If Trump wins the electoral college again on Tuesday while losing the popular vote (perhaps by a bigger margin than he did in 2016), the left will lose its mind. Well that’s a given, but they’ll really lose their mind about the electoral college. After hoisting a couple of toasts to the passing of Sean Connery and a second sour whisky shot for Britain going back on COVID lockdown, “Lucretia” and I get down to business reviewing the republican case for the electoral college, and why it is a great institution that makes our political system better. Far from being an archaic relic, it is more necessary than ever in a country that the left calls “diverse” but which it actually views through perverse homogeneous lenses.
Michael Uhlmann
In particular we recall the excellent defense of the electoral college from the late Michael Uhlmann, and end with the story of how, as a young Senate staffer in 1970, Uhlmann singlehandedly derailed a constitutional amendment to abolish the electoral college that had lots of momentum to pass (a story you can read about in detail here). As Mike ended his famous brief, “Let us, if need be, repair it; but let us not abandon it for the sake of a mathematical abstraction, or because we are angry that the world is not perfect.”
Perfect advice for our present moment. By the way, Mike was a man who enjoyed more than his fair share of whisky, and, as we recall at the very end of today’s overlong episode, was resolutely against immanentizing the eschaton, which abolishing the electoral college would surely hasten.
You know what to do now. Here, or there, or somewhere else.
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