The powers that be, Trump and the Trumpetts, know that 99.9% of the time no such changes will occur -- which is why they look out their windows at the marchers, shake their heads, look at their watches...Ho hum...it will all blow over soon...
So, what would a real institutional change look like? For starters, stop attacking statues and start attacking institutions that hurt and belittle Americans.
Top priority: get rid of the Electoral College.
Foreigners are the first to shake their heads in dismay and ask why doesn´t the U.S. simply let a direct vote determine who will be president? Why have that weird-o Electoral College?
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A friend asked what instantly enters my head when I hear the words "Electoral College."
Instant answer: The Blivet Trick.
A non-instant explanation:
The Electoral College vote, not the popular vote, elects the president. The College is a creature of the Constitution (Article II, Section 1) and the 12th Amendment.
The College is based on senators plus house members. Thus, New Mexico, which has three congressional districts and two senators, has five Electoral College votes.
The calculation for the nation is easy. 435 (representatives) + 100 (senators) + 3 (Washington; D.C.) = 538 total Electoral College votes.
Because every state automatically has 2 senators, the senate part of the equation is locked, settled. Political battles are fought over congressional districts. The latter are based entirely on population -- warm bodies counted by the census every 10 years.
What it comes down to: if your state increases by about 750,000 people, that addition will give you a new congressional district -- and hence one more Electoral College vote.
Until-death-do-us-part political turf wars gave birth to the Electoral College:
In the late 1700s the Founding Fathers could not agree on how to elect the president. The sticking point: rich Southern planters were unhappy with all proposals. They looked around and saw their states were short on population.
"Real" population, that is ...
The South had plenty of slaves. In 1790, slaves were 39% of the population of Virginia, 43% of South Carolina.
Unfortunately for the rich planters, slaves did not count for electoral purposes for the same reason dogs did not count: they could not vote. Slaves and dogs could not vote because they were -- and any rich Southern planter would be happy to set you straight if you were confused about this point -- subhuman.
If only there was a way slaves could be counted as humans but not "really," the planters' dilemma would be solved.
This "compromise" resulted. A slave = 3/5 of a human being. That way, the South could puff up its population numbers, get more congressional districts, and consequently have more Electoral College votes -- all without giving slaves the right to vote. Clever, no?
The deal was cut, the impasse broken, the Constitution passed. But there was a terrible price to pay. The Southern planters forced America to live in an as-if world -- to act as-if the 3/5 formula was morally right and factually true.
Confederate and counterfeit: read or said, the two are easily confused. In accepting the unacceptable, a diseased window opened.
I have often wondered where The Great Compromise, which high school teaches us is the holiest of holies, turns into the compromise of greatness.
3/5 human? Really? Are you crazy?
What we have here is not a failure to communicate but a textbook case of The Blivet Trick.
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Today, slave owners are -- legally at any rate -- gone. The Electoral College persists because oligarchs love it. They invented it; it is their hole card. If the little people out there in a fit of barnstorming stupidity or outright madness vote for Noam Chomsky for president, the College can stop him from taking office.
With the exceptions of Nebraska and Maine, the winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College allows someone who loses the popular vote for president to be elected anyway, by winning the Electoral College vote. That blatantly anti-democratic maneuver was executed by Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016.
What is far more important, however, is that 20 other presidential elections were so close that the loser of the popular vote could easily have won the White House.
For example, in 2004 George Bush handily beat John Kerry by 3 million votes. Bush won 286 Electoral College votes to 251 for Kerry. 270 are needed to win. That means if Kerry had won Ohio with its 20 Electoral College votes, Bush would have won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote and the presidency.
Talk about an interesting development. The oligarchic tool that put Bush in office, the Electoral College, would have booted him out.
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Recapitulation: The slave state bosses looked around and said...gosh...nobody lives here...how are we going to get seats in the House? Wait a second...we have all those slaves...if only we could count them, we´d swell up our population figures and get more seats! But, gosh, why everybody knows slaves aren´t humans...hmmm...Ah ha! I know what to do -- we will call each slave 3/5 of a person. That way we can increase our population figures and not have to count slaves as full humans and give them the right to vote. Clever, no? And by having more seats in the House, we can increase our power by having more votes in the Electoral College we are creating that will elect the president. Gosh, we´re ssssooooo smart!
And they were.
Now it´s time for us to get smart. The last major vestige of slavery in our Constitution, the Electoral College is a spectacle that should have been shut down years ago. It is the dead hand of the dead past.
As for the magic trick that dead hand keeps performing, by now you get the idea.
The Blivit Trick is the attempt to shove 10 pounds of horse shit into a 5-pound bag. Ken Lay of Enron ("Our liquidity is fine. In fact, it's better than fine. It's strong."); Bernard Madoff ("In today's regulatory environment, it's virtually impossible to violate rules."); Herbert Hoover ("Prosperity is just around the corner"); creators of the Electoral College (“Blacks are 3/5 human”) -- all were erstwhile practitioners of The Blivet Trick. That´s what happens when you live in an as-if world.
To get rid of the College will require amending the Constitution. No greater memorial to George Floyd can be made than to name the amendment after him.
In case you are wondering, all public opinion polls show the American people want the College tossed out. So, what are we waiting for?
3/5 of a person...my god...