Tyranny of the Majority

(updated) Senator Elizabeth Warren, socialist Democrat from Massachusetts, reveals her inner liar with astounding clarity this morning. The twit tweets:

Every vote matters. We need to get rid of the Electoral College so that presidential candidates have to ask every American in every part of the country for their vote, not just those in battleground states. #WarrenTownHall pic.twitter.com/UT3mYHXHQ2

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) March 19, 2019

Can you detect the lie? Let me rewrite the tweet just slightly to turn it into the truth:

Every vote matters. We need to get rid of keep the Electoral College so that presidential candidates have to ask every American in every part of the country for their vote, not just those in battleground states.

See what I did there? Such a small change. What Warren did was to completely invert the truth. The Electoral College is specifically designed to force candidates to address the entire country, rather than just those in the battleground populous states. To college age students who barely know what the Electoral College is, or wonder what the tuition costs, a lie like this coming from an acknowledged figure of authority will cement the meaning exactly backwards in their minds. They lack the ability to reason on the subject and will simply accept her statement at face value.

The danger of majority rule

The United States is not a Democracy. It is a Republic of laws with democratic methods of electing representatives who write, implement, and enforce those laws.

Edwin J. Feulner, former president and founder of the Heritage Organization, writes:

Big deal, you say? If you care about your rights, it is. The Founding Fathers knew their history well, so they knew better than to establish the U.S. as a democracy.

In a democracy, of course, the majority rules. That’s all well and good for the majority, but what about the minority? Don’t they have rights that deserve respect?

Of course they do. Which is why a democracy won’t cut it. As the saying goes, a democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.

The Founders were determined to forestall the inherent dangers of what James Madison called “the tyranny of the majority.” So they constructed something more lasting: a republic. Something with checks and balances. A system of government carefully balanced to safeguard the rights of both the majority and the minority.

Our system is very carefully balanced. The founders of our country were painfully aware of how even the most attractive systems of government seen to devolve into abject tyrannies at the drop of a hat.

Alexis de Toqueville, writing in his epic work Democracy in America, says:

In my opinion the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their overpowering strength; and I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the very inadequate securities which exist against tyranny.

The problem persists today, as evil people continue to try to subvert the safeguards we originally put in place to hobble the demon of power.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

Dr. Fuelner, again:

“The Electoral College is a very carefully considered structure the Framers of the Constitution set up to balance the competing interests of large and small states,” writes Hans von Spakovsky, a former member of the Federal Election Commission. “It prevents candidates from wining an election by focusing only on high-population urban centers (the big cities), ignoring smaller states and the more rural areas of the country — the places that progressives and media elites consider flyover country.”

[snip]

In short, the Founders were looking out for the people in “flyover country” long before there were airplanes to fly over them.

But socialists are working feverishly to change the basic structure of our electoral system so that they never have to worry about “flyover country” again. They think they’ve found the way to negate the Electoral College without actually removing the Electoral College. It’s brilliantly simple.

Christopher Ingraham, a journalist at the Washington Post who is quite obviously on-board with the project, wrote recently (behind paywall, so I won’t link to the article):

Lawmakers in Connecticut have approved legislation that would add the state to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, bringing electoral reformers closer to their goal of sidestepping the Electoral College to elect presidents by a nationwide popular vote.

Under the compact, states pledge to allocate all their electoral votes to the winner of the nationwide popular vote in presidential elections. It would not go into effect until it’s adopted by states representing at least 270 electoral votes, a majority.

Connecticut’s seven electoral votes join the 165 electoral votes of 10 other states plus the District of Columbia, putting the compact fewer than 100 electoral votes away from becoming reality.

Every year we get closer to disaster, as blue states pass legislation that will cement their dominance over the less populous states. Once their number passes 270 electors, the game is over for America, and the tyranny of the majority will be locked in place.

This is how you subvert the Constitution, by following its process but not its spirit.

Inverting the truth and then loudly proclaiming the lie is a favored tactic of tyrants, and wannabee-tyrants such as Warren. We should not allow a Senator to get away with such blatant dissimulation of the truth, and we need to stop the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact in its unholy tracks.

---

Update: Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, joins with Warren. Pam Key at Breitbart tells of his very strange spin on the Electoral College. Hint: it’s born of racism (what else).