[image_credit]J. Scott Applewhite/Pool via REUTERS[/image_credit][image_caption]Sen. Amy Klobuchar reading the final certification of Electoral College votes early Thursday morning, January 7, during a joint session of Congress.[/image_caption]
(None of the five loser-winners make anyone’s list of best presidents.)
I’ve thought this for years. But I had forgotten (assuming I ever knew, and surely I must have come across this before) that in 1970, a proposed constitutional amendment, which had majority support in both houses of Congress and a decent chance of being ratified, was killed by a Senate filibuster and so was not referred to the states for ratification. It would have abolished the Electoral College.
The story is told here, in a February piece by Jesse Wegman of the New York Times editorial board, that I must’ve missed at the time but stumbled across this morning. While the amendment had majority support in both houses of Congress, I don’t suppose we can know whether it would have received the necessary support of three-quarters of states to be ratified and implemented. But the senators who filibustered it must have been worried that it might.
The tragic hero of the tale was the excellent Sen. Birch Bayh of Indiana, who had been pushing for congressional approval such an amendment since 1966. A Bayh aide who was there and worked on it is quoted in the Times piece thus:
“We were in a moment,” Jay Berman, a top legislative staff member for Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, told me. Mr. Bayh had been pushing for a popular vote since 1966, shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had ended the Jim Crow era and pulled America closer than it had ever been to a truly representative democracy. Electing the president directly was the next logical step in that progression.
“It’s very, very difficult to deal with institutional, transformative issues like this. And we had that moment,” Mr. Berman said. “That’s what makes it so galling.”
The “it” was the unceremonious collapse of the popular-vote amendment, which died on the Senate floor in late September 1970.
A lot happened in the year after it sailed through the House, including two failed Supreme Court nominations by President Richard Nixon, that delayed and distracted senators. But in the end, the amendment was killed off for good by a filibuster led by three Southerners — Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Sam Ervin of North Carolina and James Eastland of Mississippi, the long-serving chairman of the Judiciary Committee and one of the most powerful men in the Senate.
We can’t know whether approval in the Senate would have led to ratification in the states; as you know, ratification of an amendment requires a supermajority of states. But the three notorious racists, Thurmond, Ervin and Eastland, were worried enough to roll out one of the other great anti-majoritarian features of our system, the Senate filibuster, to make sure we wouldn’t find out whether the country was ready to switch to a system in which everyone’s vote would be equal (instead of the Electoral College, which values only the votes of those who live in the swing states), and in which the candidate who got the most votes would win.
Imagine such a crazy idea.
Wegman’s Times piece telling a fuller version of the tale is here.
The south has always been very good at figuring out what serves their narrow self interest. Without the electoral college it’s highly unlikely there would’ve been a January 6. 7 million votes is hard to explain away as fraud, although I have no doubt that his low information supporters will try to come up with an excuse.
Good thing the electoral college won’t be going away every.
I’d forgotten this, too, but am not surprised to find the filibuster was led by long-time racial bigots, especially Strom Thurmond. Were it to be passed by Congress this afternoon, I have my doubts about it being ratified now, as well. Trying to imagine the Fox “News” reporting on such an amendment falls somewhere on the spectrum between hilarious and terrifying, tending toward the latter…
A few weeks back a series of comments led to one commenter mentioning Fannie Lou Hamer and her struggle for voting rights in the early 60s. With only a vague understanding of her story I sought out a little more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07PwNVCZCcY
Wow! Denied her rights, literacy tests, arrested and beaten, evicted off her share cropped land. The 1965 Voting Rights Act targeted exactly these kinds of things. And it passed. A Mitch McConnell pain free filibuster would have stopped it’s passage right in its’ tracks. How any Senator of good conscience could listen to her story and accept the idea that respecting the rights of a minority Senate filibuster denying such basic rights is stunning. Not surprising, but stunning…
It should be forced viewing for every Senator.
“Why would you want a system in which the person who gets the most votes can lose…?”
While I agree with the question, it seems that a system requiring a majority of votes would be superior to earning the “most” votes. Yes, that creates a problem when there are strong “third party” candidates like Perot or Nader, but the point stands – shouldn’t we elect a president with a majority, not a plurality?
That’s the purpose of ranked choice voting.
Making sure that the ultimate winner is acceptable (if not the first choice) of the majority of the voters.
Actually, that isn’t the purpose or the reality of ranked choice voting. Its a lie that the ranked choice proponents keep repeating.
Minneapolis always had majority winners under its top-2 run-off system. The last two mayoral winners did not achieve majorities under RCV. New York city just had a mayoral election where the RCV winner fell far short of a majority.
Huh? In the recent NYC mayoral primary, the Dem winner won 50.4% of the vote. That is a slim majority, not “far from a majority.”
https://www.vote.nyc/sites/default/files/pdf/election_results/2021/20210622Primary%20Election/rcv/024306_1.html
Well, since Obama and the DNC abandoned a local political focus, content to try to control the presidency, now that about 2/3 of the States are controlled by Republicans, an amendment on this issue is now impossible.
So until Dem’s start planning and executing a national strategy to take back the majority of States, this lamenting the Electoral College is rather wasted breath.
Poor deluded Dems — thinking that getting the majority of the votes is the way to win.
Where did you get the idea that there’s no “national strategy to take back the majority of States”? It’s all about the “marginal” vote. Which does NOT mean that any vote is “marginal.” That’s what a lot of the propaganda wants each of us to believe. That “your vote doesn’t matter.’ Or, to quote the pathetic former Pres. George W. Bush” “Who cares what you you think?”
Who cares”? The political parties do. They don’t believe in “marginal votes”. Why do they spend billions of dollars on campaign ads if they didn’t believe that every vote did matter? None of us should ever forget that “every.single.vote.counts.”Let me repeat: “Every vote counts.” Mine, yours, every single person whose vote qualifies. That’s what’s at stake here.
All that is needed is the national popular vote to be approved.
195 Electoral votes down, 75 to go:
Maybe:
Nevada: 6
Minnesota: 10
Wisconsin: 10
Michigan: 15
Pennsylvania: 19
Maine: 4
Vermont: 4
Gets to 68
Who puts it over the top?
Best bet: Virginia with 13.
And the real beauty of this is it follows Trumpian logic of getting the state legislators to use their power to assign electors.
National Popular Vote assigns all a state’s electors to the popular vote winner.
And who will howl the loudest if the NPV is enabled?
The same Trumpians who wanted the state legislatures to overrule their states voters.
One more, they were for it before they were against it.
The reality we face with our current political system is that the only thing it can still do is cling to power. Across our political institutions, people feel free to act incompetenty and irresponsibly. because they are confident in the knowledge that there is no feasible alternative to them.
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”
Usually attributed to H.L.Mencken
Da gone filibuster.