BS: Clinton wants to change 22nd Amendment

Subject: RE: BS: Clinton wants to change 22nd Amendment
From: The O'Meara
Date: 31 May 03 - 08:26 PM

Nicole C:A lot of people are confused about the electoral college. The E.C. system was set up because the founding fathers figured the aversge citizen didn't have the backgound or the knowledge or the time to study up on the candidates and elect a decent, competent president. They knew that direct democracy, where everyone votes on everything, was so clumsy and time-consuming it couldn't work if the voting population was larger than one. (Thats why the U.S. is a republic.)So the idea is we, the general public, elect people to represent us, who are smart and honest and knowledgeable and they elect a president.
    Some people say Thomas Jefferson was an elitist for pushing the electoral college idea, and maybe they're right. But the further we get away from it the more sleaze bags and crooks we elect based on 2 minutes of saxophone playing on MTV or a 10-second sound bite that sounds like a soft drink jingle. (Yes, there have been lots of them, including Nixon and Clinton.)
    Irish sergeant; I don't mean to suggest Clinton was the least competent or sleaziest president the U.S. has ever had. (He couldn't even get that right.)He's just the sleaziest most incompetent president in my lifetime. Nixon was a close second, I'll admit.

O'Meara

Subject: RE: BS: Clinton wants to change 22nd Amendment
From: Nerd
Date: 05 Jun 03 - 01:02 PM

NicoleC and O'Meara,

A significant reason behind the electoral college was that it was perceived to protect states' rights by adding extra electors to the delegations of small states. So, for example, a state with enough people for 20 congressmen gets 22 electors, or 1.1 per congressional district. But a state with enough people for 1 congressman gets three electors, or three per congressional district, almost three times as many electoral votes per person. In this way, the college was intended to meld the ideas of direct democracy and independent but federated states.

The problem comes in the way the electoral college works in practice, which is NOT spelled out in the constitution. Most states have all their electors vote the same way, so if 51 % of the state votes democrat, 100% of the electors do. This re-introduces the very problem the college was meant to help mitigate: the big states dominate. It's counter-intuitive, too boot: why should electors be assigned in this way? So, some form of proportional representation in the college would go a long way to relieving the problem the college introduces, and it's a state-level issue, not a constitutional one. If the EC voted proportionally, Gore would be President today.

Instant run off voting is another issue entirely. It allows for third party votes to be reassigned to a second choice candidate of the voter's choosing if no candidate achieves a simple majority. This would relieve our other problem, which is that third parties screw up elections. So the more popular general viewpoints (to be convenient we can use "liberal" and "conservative" here) will usually lose, because more candidates holding that general viewpoint will usually share the votes. Nader was a more significant draw than Buchanan in our last election, which affected the outcome. with IRV, most of Buchanan's votes would have been reassigned to Bush, Nader's to Gore, and the other third parties to whoever. In the end we'd have a president that more than 50% of Americans put in the top 2, and that's probably not the president we have today--though the election was close, so who knows.

Incidentally, one of the things that cracks me up when party hacks of either side wax lyrical about how their policies are true to the founding fathers was that our system was designed to operate without political parties. Hamilton was quite clear when helping devise the electoral system that parties would screw it up by introducing impediments to the people expressing their will. But within a decade or so, the elections were dominated by parties!

One of the reasons these laws seldom change, and IRV or proportional representation are rarely implemented in US elections, is that the people in power at any particular time are by definition those who have most recently benefitted from the status quo!

Subject: RE: BS: Clinton wants to change 22nd Amendment
From: GUEST, Claymore
Date: 05 Jun 03 - 05:24 PM

There are a couple of thoughts which the liberals might want to consider before they advocate repealing the 22nd ammendment. There are several past presidents which would have easily won a third or perhaps a fourth term past FDR and prior to Clinton.

"I like Ike" Had he run he would have beat the pants off of Kennedy, who barely won against Nixon on the Chicago graveyard vote. Ike could have run till he died. Then Nixon would have been handed the Presidentcy without running. And Ike crushed Truman in every poll of the time.

"Morning in America" He crushed Carter, and Bush the Elder won off his coat-tails despite the Iran Contra affair. Bush would have eventually taken the Presidentcy like Nixon above.

Clinton never had the pluralities of these two and and he would have had to run when he was in his sixties (which by then might matured him enough to keep his pants on)...

Something to think about...

And I really like the idea of Bush running against Clinton. After Monica, Travel Gate, File Gate, and Pardon Gate, and the fact that few if any Democrats outside of the liberal Northeast, still do not speak Clintons name, I think you guys are kidding yourselves...