The End of Democracy?
by John Lawrence
The changes to voting rules by state legislatures in certain states where the legislatures are Republican controlled has been characterized as a mechanism by which a Republican such as Trump could be installed as President regardless of the popular vote, and this would be the end of democracy. But would it? The Constitution itself gives total control of the Electoral College to state legislatures. It states:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress; but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States shall be appointed an Elector"
In other words state legislatures have total control over how electors are selected irregardless of the popular vote, and this principle is enshrined in the Constitution! The election of President is not now nor was it ever determined by the popular vote. The "Electoral College" was supposed to be a deliberative body which "filtered" the popular vote and was free to countermand it if the wise men of the Electoral College chose to do so. So the seeds of the issue of "autocracy vs democracy" were sown in the Constitution itself. Reforming voting rules to allow more people to vote is not the central issue here if Republican controlled state legislatures can appoint Republican electors who can install a Republican President regardless of the popular vote. This is all perfectly legal in accordance with the Constitution. It's how the Constitution was designed. It favors states' rights baby!
The US Constitution itself is anti-Democratic. Unless it is rewritten and updated, it will be the source of the collapse of American so-called democracy. It was never meant to make the US a democracy in the first place. America is a republic, not a democracy. Get used to it. If you want a democracy, the first thing is to make election of the President solely contingent on the popular vote like every other democracy in the world. The next thing is to eliminate the filibuster which is the most anti-democratic mechanism ever thought up by human beings. In a democracy you are supposed to have majority rule. The filibuster prevents that in the US Senate. As opposed to the Constitutional provision of state legislature control over the electoral college, the filibuster is not even in the Constitution. It was just added as an afterthought by means of a rule in the Senate put there by Aaron Burr. According to Brookings:
"[I]ts emergence was made possible in 1806 when the Senate—at the advice of Vice President Aaron Burr—removed from its rules a provision (formally known as the previous question motion) allowing a simple majority to force a vote on the underlying question being debated. This decision was not a strategic or political one—it was a simple housekeeping matter, as the Senate was using the motion infrequently and had other motions available to it that did the same thing."
The filibuster was used extensively to deny African American rights. The Washington Post reported in an article, For 100 years, the filibuster has been used to deny Black rights:
"The most famous such use of the filibuster was against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Opponents of the Act filibustered for a record-breaking 60 working days. Millions of Americans watched as CBS’s Roger Mudd reported live from the steps of the Capitol on white Southern senators’ efforts to kill the legislation.
"But the modern filibuster’s first civil rights fatality actually occurred decades earlier in the searing 1922 defeat of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. The Senate’s abandonment of this landmark legislation in the history of anti-Black violence is little remembered today, but it set a path for partisan and ideological battles in the century since and continues to reverberate in our legal system."
So if autocracy takes over from democracy, it won't be because some group acted in a way that was outside of their Constitutional rights. In particular if a Republican state legislature assigns all its electoral votes to Trump despite the popular vote in that state having a majority for Biden, that's totally within the Constitutional rights of that state so to do. The filibuster, however, is not enshrined in the Constitution. It's a pure convention, a relic that the Senate has decided to keep in place despite the fact that it's anti-Democratic. There's no justification for it whatsoever. In fact, just because Manchin wants to keep it so that a future Republican controlled Senate will not change it is hooey. They can go ahead and change it at any time they have a majority in the Senate regardless of whether or not the Democrats decide to keep it. That's the ironic and moronic aspect of Manchin's position.
