Bret Hrbek

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Why We Need the Electoral College
By Bret Hrbek

12/8/2000

Once the dust settles, November 7, 2000 will not be remembered as an historic presidential election but as the day the political career of Hillary Rodham Clinton was born.  The Clintons are like Dalmatians at the
firehouse; they won't go away.  But they aren't as cute.

Within days of her election, Clinton already began to show contempt for the very country that she serves by publicly suggesting the abolishment of the Electoral College.  Some argue that she advocates the dismantling of this uniquely American institution for selfish reasons-she realizes she can't be elected president through it.  I don't necessarily buy that explanation.  I didn't think the voters of New York would actually pull the levers or punch
their chads for her either.  But they did.  And it makes you wonder which group of voters deserve America's disdain more, Floridians or New Yorkers.

But, I do believe the Electoral College was designed to prevent people like Hillary Clinton from eventually sitting in the Oval Office.  It was designed, like the rest of the U.S. Constitution, to protect the individual
rights and liberties from the masses and the natural socialistic, expansive and repressive tendencies of government.

The Electoral College balances the interests of all areas of the country by amplifying the influence of smaller state populations and capping the dwarfing impact of mega-states that are larger than some countries.

For example, Al Gore won the popular vote.  That's not in dispute.  But he won it in the armpit of America.  Gore only won 676 out of 3,112 counties in the United States.  And of the counties he did win, where are they?  For the most part, the big cities and the southern borders.  Where do we spend most of our welfare dollars?  I think a reasonable guess is....the big cities and the southern borders.  So without the Electoral College these dirty, crime filled cities would determine who would become the president.

These election results are anecdotal evidence showing us that liberals know how to organize in the cities and they know how to manipulate and intellectually and physically enslave minorities.  George W. Bush might not
have won the popular voters of Americans, but he did win the popular vote of America.  Bush won counties representing 143 million citizens while Gore won counties representing only 127 million citizens.

I raise these points only to demonstrate the continued need for the election of the president by state and not by the popular vote.

Many people have already explained where presidential candidates would spend their time without the Electoral College.  The liberals would head to the cities and southern borders (representing about 500,000 square miles) and the center-right candidates would spend time in the southern states and rural America (representing almost 2.5 million square miles).  (Haven't you ever wondered why liberals want people to move to the city?  They know how to control them there.)

If you want a real solution to our problems in America do not repeal the Electoral College but repeal the Seventeenth Amendment that provides for the direct election of senators.  This would restore the institutional friction in our political system that protects our individual rights.

I won't defend everything about the original constitution or our Founding Fathers.  Slavery was just as wrong in 1492, 1776, 1789, and 1860 as it is today.  We just acknowledge it now.  But, the Founders did strike a delicate balance in the government's structure to protect our individual liberties with three branches of government that represented different agendas, two houses of one branch with different constituencies and a federal government always butting heads with state governments.  Talk about gridlock, it created a small, inefficient government.  Ah.  Those must have been the days.  Nothing could get done everyone could sleep at night.

We had the House of Representatives elected by the "people."  (Every time I hear that I expect to see Eva Peron on the balcony crying for Argentina. Can't you see Hillary looking over the Rose Garden from the White House balcony?  Where's Andrew Lloyd Webber?)  Senators were elected by the state legislatures.  The judiciary was elected by nobody but appointed by the executive and approved by the Senate.  And the president was (and still is God willing) elected by a hybrid of direct vote and representative
government.  Throw in state sovereignty and you make Washington, D.C. rush hour traffic look like the Indy 500 raceway.

Then in the earlier part of this century our so-called progressive leadership broke the balance when they cut the states out of the picture with the direction election of senators.  This is when federalism died and
replaced with socialism.

Now Senator-elect Clinton and her socialist allies want to do the same thing to the presidency.

I don't trust democracies.  As oxymoronic as it is, democracies are organized mob-rule.  But they are the only political institution that can and will support capitalism.  With the direct election of senators though,
Gallup Polls already has more power than McDonald's or Microsoft or the average small business owner.  I can only imagine how our rights would be trampled with the direct election of the president. I shutter to think.

Looking back, maybe Patrick Henry was right to oppose the ratification of the Constitution.  Maybe he could see how it might actually evolve.  But I don't even think he thought it could ever get this bad.  I'm sure he had
greater faith in the American people to stop this constant encroachment on our individual rights.  And he probably never imagined Americans electing someone like Hillary Rodham Clinton.

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© Bret Hrbek, 2000

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