More on Trump

[Palehorse]

Then how do you know he doesn't know how government works? What are you basing that on? If you're saying that because he's never had a job in the government that doesn't mean he doesn't know how things work.

Not what you said about Obama now is it? 

[Purplelady1040]

Why do libs have the idea that only they are well educated and smarter than anyone else? If Trump were a lib ya'll would be singing his praises.

Nope, I wouldn't, again you are making the usual ass out of yourself assuming that you know what I am thinking. And please show me where I ever claimed to be a lib? For your information, I vote Republican most of the time but I sure to hell didn't this time. If he had ran on the Democrat ticket being the way he is, I would still say the same thing. I know plenty of people both Republicans, Democrats and Independents who are not more educated or smarter but they have been in a political office which gives them a little experience in how things work. One thing is certain, you don't have a damn clue.

[me]

And now you're telling me what I know and am thinking so I guess you would be making an ass of yourself as well.

Nope, I wouldn't, again you are making the usual ass out of yourself assuming that you know what I am thinking. And please show me where I ever claimed to be a lib? For your information, I vote Republican most of the time but I sure to hell didn't this time. If he had ran on the Democrat ticket being the way he is, I would still say the same thing. I know plenty of people both Republicans, Democrats and Independents who are not more educated or smarter but they have been in a political office which gives them a little experience in how things work. One thing is certain, you don't have a damn clue.

[Purplelady1040]

And now you're telling me what I know and am thinking so I guess you would be making an ass of yourself as well.

Nope but we all know you have made an ass out of yourself quite well and been debunked on everything that you post that you state as facts.

[me]

Nope but we all know you have made an ass out of yourself quite well and been debunked on everything that you post that you state as facts.

You mean like Trump being President?  Hum, seems to me like that ended up being fact.

[Purplelady1040]

You mean like Trump being President?  Hum, seems to me like that ended up being fact.

Just like Obama was President something you seemed to have had a hard time liking and show me where I ever said anything after he won about the results. All I have said is that it would be nice if he knew more about government dealings which he doesn't.

[Locutus]

Just like Obama was President something you seemed to have had a hard time liking and show me where I ever said anything after he won about the results. All I have said is that it would be nice if he knew more about government dealings which he doesn't.

You're arguing with a .

[Purplelady1040]

You're arguing with a .

True!
How is the weather where you are Locutus? If you tell me it is above 65, I think I am not going to be your friend anymore! Hahahaha. It was 11 this morning when we got up.

[Palehorse]

You mean like Trump being President?  Hum, seems to me like that ended up being fact.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day. . . 

[Henry Hawk]

You really don't know how wrong you are, do you?

The electoral college system was designed as a preventative measure to protect the republic from unqualified and dangerous candidates like Trump who successfully dupe voters like you. 

But I suppose it's too much to ask for you to understand that when you didn't even know what it would take to impose term limits on members of Congress. 

I almost forgot about this post.......and WOW, once again, you got to be so damn arrogant....you may learn someday..

I found this article and it explains it beautifully....


:http://theweek.com/articles/668508/electoral-college-actually-awesome


The Electoral College is actually awesome
    by
   Edward Morrissey
The left's whiplash over the Electoral College has finally culminated in complete incoherence.
At first, Democrats and the media barely paid any attention to the constitutional structure of presidential elections, assuming that Hillary Clinton would win handily thanks to the "blue wall" of Rust Belt states and supposedly superior funding and organization.

When she lost, Democrats at first decried the representative nature of the Electoral College — and then tried to exploit it with a campaign to convince electors to switch their votes away from Donald Trump.
That "faithless elector" project wound up backfiring on Clinton supporters and Trump opponents. While activists predicted a significant drain of support from Trump — activist attorney Larry Lessig claimed that nearly two dozen electors had contacted his organization for potential legal support — only two electors changed their vote from Trump, both in Texas.

Meanwhile, Clinton lost five electors from three different states, which had the net effect of increasing Trump's margin of victory from 74 electoral votes to 77 (306-232 to 304-227).

Now that electors have fulfilled their roles almost entirely as written, Trump opponents have shifted away from casting the Electoral College as a last bulwark against the bad choices of the voters, and back to a historical anachronism that defeats the purpose of democracy.

While electors gathered to cast their votes and it became clear that the faithless-elector project had laid an egg, The New York Times editorial board demanded an end to the Electoral College.
By overwhelming majorities, Americans would prefer to elect the president by direct popular vote, not filtered through the antiquated mechanism of the Electoral College. They understand, on a gut level, the basic fairness of awarding the nation's highest office on the same basis as every other elected office — to the person who gets the most votes. But for now, the presidency is still decided by 538 electors. [The New York Times]

That argument is flat-out wrong. The presidency doesn't get decided by the personal whims of 538 electors, but by the voters in the states they represent.

In fact, that was precisely what Trump's opponents and those who now want to eliminate the Electoral College hoped would happen.

They invented a new purpose for the institution as a check on popular votes within each state rather than a direct representation of them, trying to convince electors that they had a duty to oppose Trump.
It didn't work, in large part because it ignores how electors get chosen. Voters do not cast ballots for electors; the names they see on the ballot are the nominees of each party, who select their own electors for their own slate.

Generally speaking, electors come from the ranks of party officials and activists whose loyalty is unquestioned. As we saw in the vote, those assumptions proved to be 98.7 percent valid.
The Times' editorial also highlighted the supposed unfairness of not "using the same basis as every other elected office." The reason for this is that the presidency is not at all "like every other national office" — and it never has been.
Unlike governors, whose state governments have total sovereignty within their borders, the presidency governs over states with their own sovereignty under the Constitution. The role of the presidency is at least somewhat limited to foreign policy and questions that are at least loosely connected to interstate issues and enforcement of other provisions of the Constitution.

For that reason, the framers of the Constitution wanted to ensure that the president would have the greatest consensus among the sovereign states themselves, while still including representation based on population.
That is why each state gets the same number of electors as they have seats in the House and the Senate. It reduces the advantage that larger states have, but hardly eliminates it entirely; California has 55 electors while Wyoming has only three, to use the Times' comparison.

Rather than being an "antiquated system," as they write, it's an elegant system that helps balance power between sovereign states with national popular intent, and it forces presidential contenders to appeal to a broader range of populations.
The editorial points out that Republican votes in San Francisco are "worthless" under the current system. But that has more to do with the way the states choose to allocate electors than it does the Electoral College.

California and 47 other states allocate electors on a winner-take-all basis, which gives their states much more power in presidential elections. States could choose other allocation schemes if they want to prioritize "democracy" and proportional representation over influence, but none of the high-population states do so.
In this case, the nature of the popular-vote lead is instructive on why smaller states won't go along with the Times' demand to end the Electoral College. Clinton won the overall popular vote by nearly 3 million, but won California by 4.3 million and New York by 1.7 million.

Donald Trump won 30 of the 50 states. Relying on the popular vote would have voters in the largest states determine the outcome and lock out the majority of the states, as it would have in 2016.
A popular-vote system would change the entire dynamic of presidential campaigns. Rather than spending time in states with smaller populations, candidates would spend their time trying to fight it out in the most populous locations.

That might be good news for California, New York, and Texas, but it's bad news for most of the South and Midwest. Had a popular-vote system been in place in 2016, the Trump campaign would have oriented itself toward it and might have competed more in coastal Democratic strongholds, wasting less effort in other states.
Instead, the Electoral College system worked exactly as intended. The candidate who built the best consensus among the states through their popular votes won the presidency.

The problem for the Times and others opposed to the outcome is that their candidate didn't beat the winner.
   

[Locutus]

That article is myopic Hank.

He's describing one of the purposes of the Electoral College while flat out lying about the other.  The other purpose, as intended by the founders, is exactly what I described to you.  The founders, as Hamilton duly stated, intended the electoral college to be a deliberative body in the manner that I described in my post.  They had a clear fear that a charismatic tyrant could manipulate public opinion and come into power.   Alexander Hamilton described these concerns in the Federalist Papers.

Do you believe the guy who wrote the above, or the words of Alexander Hamilton himself? 

You should take the time to do some reading outside of your comfort zone.  You may learn something someday. 

[Locutus]

And yes, given Hamilton's own words, this statement still holds:

The electoral college system was designed as a preventative measure to protect the republic from unqualified and dangerous candidates like Trump who successfully dupe voters like you. 

[Locutus]

Here's a link to Federalist 68:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp

Read it.

In it, Hamilton states:

These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?

That sounds strikingly familiar with what happened in this election, does it not?

[Henry Hawk]

Here's a link to Federalist 68:

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp

Read it.

In it, Hamilton states:

These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?

That sounds strikingly familiar with what happened in this election, does it not?

No more than Obama 2008....

[Locutus]

No more than Obama 2008....

How did a foreign power attempt to intervene in the election in 2008?