The Telling Threat to our Democracy

I will never forget, it was 48 years ago, when our Government professor in Constitutional Law asked us what the greatest threat to our democracy was. It was at the height of the Vietnam War, so many answered “that damned war”.

We went through about a dozen ideas when he stopped us, and said, “The Electoral College and the Senate for extra”…

We were incredulous. Many of us remembered the Electoral College, that anachronism that has been a factor in picking a President long ago; nobody could remember.

“Five times a candidate has won the popular vote and lost the election. Andrew Jackson in 1824 (to John Quincy Adams); Samuel Tilden in 1876 (to Rutherford B. Hayes); Grover Cleveland in 1888 (to Benjamin Harrison); Al Gore in 2000 (to George W. Bush); Hillary Clinton in 2016 (to Donald J. Trump).”

Five times and Trump is the 45th President. That is about 11% of the time, the winner loses.

So, it isn’t that unusual, that all of us were taught in high school civics.

Why on earth would the founding fathers have done such a thing. Well it was part of the Great Compromise, that kept the slavery south in the union in 1789. The other part of that Compromise, aside from counting non-voting slaves as 2/3 of a man, was giving 2 Senators to each state, totally disregarding the size of the state. So New York that had the most people by many times over, was given the same number of Senators that Alabama that did not have as many people as the city of New York (even in 1789).

And what has this done? Well in 1876 Rutherford B. Hayes made several concessions to the southern Democrats to get the Electoral College vote; that gave even more power to those forces that would end any kind of Reconstruction in the South that helped former slaves, ushering in over 100 years of white supremacy and Jim Crowe segregation in the south.

It gave us George W. Bush, who was asleep at the switch and fell into the hole of the Iraq War following the tragedy of 9–11. It was later discovered that the Clinton Administration, of which Gore was Vice President, was trying to inform Bush of the threat of Ben Ladin….

And now we are suffering through Trump, who lost by over 3 million votes and rules as if he won by acclamation.

Bush got us into a terrible war and then the Great Recession, Trump is not done yet!

If you doubt the sinister intentions of the Great Compromise of 1789, look at the fact that no Northerner was elected President for almost 50 years; the first one was Lincoln, and that tripped off the Civil War.

Virginia, the first slave state, dominated the Presidency.

And the U.S. Senate after the Civil War, effectively blocked any action of Reconstruction following Grant for nearly 100 years. The filibusters of the southern segregationists that killed every Civil Rights Bill, that almost ended the union again, was finally stopped in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

LBJ was able to get Voters Right Law passed and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that directly led to the southern states quitting the Democratic Party and moving in mass to the Republican Party.

And remarkably, the Republican Party has become the racist party, and consistently blocks the will of a diverse majority in the country.

We stand poised on the verge of yet another Civil War because of this undemocratic Constitutional “compromise” that actually gave a “grace period” to end the slave trade, that the rest of the world banned shortly thereafter.

The Civil War saw over 600,000 dead and thanks to Andrew Johnson, a lost opportunity to right the wrong of slavery, leading to Jim Crow segregation that nearly tore the country apart a hundred years later.

And the poison pills of the unfair Senate apportionment and the electoral college gave us Donald Trump and is essentially killing any chance of doing anything to stop both a possible nuclear war in the middle east and doing anything about global warming.

In short, my professor almost 50 years ago, had it spot on: The Senate and the Electoral College are existential flaw in the Constitution that very well may kill us all!