The Electoral College Is Also a Climate Problem

[homersapien 11,423]

Another practical reason for us to eliminate the electoral college.

 

If the West Coast fires were happening in swing states, presidential candidates wouldn't be able to ignore the issue.

September 15, 2020

Peter Beinart  Professor of journalism at the City University of New York

 

In a speech yesterday, Joe Biden condemned Donald Trump’s handling of the wildfires devastating the American West and pledged to “put our nation on the road to net-zero emissions by no later than 2050.” That’s good news. But it was Biden’s first speech on the subject, even though California, Oregon, and Washington State declared states of emergency almost a month ago. He still hasn’t visited the devastation.  

Unlike Trump, Biden hasn’t been slow to address the wildfires because he doubts climate change. As he mentioned in his speech, he’s laid out a more ambitious agenda to tackle it than any other presidential nominee in American history. He’s been slow to address the fires because he’s obeying the dictates of the Electoral College, an institution that is bad not only for American democracy, but for American survival.

Twice in the past 20 years, the Electoral College has installed presidents who garnered fewer votes than their opponent. This year, according to Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, Trump could lose the popular vote by three to four percentage points and still have a one-in-four chance of winning reelection—which would lead many Americans to ask, understandably, whether they actually live in a democracy.

That’s bad enough. But the Electoral College also undermines the fight against climate change. If every additional vote in California, Oregon, and Washington—which between them boast roughly 50 million people—mattered as much as every additional vote in a swing state, Biden might have spent the past few weeks touring the West Coast and explaining how his plans can save its residents from a climate apocalypse that threatens to make their home unlivable.

But the Electoral College rules that out. Biden has no incentive to run up his margin in three reliably blue states. Instead, he’s singularly focused on purple ones in the Midwest. So far this month, he’s visited Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and he’s headed to Minnesota next week. Conventional wisdom holds that in a Midwest built on fossil fuels and heavy industry, focusing on climate change is politically risky. In January, The New York Times described “fracking”—an environmentally damaging process that extracts natural gas from shale—as the swing issue that could win Pennsylvania. And since clinching the Democratic nomination, Biden has been furiously refuting Republican claims that he wants to ban fracking.

In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the conservative Club for Growth has run ads attacking his running mate, Kamala Harris, for supporting the “radical Green New Deal, eliminating 10 million oil and gas jobs.” And when Biden gave a major economic speech last Wednesday in Warren, Michigan, he mentioned electric vehicles but never uttered the word climate. As the political strategist Dan Schnur recently told the Associated Press, “The Biden campaign understands that a full embrace of an aggressive climate-change agenda could create problems for them in [the] Upper Midwest.”

Biden’s caution might or might not help him get elected. But it will make it harder for him to take dramatic action on climate if he does, because he won’t be able to credibly claim a popular mandate. Republicans will insist that Biden’s victory reflects not an embrace of progressive policies by the electorate but merely a sourness over the bad economy, the pandemic, and Trump’s divisive brand of politics. And, on climate, Biden won’t have a strong retort, because he hasn’t emphasized the issue on the stump. Because Barack Obama campaigned relentlessly on health care in 2008, he found it easier to persevere when the Affordable Care Act met congressional opposition in 2009. Biden is not laying the groundwork for the same kind of fortitude on climate change.

This is the problem with an electoral system that allows presidential candidates to ignore most of America’s voters. Sometimes the Americans being ignored are facing problems that presidential candidates desperately need to prioritize. By the time Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin face climate emergencies that rival those currently afflicting California, Oregon, and Washington, the problem may be too far along for anyone to fix.

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/electoral-college-also-climate-problem/616347/

[I_M4_AU 7,930]

Another misleading article as climate change is not the main cause of the wildfires in California and the West.  It may have a small part in the tinder being dried out, but even Governor Gavin Newsom said yesterday the forest mismanagement was the cause for the devastation.

Newsom, along with Biden, is pushing climate change being the cause of all disasters while Newsom has devastated his state with rolling blackouts due to his management of the state.  The solar panels and wind mills are not up to the task of providing its citizens with power in the hottest months of the year.  They ask their residents to turn the thermostat to 78 and/or us fans.  California’s infrastructure is not equipped to handle the demand and the dems want the entire US to jump on this train when the technology isn’t where it should be?  Why should the US submit to this until the technology catches up to the demand?

1 hour ago, homersapien said:

But the Electoral College rules that out. Biden has no incentive to run up his margin in three reliably blue states. Instead, he’s singularly focused on purple ones in the Midwest. So far this month, he’s visited Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, and he’s headed to Minnesota next week. Conventional wisdom holds that in a Midwest built on fossil fuels and heavy industry, focusing on climate change is politically risky. In January, The New York Times described “fracking”—an environmentally damaging process that extracts natural gas from shale—as the swing issue that could win Pennsylvania. And since clinching the Democratic nomination, Biden has been furiously refuting Republican claims that he wants to ban fracking.

If it wasn’t for the Electoral College Hiden Biden could stay in his basement and win California and New York and the popular vote.  See how the Electoral College is a good thing?  To try to convince people the Electoral College undermines Climate Change and this would be a reason to eliminate the practice is ludicrous. 

In July Biden had this to say during the Democratic Debate:

During a CNN debate in July 2019, Mr. Biden said, “We would make sure it’s eliminated,” when asked if there would be a place for “fossil fuels, including coal and fracking” in his administration.

Mr. Biden’s campaign later clarified that he supports ending subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

During a debate in March, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said, “I’m talking about stopping fracking as soon as we possibly can. I’m talking about telling the fossil fuel industry that they are going to stop destroying this planet — no ifs, buts and maybes about it.”

“So am I,” said Mr. Biden, adding: “No more — no new fracking.”

https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2020/09/01/Biden-s-confusing-stand-on-fracking/stories/202008260066

When your campaign has to clarify what you meant to say, you are entering Trump territory and we all know how that ends up.

Another Orange Man bad article with no substance from the Atlantic.

[AURex 2,025]

Climate change is definitely a problem in non-swing states -- but they are pretending it is not happening because Republican. And it's affecting weather and disasters in other states, but hey, they have Democrat governors, so they don't count.

As for "clarifying" what your candidate actually meant ---- lets not forget the 4 years of endless lies and environmental catastrophic policies the Trump Administration is trying to either justify or cover up or blame on Obama or Biden. It is absolutely ludicrous.

 

[Mikey 16,686]

Climate change has been happening since the beginning of the world, and will continue until the end of the world. Glaciers gouged out the Great Lakes. There are fossils of palm trees and other tropical species in the ground under the Antarctic ice pack. The sea once covered all of Florida. Just south of Auburn was once a beach, you can find seashells in the soil there.

These things have happened in the past and in all likelihood will happen again. Whether man's puny activities can affect climate change is extremely doubtful.

[homersapien 11,423]

1 hour ago, Mikey said:

Climate change has been happening since the beginning of the world, and will continue until the end of the world. Glaciers gouged out the Great Lakes. There are fossils of palm trees and other tropical species in the ground under the Antarctic ice pack. The sea once covered all of Florida. Just south of Auburn was once a beach, you can find seashells in the soil there.

These things have happened in the past and in all likelihood will happen again. Whether man's puny activities can affect climate change is extremely doubtful.

That's just hopelessly blatantly ignorant. 

We aren't talking about changes that occur over a geologic time scale (hundreds of millions of years) but rapid changes that started with the industrial age. 

Do you know how many years ago that was Mikey?  Look it up,  it will do you good.  Maybe.

(But thanks for making the point of the article.)

[homersapien 11,423]

It’s dangerous when the minority party rules everyone else

Republicans get fewer votes, but they’re about to lock down the Supreme Court.

By

Seth Masket

Seth Masket is a professor of political science and director of the Center on American Politics at the University of Denver. He is the author of "Learning from Loss: The Democrats, 2016-2020."

 

September 25, 2020

Before the end of the year, Amy Coney Barrett will probably be sworn in as a Supreme Court justice — and she may serve for decades. She will have been appointed by an impeached president who lost the popular vote in 2016 and may well continue in office after losing it again in 2020. She will almost certainly be approved by senators representing less than 45 percent of the American population.

Our nation is moving even deeper into minority rule: The House aside, the U.S. government is controlled by the less popular party in a polarized two-party system. We may call this unfair, but that would trivialize the problem. It is entirely permissible under the Constitution, and it is dangerous. When the majority of a nation’s citizens can’t get its candidates elected or its preferred policies passed, the government’s legitimacy is compromised and destabilizing pressure begins to build.

The tendency toward minority rule in the United States, present since the founding, has become more acute. That’s certainly true in the Senate: California has 68 times as many residents that Wyoming has, but the same number of senators. The disparity in population size between the biggest and smallest states is far greater than anything the founders knew.

Residents of rural, sparsely populated states are vastly overrepresented in the Senate. And because the electoral college is based on the number of federal representatives, this rural-state overrepresentation plays out in the selection of presidents, as well. Former vice president Joe Biden could well win the popular vote by three or four percentage points, or even more, this fall and still not be elected.

The House, the most democratic institution in the three branches of government, has no role in selecting Supreme Court justices. That’s the purview of the president and the Senate, which means that the composition of the high court has a minoritarian, rural-state bias built into it as well. (According to a Washington Post-ABC News Poll, only 38 percent of Americans say the replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be nominated by Trump and confirmed by the current Senate; 57 percent say the nomination should be left to the winner of the presidential election, and put to a Senate vote next year.) Should a Trump nominee be confirmed, the Supreme Court will consist of six justices appointed by Republicans, even though the party has won the popular presidential vote only once in the past seven elections (George W. Bush, in 2004).

On its own, a rural state bias in representation is potentially problematic but not invidious. Plenty of issues in rural states should receive national attention, of course. But the problems mount when one party dominates the rural areas and the other dominates the urban ones, which is where we stand today. Republicans essentially get bonus points: They can be the less popular party and still get to govern.

How scared should you be about American democracy?

Political science research reveals that ideologically extreme parties tend to do worse in elections than more moderate parties, and that parties that find themselves in the minority — and out of power — recognize the problem and recalibrate toward the center. But because of their built-in systemic advantage, Republicans face no such check. They have come to prefer winning narrowly with committed partisans than winning broadly with unreliable moderates. Such a strategy helped bring the nation President Trump.

This presents a further problem: How are Democrats to respond to an increasingly extreme, Trumpist Republican Party? Democratic leaders, when pressed with examples of Trump’s latest malfeasance, typically respond with, in effect, a one-word answer: “Vote.” It’s good advice, of course. But what if it’s not enough? What if Democrats continue to bring more people to the polls than Republicans but Republicans maintain control of most of government?

Democrats largely responded to the presidential elections in 2000 and 2016 — in which they won the popular vote — by conceding that rules are rules, and sometimes the more popular candidate just doesn’t get to be president. But how many such defeats will they take in stride? There may be a tipping point at which the situation becomes intolerable.

Since George Floyd’s death, in police custody, at the end of May, enormous numbers of protesters (many, although hardly all, Black) have taken to the streets to demand change. They have done so in large part because, with considerable justification, they don’t think that working within the system — voting regularly, calling their elected officials, showing up at city council meetings, etc. — is producing the change they need. Black people are still being killed by police officers who face few or no consequences. Protest and unrest are a predictable outcome when a population thinks the political system is completely unresponsive to its needs.

Imagine that dynamic multiplied many times over. When well more than half the country votes for one result — over and over — and continues to get another, the situation is unsustainable. This is how a government loses its legitimacy. Governments worldwide facing legitimacy crises have been faced with struggling to govern, as we saw in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, or brutally cracking down on protests, as we saw in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak and continue to see under Abdel Fatah al-Sissi. It’s an ugly situation, and the United States is not immune.

Reform is possible — in theory. The Constitution can be amended to substantially change the electoral college procedure, as happened in 1804 when the 12th Amendment was ratified, allowing separate votes for president and vice president. But as long as one party considers the current system advantageous, it’s hard to imagine such an amendment attracting the supermajority support needed to pass. Other reforms — such as an interstate compact that would make presidential elections subject to the popular vote — are possible without an amendment.

And that reform, too, faces the brutal logic of minority rule: The party in power will fight desperately to keep its entrenched advantage (and deepen it, if possible). Almost by definition, the longer the anti-democratic spiral continues, the harder it becomes to reverse. And it’s not a counterargument to say that the advantages the Republicans have today are “constitutional.” In fact, that’s the heart of the problem.

 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/minority-party-electoral-college-court-trump/2020/09/25/1163b954-fdfc-11ea-8d05-9beaaa91c71f_story.html

[DKW 86 7,438]

You know what? Elections mean things. If you want to rule, then win the elections. If HRC had won and had named 3 Scotus Justices. How many would care??? Just about Zero. People want to rip up the Interstate because their old car broke down. Maybe you just need to repair it, or buy a slightly newer one?

[Grumps 3,704]

Who was it who said, "Elections have consequences."?

[DKW 86 7,438]

4 minutes ago, Grumps said:

Who was it who said, "Elections have consequences."?

Barack Obama?

If you want to win elections, stop running old white people with stale ass ideas that are cosmically sold out to Wall Street.

[Grumps 3,704]

1 minute ago, DKW 86 said:

Barack Obama?

It it funny how the same people who complain about the minority party ruling everyone else don't mind when they are in the minority and are using the rules to push through unpopular legislation. 

[homersapien 11,423]

9 minutes ago, Grumps said:

Who was it who said, "Elections have consequences."?

What does that have to do with the long term danger of an election process that consistently allows for minority rule?

[homersapien 11,423]

1 minute ago, Grumps said:

It it funny how the same people who complain about the minority party ruling everyone else don't mind when they are in the minority and are using the rules to push through unpopular legislation. 

What "unpopular" legislation? 

And Obama was not a minority POTUS.

[Grumps 3,704]

Just now, homersapien said:

What does that have to do with the long term danger of an election process that consistently allows for minority rule?

Define minority. Liberals are the minority if you give power according to land ownership or by the number of states who vote a certain way - but that is not how the system works. Conversely, conservatives are in the minority if you give power according to population - but that also is not how the system works.

If you don't like the system then work to change it.

[Grumps 3,704]

4 minutes ago, homersapien said:

What "unpopular" legislation? 

And Obama was not a minority POTUS.

An example, people who were in favor of the ACA were in the minority (not minority party). The dems lied to the people as to whether the mandate was a tax or not to get enough support for it to pass. 

[homersapien 11,423]

7 hours ago, Grumps said:

1) An example, people who were in favor of the ACA were in the minority (not minority party).

2) The dems lied to the people as to whether the mandate was a tax or not to get enough support for it to pass. 

1) Got proof of what the "people" were in favor of, and why?

2) The Democrats didn't lie about anything. A "mandate" is equivalent to a tax, (just ask chief justice Roberts). But more importantly, how has that worked out in terms of popularity?

[homersapien 11,423]

7 hours ago, Grumps said:

1) Define minority.

2)Liberals are the minority if you give power according to land ownership

3) or by the number of states who vote a certain way 

4) - but that is not how the system works.

5) Conversely, conservatives are in the minority if you give power according to population

6) - but that also is not how the system works.

7) If you don't like the system then work to change it.

1) I define minority as fewer votes than either a plurality or majority.

2) Citation please.  And then explain how that's relevant to today's constitution.

3) Well, that's sort of the point.

4) Which is why it needs to be changed, (obviously)

5) Thanks for recognizing the argument!

6) (see response # 4)

7) That's what I am doing, and will continue to do.

 

[Mikey 16,686]

12 hours ago, homersapien said:

Republicans get fewer votes, but they’re about to lock down the Supreme Court.

Ain't America a wonderful place? We can expect have a conservative court for many years to come. Kudos to President Trump!

[DKW 86 7,438]

11 hours ago, Mikey said:

Ain't America a wonderful place? We can expect have a conservative court for many years to come. Kudos to President Trump!

Its what the Dems get for playing around with NAMING Nominees rather then having their rank and file select the nominees. 

[homersapien 11,423]

12 hours ago, Mikey said:

Ain't America a wonderful place? We can expect have a conservative court for many years to come. Kudos to President Trump!

You're a fool if you don't think what goes around, comes around.

And you have a low regard for the American people if you think they will accept a continuous string of minority governments.

[Mikey 16,686]

10 hours ago, homersapien said:

You're a fool if you don't think what goes around, comes around.

Harry Reid and the Dems certainly know what goes around comes around. They were extremely stupid to break 220 years of tradition and invoke the nuclear option. That was the blunder that just kept on biting them in the behind and it's still chomping away.

10 hours ago, homersapien said:

And you have a low regard for the American people if you think they will accept a continuous string of minority governments.

The SCOTUS is not the government, even though the socialists would like to rule this nation through the courts instead of through the legislative branch. That's not going to happen, thanks to the Trump Court that stands to be in place for many years.