left was content to play by when Hillary Clinton seemed sure to win? Well, they’ve simply gotta go.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Trump’s victory has ignited renewed calls to abolish the institution that denied Hillary the title she thought she was owed.

And apparently, any old justification will do.

The winner of the “most creative reason to hate the Electoral College” award goes to Yale Lecturer Todd Cort, who recently blamed the EC for — wait for it — global warming.

You just can’t make this stuff up. Thanks to the Electoral College, Cort explains, both George W. Bush and Donald Trump won the presidency while losing the popular vote. Cort disliked Bush’s record on climate change and predicts more of the same from Trump. Hence, the EC is ruining the planet. This, ladies and gentleman, is why Ivy League institutions shouldn’t intimidate anyone.

Then there’s The New York Times, whose editorial board — sometimes difficult to distinguish from a room of three-year-olds — called for an end to the Electoral College this week because, well, Hillary lost. (Seriously, do you think they would have done the same had Trump won the popular vote but Hillary the presidency? Exactly.)

But again, three-year-olds … losing … rules need changing. You get the point.

The Times whines, “By overwhelming majorities, Americans would prefer to elect the president by direct popular vote, not filtered through the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College. They understand, on a gut level, the basic fairness of awarding the nation’s highest office on the same basis as every other elected office — to the person who gets the most votes.” Yet, “for now, the presidency is still decided by 538 electors.” Tossing in another trump card for good measure, the Times also claims the EC “is a living symbol of America’s original sin” — slavery. Because it’s just like 3/5 representation? Who knows.

At least you can reason with three-year-olds. The Times editorial board? Not so much.

For a company that boasts of “excellence in its journalism,” the Times either isn’t checking its sources, or is flat-out lying about them. All it takes is a simple read of James Madison’s journals on the Constitutional Convention (which, incidentally, every American should read) to understand the electoral system was actually about preserving the rights of the minority and not about some imagined white supremacy that the Leftmedia (and academia) try to project on any white American male unfortunate enough to have lived before the current age of leftist enlightenment.

As Red State’s Jay Caruso points out, “The process of protecting smaller states from the whims of the larger, more populous states is precisely why the electoral college exists. Contrary to what the editors of the New York Times think, we are not one large nation where the federal government reigns supreme. We are a republic made up of semi-sovereign states. That sovereignty is what protects states like Wyoming and Montana from states such as New York and California.” Indeed, if direct democracy ruled the day, someone could win the White House having never set foot in states like Wisconsin or Utah. Of course, elites who disdain rural America and its values wouldn’t complain were this the case.

Further, as Edward Morrissey writes, the claim that the presidency is decided by 538 electors is “flat-out wrong.” On the contrary, he says, “The presidency doesn’t get decided by the personal whims of 538 electors, but by the voters in the states they represent.”

And finally, 16 years ago, the Times’ editorial board made the case for the Electoral College: “Yet the arguments for the Electoral College are also compelling, and in our view, outweigh the majoritarian case put forward by Mrs. Clinton and others. The nation’s founders sought in various creative ways to create checks and balances, both inside and outside government. The Electoral College was first and foremost a compact among states, large and small, designed to ensure that one state or one region did not dominate the others.”

Lies and wacky reasons will undoubtedly abound in the Left’s continued efforts to dismantle the Electoral College. After all, as Barack Obama bitterly put it, “There are some structures in our political system, as envisioned by the Founders, that sometimes are going to disadvantage Democrats.”

Because at the end of the day, the only fact that matters to the Left is their anointed candidate lost. So, like any losing child would argue, the rules must be changed.