In politics, as in business, it’s long been accepted practice to release bad news on Fridays in hopes of keeping media scrutiny to a minimum… And, I’m sure it was with this in mind that President-elect Donald Trump, this past Friday, released word that he’d agreed to pay a $25 million settlement to former students of Trump University, rather than go to court and respond to charges that his unaccredited education company was, to quote a former Trump University employee, “a fraudulent scheme… that preyed upon the elderly and uneducated to separate them from their money.” [During the campaign, Trump had vowed to fight the charges, which he said had no merit, vigorously in court, but apparently, as with so many other things, like his promise to reopen the coal mines of West Virginia, he had a sudden change of heart after winning.] In the age of social media, however, releasing news on Friday is no guarantee that people won’t see it. And, as you might imagine, word that our soon-to-be President had essentially paid $25 million rather than face fraud charges in court, quickly made its way across social networks. Fortunately for Trump, however, the barrage of negative posts did not last long, thanks to another, even bigger, news story.
Mike Pence, our aggressively anti-gay Vice President-elect, had, for whatever reason, decided that he needed to see the Broadway musical Hamilton early Friday evening. And, as you might imagine, he wasn’t exactly welcomed with open arms by the theater-loving audience he encountered. And, when word made it out of the theater that Pence was not only welcomed by a chorus of boos, but addressed from the stage by the cast, the story of the $25 million settlement was effectively pushed from the front page of the internet. [Brandon Victor Dixon, the black actor who currently plays the role of Aaron Burr in the musical, addressed Pence directly after the performance, stating, “We, sir, we are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us.”]
Well, as you might imagine, some immediately speculated that it wasn’t just a coincidence that Pence, who has advocated for both gay conversion therapy and anti-immigrant policies, felt the need to see a Broadway musical with a plot revolving in part around the awesomeness of immigrants, featuring an openly gay, Latino leading man. [The chorus “Immigrants, we get the job done,” which is sung jointly by Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis di Lafayette in the play, received a standing ovation during the performance that Pence attended.] Yes, some are suggesting, that Pence was directed to see Hamilton, knowing that his presence would create an incident which would both push the Trump University fraud case off the front page, and give our President-elect an opportunity to lash out on Twitter against the cruel liberals in the audience who had made his Vice President feel so unwelcome… If true, it was absolutely brilliant, and demonstrates just what we’re up against.
[“If your media outlet is focused on Trump v Hamilton instead of Trump’s $25m fraud settlement, you are a sad pawn in Trump’s game,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior aide to Barack Obama, to The Guardian… “The controversies will divert you from the scandals,” warned David Frum, a former speechwriter to president George W Bush.]
Interestingly, though, this purposeful diversion on the part of the Trump administration, if that’s what it was, had an unintended consequence for me. Having never seen the musical Hamilton, this most recent incident got me doing a little research into the plot, which, in turn, led me read about the life of Alexander Hamilton online, which in turn led to a frenzied search among our bookcases, looking for my copy of The Federalist Papers. [The so-called Federalist Papers are a collection of 85 articles submitted anonymously to New York newspapers beginning in 1787 by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution.] And I didn’t reemerge from the Hamilton rabbit hole until I’d come to Federalist Paper #68 (March 12, 1788), in which Hamilton, writing under the alias Publius, says the following, which, given the current situation we’re facing as a nation, seems very much worthy of discussion. “The process of (the Electoral College),” he wrote, “affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
I’m sure someone else out there, with a better understanding of Constitutional history, can do a better job of explaining it than I can, but here’s what I understand Hamilton trying to impart in that quote… Essentially, what he’s saying there is that, when he and his fellow founding fathers drafted the Constitution, they purposefully chose not to have our President selected by a simple majority vote. Having seen examples in history of people selecting unqualified leaders in the past, they chose instead to create a system, wherein, instead of voting directly for our candidates, the voters in each state instead select Electors, who are then given the task of electing the President of the United States. And, in that way, four founding fathers built in a safeguard that, in time of emergency, could be employed to save the republic.
And, the more alarming the prospect of the Trump presidency looks, the more people seem to be rallying to this idea, as first expressed by Hamilton, that Electors should have the freedom to essentially override the popular vote. [In this case, though, it wouldn’t really be an override of the will of the people, as Hillary Clinton’s popular vote count currently exceeds Trump’s by over 1.5 million.] Here, to give you a sense of what people are saying, is a clip from an article in today’s Atlantic titled The Electoral College Was Meant to Stop Men Like Trump From Being President.
Americans talk about democracy like it’s sacred. In public discourse, the more democratic American government is, the better. The people are supposed to rule.
But that’s not the premise that underlies America’s political system. Most of the men who founded the United States feared unfettered majority rule. James Madison wrote in Federalist 10 that systems of government based upon “pure democracy … have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” John Adams wrote in 1814 that, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.”
The framers constructed a system that had democratic features. The people had a voice. They could, for instance, directly elect members of the House of Representatives. But the founders also self-consciously limited the people’s voice.
The Bill of Rights is undemocratic. It limits the federal government’s power in profound ways, ways the people often dislike. Yet the people can do almost nothing about it. The Supreme Court is undemocratic, too. Yes, the people elect the president (kind of, more on that later), who appoints justices of the Supreme Court, subject to approval by the Senate, which these days is directly elected, too. But after that, the justices wield their extraordinary power for as long as they wish without any democratic accountability. The vast majority of Americans may desperately want their government to do something. The Supreme Court can say no. The people then lose, unless they pass a constitutional amendment, which is extraordinarily difficult, or those Supreme Court justices die.
That’s the way the framers wanted it. And, oddly, it’s the way most contemporary Americans want it too. Americans say they revere democracy. Yet they also revere those rights—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms—that the government’s least democratic institutions protect. Americans rarely contemplate these contradictions. If they did, they might be more open to preventing Donald Trump from becoming the next president, the kind of democratic catastrophe that the Constitution, and the Electoral College in particular, were in part designed to prevent.
Donald Trump was not elected on November 8. Under the Constitution, the real election will occur on December 19. That’s when the electors in each state cast their votes.
The Constitution says nothing about the people as a whole electing the president. It says in Article II that “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors.” Those electors then vote for president and vice-president. They can be selected “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Which is to say, any way the state legislature wants. In 14 states in the early 19th century, state legislatures chose their electors directly. The people did not vote at all.
This ambiguity about how to choose the electors was the result of a compromise. James Madison and some other framers favored some manner of popular vote for president. Others passionately opposed it. Some of the framers wanted Congress to choose the president. Many white southerners supported the Electoral College because it counted their non-voting slaves as three-fifths of a person, and thus gave the South more influence than it would have enjoyed in a national vote. The founders compromised by leaving it up to state legislatures. State legislatures could hand over the selection of electors to the people as a whole. In that case, the people would have a voice in choosing their president. But—and here’s the crucial point—the people’s voice would still not be absolute. No matter how they were selected, the electors would retain the independence to make their own choice…
And others, under Hamilton’s name, are pushing for our 2016 electors to essentially break the promises they’ve made to cast their votes on behalf of Trump, and cast them for Clinton instead. [As I understand it, we’ve had 157 “Faithless Electors” in U.S. history, so it’s not unprecedented, but the scale being discussed here, in the movement to get committed Electors to vote against Trump, is significantly larger than anything we’ve seen discussed in this country before.] The following overview, which is from the site Hamilton Electors, sums it up quite well.
#HamiltonElectors are patriots participating in the electoral process who believe that Presidential Electors are responsible for safeguarding our nation’s future and ensuring that the next President is the best person for the job. As Electors, we honor Alexander Hamilton’s vision that the Electoral College should act as a Constitutional failsafe against those lacking requisite qualifications, ability, and virtue from becoming President. Guided by the Framers’ original intent, we’re compelled this year to do our job as Electors, to put party aside, and to put America first. So we are encouraging Electors from both red and blue states to answer the Founding Fathers’ call, deliberate, and unite behind an alternative Republican Candidate: the Hamilton Candidate. Americans of all political persuasions are invited to join us and show their support online by spreading the word online, in their communities, and at their statehouse on December 19 when the Electoral College officially meets.
[Yes, they’re calling for another Republican candidate to be substituted for Trump. Others, however, are suggesting that either Clinton or Sanders receive the votes of these Electors.]
For what it’s worth, I should add that I’m not altogether comfortable with the idea. While it’s painfully obvious to me me that Trump is a dangerous and reprehensible man, and a threat to our nation, I don’t like the precedent that it would set. The idea that 538 Electors could just choose our next President on their own seems incredibly undemocratic to me. But, as they say, desperate times call for desperate measures, and I suspect, if the founding fathers were with us today, they’d tell us that Trump is exactly they kind of person they constructed the Electoral College to protect us from. But, yeah, I’d hate it if the shoe were on the other foot, and Republicans had tried to keep Obama from taking office by essentially coordinating an Electoral College coup. But, then again, in this case, Trump not only lost the popular vote, but we now know that both the FBI and the Russian government interfered with electoral process in order to deliver a dangerous, authoritarian xenophobe to the White House. So, yes, I think it’s worth at least discussing the possibility of “the Hamilton option.”
Personally, even if we were successful, and convinced enough Electors to turn “faithless,” and vote to keep Trump from the White House, I’m not convinced the results would be any better. I think, most likely, it would lead to civil war. But, as I suspect we’re heading in that direction anyway, I’m to sure how much that would really matter. No matter what we do at this point, it just feels like we’re in for a lot of pain, sorrow and insanity.
As much as it pains me to say it, I think we’re so far past reality now that there’s no hope of turning things around. I mean, we elected someone we all knew to be a pussy-grabbing conman… how does a nation come back from that?
At this point, it feels like we’re living inside a really poorly written mini-series.
Whenever I think, “Well, things couldn’t possibly get any weirder,” they do. The plot just keeps unfolding, getting stranger and stranger by the day. Yesterday it was Ivanka Trump announcing that she’d be selling the jewelry off her body, as though the White House were just a set in the QVC studio. And today our President, who has constantly derided members of the left for being too sensitive, is attacking Broadway for hurting the feelings of his Vice President, all while Nazis across town were cheering him over dinner. And there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight.
I’m not one to make predictions, but, if I had to guess, I’d say, based on what we’ve seen thus far, that we’re going to see some Electoral College drama. And I say that primarily because the musical Hamilton has now been brought into this narrative. It’s like when you’re reading a book, and a character mentions some little detail, and you just know that it’s going to be significant later, as it wouldn’t have been said otherwise. It just seems to perfect to me that Pence was at Hamilton. It feels like we’re deep inside of a plot that’s already been written… Is it just me, or are you feeling it too?
[The drawing at the top of this post is of Alexander Hamilton being mortally wounded in a duel by Aaron Burr, the sitting Vice President of the United States, on July 11, 1804. I decided to include it as a reminder that our nation’s history has been absolutely fucking crazy from the start. I thought that some of you might take some comfort in that.]
