Can the electoral college revert to its original function to negate its original intent?

There's a knot in the logic of those urging the presidential electors to deny Trump an electoral college majority. It comes between these two propositions:

1. The founders (wisely?) established the electoral college as a potential veto of the popular choice* in case the people (or state legislatures) voted in a demagogue.

2. The popular choice in this election was not a dangerous demagogue, as Hilary Clinton will end up with about 2.5 million more votes than Trump.

Thus, the electoral college should use its veto function to un-veto the popular choice rather than to countermand it.

The disconnect is between the electoral college as designed versus the electoral college as evolved. It was designed to be a deliberative body (or set of bodies, as each state's electors meet separately). It evolved into an inexact and unreliable mirror and intended rubber stamp of the popular choice. Like a human appendix, it serves no practical function except to rupture occasionally.

Subtitle to the Federalist Papers: We are not throwing away our shot

In the grand (or not so grand) tradition of blogging the Bible, another lay impression as I work my way through the Federalist Papers:

Hamilton and Madison are both deeply frustrated and alarmed by what they paint as the ever-more complete enfeeblement of the federal government under the Articles of Confederation. Both, too, present themselves as cold realists with respect to human motives and response to incentives. At the same time, they are breathless with the sense of the U.S.'s potential -- geographically, as a contiguous, fertile, navigable and highly defensible land mass; culturally, as speaking one language and being bred to liberty by English heritage; and politically, as having won the opportunity for a fresh start informed by human experience to date.

Both are at pains to argue that the perceived and often cited failures of democracies past do not apply to representative democracy. Madison, making the distinction in No. 9, touts representative democracy as a kind of emerging technology that the Constitution will bring to scale. Acknowledging that the republics of antiquity present a cautionary tale of constant warfare and corruption, he argues:

Hamilton's ghost in the Gettysburg Address

Nearing the end of Ron Chernow's Hamilton led me to dip into the Federalist Papers last night. No sooner did I crack the volume and start in on No. 1, written by Hamilton, when lo, deja vu ensued. Not because I'd read the words before, though I probably have, but because I felt I was reading the Gettsyburg Address. Here's Hamilton:

After an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the UNION, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world. It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

And Lincoln:

Obama's liberal Lincoln

On Lincoln's 200th birthday, in the latest of a long series of tributes to Lincoln, Obama cast Lincoln as the avatar of union - that is, of commitment to the collective effort that removes the fetters from individual effort. He drew his usual long historical framework: that we can meet the challenges of the moment because "we have been here before" -- Americans have, historically, mustered the collective will required to meet enormous challenges. Within that larger story, he set his usual shorter historical narrative -- the story of the last thirty years -- with unusual clarity and compression.

The short frame is: Reagan was a legitimate corrective to a state that had grown bloated; the Republicans who followed him were an overcorrection; it is time to restore collective effort, commitment to the common good, faith in government as a instrument in collective problem solving. Obama implicitly casts himself as an instrument of democratic self-correction:

And yet, while our challenges may be new, they did not come about overnight. Ultimately, they result from a failure to meet the test that Lincoln set. To be sure, there have been times in our history when our government has misjudged what we can do by individual effort alone, and what we can only do together; when it has done things that people can – or should – do for themselves. Our welfare system, for example, too often dampened individual initiative, discouraging people from taking responsibility for their own upward mobility. With respect to education, we have all too frequently lost sight of the role of parents, rather than government, in cultivating a thirst for knowledge and instilling those qualities of a good character – hard work, discipline, and integrity – that are so important to educational achievement and professional success.

But in recent years, we’ve seen the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction. It’s a philosophy that says every problem can be solved if only government would step out of the way; that if government were just dismantled, divvied up into tax breaks, and handed out to the wealthiest among us, it would somehow benefit us all. Such knee-jerk disdain for government – this constant rejection of any common endeavor – cannot rebuild our levees or our roads or our bridges. It cannot refurbish our schools or modernize our health care system; lead to the next medical discovery or yield the research and technology that will spark a clean energy economy.

Once again, Obama casts moving the center left as a restoration of core American values. (Elsewhere, he's drafted not only Lincoln but Hamilton into this historical narrative -- two of our leaders, ironically, who arguably did most to empower industrial and financial elites, as well as strong central government and collective effort.) He presents Lincoln's railroads, and his land grants, and his land-grant colleges, as precursors of his own intended alternative energy investments, and job creation, and school reform. He embraces Lincoln's injunction to “lift artificial weights from all shoulders [and give] all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life" as the essence of what he has often defined as the always-unfinished American drive toward a "more perfect union."

McCain's economic bridge to nowhere

The Wall Street Journal's Bob Davis, reporting on an interview with John McCain focused on his economic platform, does a nice job highlighting multiple inconsistencies -- not to say an overall incoherence -- without any explicit diss. Repeatedly, Davis presents McCain's claims against an understated backdrop of inconvenient truths.

Among the highlighted lacunae:

Social security reform: "the Arizona senator says he still backs a system of private retirement accounts that President Bush pushed unsuccessfully, and disowned details of a Social Security proposal on his campaign Web site." That is, the website calls for a plan similar to Hillary Clinton's, creating personal investment "supplementing" social security, without touching the structure of the existing program. That's a switch from his 2000 campaign, when McCain called for diverting a portion of social security taxes to fund private accounts, as Bush tried to do in 2005. McCain's chief economic aide, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, chalks up the change to the runup of the deficit in the Bush years.

But, Davis reports, "asked about the apparent change in position in the interview, Sen. McCain said he hadn't made one. 'I'm totally in favor of personal savings accounts," he says. When reminded that his Web site says something different, he says he will change the Web site. (As of Sunday night, he hadn't.) ' As part of Social Security reform, I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it -- along the lines that President Bush proposed."

This repudiation highlights the article's subtext: that McCain claims to be a deficit hawk but avoids any serious attempt to make his numbers add up - that is, to deal with the deficit. Which brings us to self-repudiation #2:

Bush tax cuts and more: As is well known, McCain voted against Bush's massive tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 but now opposes letting them expire. Now he wants to pile on with a cut in the corporate tax rate from 35% to 25% at a cost of $100 billion per year, and elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax, at a cost unspecified in the Journal article but estimated by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center at least $800 billion over the next decade (Aviva Aron Dine, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities). "In all," Davis reports, "his tax-cutting proposals could cost about $400 billion a year, according to estimates of the impact of different tax cuts by CBO and the McCain campaign. The cost will make it difficult for him to achieve his goal of balancing the budget by the end of his first term."

Offsetting savings? Davis makes it clear that they're pitifully inadequate:

To show he can control spending, Sen. McCain cites his long record as a spending hawk, who battles sweetheart deals between the Pentagon and defense contractors, as well as projects that lawmakers of both parties cram into appropriations bills -- "earmarks," in budget lingo.

Congressional earmarks total $18 billion a year, according to the Taxpayers for Common Sense, a Washington, D.C., research group -- and each has a member of Congress who will ferociously fight to keep that spending going. Mr. Holtz-Eakin, the McCain adviser, says that earmarks actually cost $60 billion a year, counting programs that started in earlier years and get funded year after year.

Another source of spending cuts eyed by the McCain campaign is a White House hit list of underperforming or redundant programs. But again, the numbers are relatively small -- $18 billion annually -- compared to the cost of Sen. McCain's tax plans, and the programs include housing loans, education grants, and water projects popular with Congress.

The accompanying interview highlights the absurdity. Asked by Davis, "are you worried your numbers don't add up?", McCain responds:

If you just look at two spending bills that the president signed into law, there's $35 billion just in those two bills [that could be cut]. I saved the taxpayers over $6 billion on one Air Force tanker deal. I'm not worried about being able to find savings in government.

I love the use of brackets above - $35 billion [that could be cut] -- if the President got every cut he claimed to want in two bills totaling several hundred billions in spending. That's in a budget with a current deficit of over $400 billion. Tack McCain's $400 billion in new tax cuts onto that, and then take a guess at the cost of maintaining over 100,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely.

Slow Stimulus: To get the economy going, Davis emphasizes that McCain "said he might have 'a couple of fireside chats with the American people.'" Beyond that, nothing -- except extending the Bush tax cuts and adding his own:

While other candidates were scrambling in January to put together stimulus plans to boost flagging consumer spending, he proposed long-term tax cuts which could take years to come into law. "In the shorter term, if you somehow told American businesses and families, 'Look, you're not going to experience a tax increase in 2010,' I think that's a pretty good short-term measure," he says.

The Bush tax cuts have already been justified, first by the surplus of 2000, then by the recession of 2001, then by the recovery of 2003-07. Now McCain is tacking on the anticipated recession of 2008. Here we go again: massive tax cuts are the cure for every economic slowdown, and the cause of all economic growth.

Pat Buchanan recently said that McCain running our foreign policy "could make Cheney look like Gandhi." With this deadpan presentation, Bob Davis makes it clear that McCain running the economy could make Bush look like Alexander Hamilton.

Related posts:
Obama and Clinton share a pander on trade
Obama channels Edwards in Janesville