Featured Image by Cornell University Library. Follow the link to learn more.
Prior to the Constitutional Convention, Thomas Jefferson had put a statement condemning slavery in an earlier draft of the Declaration of Independence. This was removed by the Continental Congress, which was dealing with the larger issue of securing liberty first for the country. This left the problem for the Framers to solve when it came to the establishment of our Federal system of government.
There were two views on the matter: The Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan. Virginia with its large population (both free and enslaved), wanted representation solely done based on population size or wealth which would give it considerable influence in Congressional matters. New Jersey pushed for equal representation among the states regardless of the population. it was with the Connecticut (Great) Compromise that established a way forward that wouldn’t rip the fledgling country apart. The House was to be proportional, the Senate Equal.
This created another problem for the Framers to solve. How do we count the population of enslaved people? They were given no right to vote, but were being pushed by Virginia and the larger Southern agricultural states to be counted fully in the population when it determined representation. The smaller states didn’t want them to count in order to undermine Virginia’s influence in the House, but again it would have lead back to war. So the framers agreed to represent the enslaved population at three-fifths value. This was another temporary solution, and lead to the problems that formed the basis for the civil war, but they avoided that problem and created a system that could address it later.
You may be wondering why the long preamble for this post. Abolish the Senate is trending on Twitter and in several publications, along with articles calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. And I don’t think that many people understand just what kind of impact that will have, or the problems that it will cause if the idea becomes reality. The same can be said of the Electoral College. Both are hallmarks of the Representative Republic that was founded and framed by men who, following the war for independence, recognized that representation was vital in the cause of liberty. They recognized that the voice of the minority should not only be heard, but protected against those who held the majority.
Historically, urbanization is a relatively new thing. The vast majority of the world’s population dwelled in rural areas. It is only with recent advances in technology that large urban population centers have come to dominate the landscape. In the US, urban centers have only been the majority of the population for about one hundred years. These changes represent an inversion of the thinking that the founders had during the late 1700’s. But the principle is still the same.
The founders were wary of executive power, having just ended a war against a tyrannical monarchy in England and their proxy governors. They saw the death and destruction that raged during the War for Independence, and did not wish to return to that. There were factions within the Constitutional delegation that did not wish for the legislators to elect the president over fears of favoritism and corruption, and others that distrusted the masses to do the same thing. There were fears of the tyranny of the majority, and where populist candidates could sway public opinion for immense power.
These issues laid the ground work for a system of checks and balances to help ensure that all parties got and gave something. No one party got everything, and everyone took a brief sigh of relief, at least for the moment.
Washington had warned against the formation of political parties. And the repercussions are being felt today. Instead of many candidates that the founders would have assumed would run, and the various districts voting to give their individual electoral votes to those people, we now have a system bound in rules and regulations that promise to give the entirety of the electoral vote to the winner of that state (with exception of Maine and Nebraska). This results in the distribution of electoral votes that we’ve seen over the last several centuries, and much of the criticism.
I think that many who call for the abolishment of the Electoral College believe that in doing so, the individual would be given more importance. And in similar fashion they believe that the “will of the people” should be what dictates who governs our country. This in itself creates other problems, and history shows us that the founders were right.
Many people do not investigate the news that they hear. They hear the same thing coming from several sources and assume it to be true because they heard it from several sources. As the saying goes, “a lie can travel halfway round the world before the truth puts its shoes on.” In our constant, unrelenting news cycle that is incentivized to produce inflammatory content, the reliance on “public opinion” and popular vote creates the groundwork for the rise of tyranny. History shows many examples of this. As a fictitious agent once explained to a newly awakened police officer, “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it!”
Recent examples come to mind about this. The great Toilet Paper rush of 2020. People hoarding and clearing out shelves of food. Large mobs of folks burning, looting, screaming, spitting, and sharing drinks in revelry during a pandemic. Whether they live in a city or in rural America, collectively people aren’t going to make decisions based on reason and thought.
This is also where the tyranny of the majority returns. If, in a majoritarian system, half of the population votes to enslave the other half of the population, is that truly justified? If the majority of people vote to steal from the minority, is that good? Simple majority rule creates disenfranchisement. This is why the Senate matters. This is why the Electoral College matter. Stripping away those protections means that large urban centers gain outsized influence, and that anyone living on the “outside” of those few urban centers essentially has no voice.
Our system isn’t perfect. Nothing on Earth is. But allowing our voices to be decided not by a system that provides checks and balances to prevent the natural descent into tyranny, but by one that inevitably invites it is short-sighted and ultimately fatal.
So if it comes to pass that the Senate disappears and the Electoral College is abolished and the country descends back into war because people clamor that they have no voice, God help us all. I told you so simply wouldn’t be sufficient.
A Place 4Politics 