Sorry, I mean it needs to be headline news, every night and every single time. Media needs to put a magnifier on it when it happens.
Harris-Walz / Dems
- Thread starter Teufel
- Start date
"Why isn't the media reporting on this?" says a terminally online person linking to an article on a mainstream news site.
"I know, right?" chime in all the people who don't even read the news anymore and just wait for stuff to trickle in through their social networks.
"I know, right?" chime in all the people who don't even read the news anymore and just wait for stuff to trickle in through their social networks.
An older lady I know posted after Trump's win in 2016 that the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, gave us the Electoral College to protect the nation from the cities and I hope someone gets it on video if she ever says that to James Madison's face. He's gonna be like "What????" Madison was from Virginia and didn't want the disproportionate electoral votes, but agreed to it to get the thing settled. Tell him you think the cities are going to run the table. Do it. I want to see his face. Because he never imagined that that would even be possible.
I wish some larger red states would have the guts to sign on with the Popular Vote pact. There's this modern conventional wisdom that the Electoral College is helping Republicans. Well, it helps the Republican Party, but it doesn't help Republican people. It's like people think that nothing else would change and all of the sudden the Democrats would always win when in fact so many things would change that the next few years after are impossible to predict, but what wouldn't change is that our elections are not close because there are two kind of people in roughly equal concentrations. They are close because two parties are competing fiercely and strategically to get power.
We wouldn't be hearing so much about fracking, that's for sure. It's a national issue that keeps getting talked about even though both candidates are on the same side of the issue.... because the parties know all eyes are on Pennsylvania on election night. The winner of Pennsylvania is probably the next President. So whatever matters to Pennsylvanians is what matters and Pennsylvania cares about fracking.
I wish some larger red states would have the guts to sign on with the Popular Vote pact. There's this modern conventional wisdom that the Electoral College is helping Republicans. Well, it helps the Republican Party, but it doesn't help Republican people. It's like people think that nothing else would change and all of the sudden the Democrats would always win when in fact so many things would change that the next few years after are impossible to predict, but what wouldn't change is that our elections are not close because there are two kind of people in roughly equal concentrations. They are close because two parties are competing fiercely and strategically to get power.
We wouldn't be hearing so much about fracking, that's for sure. It's a national issue that keeps getting talked about even though both candidates are on the same side of the issue.... because the parties know all eyes are on Pennsylvania on election night. The winner of Pennsylvania is probably the next President. So whatever matters to Pennsylvanians is what matters and Pennsylvania cares about fracking.
Last edited:
I cringe any time people act like the founding fathers were all on the same page. Frankly, the fact that the Constitution was ratified at all is remarkable. Their views on states rights, slavery, the economy etc. all varied greatly.
And they've been dead for a couple hundred years, so frankly who cares what they thought.
Then again, one party thinks a carpenter who's been dead for two thousand years would approve of their hate-filled bullshit, so....
Then again, one party thinks a carpenter who's been dead for two thousand years would approve of their hate-filled bullshit, so....
I tend to agree that we shouldn't care how long dead people think things should be run in today's society, but understanding what their thoughts on the matters of their day were can help us understand the past, and understanding the past is one of the best ways to understand why things are the way they are now and can provide guideposts on how to change things in the future, so I can't be totally dismissive of their views, even if I disagree with a LOT of them.
The reason that what they think matters is that they wrote a Constitution that we have to follow. They were very proud of how easy they made it to change it, but it has turned out to be very hard.
The idea of abolishing the Electoral College is so scary to conservatives when it shouldn't be. We would no way put that in if we were writing a Constitution today. The Electoral College doesn't even meet. And even though I knew it started out with a rule (before the invention of running mates) that an Elector could not vote for two people from the same state, it took me by surprise this summer when pundits said that Rubio and Newsom would not be running mate picks because of that rule. If I had ever stopped to think about it, yeah none of the rules were ever repealed, but it is just hard to believe that could still be a rule. The Electoral College hamstrings a bunch of stuff for no real functional reason anymore. Its original reasons are totally obsolete. Its current function of giving the GOP a slightly easier path to win would be un-Constitutional if it weren't the actual Constitution. And even a swing state that would never vote to end it because of all the attention they get or a GOP leader that would never vote to end it because it gives them an edge cannot really pony up a legitimate justification for keeping it. I live in Oklahoma where Trump will get every single county and win the state 60-40 and Oklahoma would not want the Electoral College abolished even though you take a step back and think the result of this is that nothing anyone in Oklahoma is concerned about will concern the candidate unless Pennsylvania is also concerned about it and it doesn't make the slightest difference who I vote for and what sign I put in my yard. If we got rid of it, every vote in every state would matter. Oklahoma would still have only a couple million votes max, but every single one of them would matter.
Having electors at all was intended to make it possible for grownups to really look things over and keep silly states from making a mistake, but they never met after the first or second time. Mirroring the Virginia compromise in elector distribution was intended just like with Congress to protect 12 colonies from just being hangers on always having to do whatever Virginia wanted. Virginia has become SO much less scary and now we have several big states that are so different you don't have to fear one of them or a coalition of them taking control. It is too bad that the Constitution didn't have an official justification for each measure with conditions that would trigger a measure going out of effect.
The idea of abolishing the Electoral College is so scary to conservatives when it shouldn't be. We would no way put that in if we were writing a Constitution today. The Electoral College doesn't even meet. And even though I knew it started out with a rule (before the invention of running mates) that an Elector could not vote for two people from the same state, it took me by surprise this summer when pundits said that Rubio and Newsom would not be running mate picks because of that rule. If I had ever stopped to think about it, yeah none of the rules were ever repealed, but it is just hard to believe that could still be a rule. The Electoral College hamstrings a bunch of stuff for no real functional reason anymore. Its original reasons are totally obsolete. Its current function of giving the GOP a slightly easier path to win would be un-Constitutional if it weren't the actual Constitution. And even a swing state that would never vote to end it because of all the attention they get or a GOP leader that would never vote to end it because it gives them an edge cannot really pony up a legitimate justification for keeping it. I live in Oklahoma where Trump will get every single county and win the state 60-40 and Oklahoma would not want the Electoral College abolished even though you take a step back and think the result of this is that nothing anyone in Oklahoma is concerned about will concern the candidate unless Pennsylvania is also concerned about it and it doesn't make the slightest difference who I vote for and what sign I put in my yard. If we got rid of it, every vote in every state would matter. Oklahoma would still have only a couple million votes max, but every single one of them would matter.
Having electors at all was intended to make it possible for grownups to really look things over and keep silly states from making a mistake, but they never met after the first or second time. Mirroring the Virginia compromise in elector distribution was intended just like with Congress to protect 12 colonies from just being hangers on always having to do whatever Virginia wanted. Virginia has become SO much less scary and now we have several big states that are so different you don't have to fear one of them or a coalition of them taking control. It is too bad that the Constitution didn't have an official justification for each measure with conditions that would trigger a measure going out of effect.
Last edited:
That old Scout is gorgeous! 