The people who advocate this aren't smarter than any fathers, much less the founding ones.

Excellent link!
I was trying to remember that quote about a democracy only lasts until the citizens discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the state treasury.

The founding fathers wanted a representative democracy. The elected representatives were supposed to be better than the average citizen. Not of more worth... but better educated, better informed, perhaps of at least slightly better moral character.
Boy, of late that last one has been an epic fail. The first two aren't doing that well either.

We need to elect some smarter people.
I think that anyone that is to be elected to any significant public office (say Congressional level or thereabouts) should have to take a class on civics... and the all the results should be made public... especially their answers to essay questions. Of course it's kinda hard to test for morals... but at least we would know they understood how the Government works... and would have no excuse for violating or obviating the laws.

I know it would be impossible to implement. Someone would no doubt declare such a proposal racist because it favored people who did well with larnin' and such.

We need to elect what our founding fathers intended, Statesmen.
Now what we've got are rabble-rousers.

@An_Ominous I think it would be relatively easy to fix.

1. Only flesh and blood voters can contribute to political campaigns. No more corporate donations.
2. Flesh and blood voters can only support someone they can vote for. No more overseas donations - no more californian or new york residents supporting Alabama candidates
3. No more e-votes. A mark on a piece of paper is the only vote that qualifies. Better voter fraud control.
4. Candidates cannot have connections to any organization that takes $$$ from government.
5. Political Salaries = the average salary of the people living in the district represented.

It would take a generation or two to start seeing "good" candidates step forward.

@cRaZyTMG Good ideas!
Or as someone posted recently... if politicians get rich in office they have to teach math and economics to middle-schoolers to explain how you can become a multi-millionaire on 140K per year.

Actually one dem candidate Andrew Yang has a proposal that the president's salary should be increased to 4 million per year but that after he leaves office he is prohibited from making paid speeches or serving on the board of directors of corporations.
Unfortunately a lot of his other ideas... suck. So no yen for Yang.

@cRaZyTMG
I especially like your second point.
I believe the Clintons received donations from China.
Why would other Americans want to support a candidate that China favors?

@cRaZyTMG
I also think we should have "salary caps" in campaign finance. NBA teams have a salary cap... a limit on how much each team can spend on players. Hence a team's owner can't just outspend other teams and win every championship that way.
Now, it should cost a billion dollars to run for president. With the internet and social media, campaigns have easy access to millions of people. Sure print signs and buttons and hats, but put a limit on it.
Candidates who just overwhelmingly outspend their opponents are probably winning through subliminal means. The message is ubiquitous.
Again, I'm sure there are some practical reasons why this would be hard to implement. It might infringe on the 1st amendment if you say people can't print as many t-shirts as they want.

But now... as many left candidates rail at 1 percenters... you have to be one to run for office.

Anyone who supports the current presidential election system, believing it is what the Founders intended and that it is in the Constitution, is mistaken. The current presidential election system does not function, at all, the way that the Founders thought that it would.

Supporters of National Popular Vote find it hard to believe the Founding Fathers would endorse the current electoral system where 38+ states and voters now are completely politically irrelevant.
10 of the original 13 states are politically irrelevant now.

Policies important to the citizens of the 38 non-battleground states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.

“Battleground” states receive 7% more presidentially controlled grants than “spectator” states, twice as many presidential disaster declarations, more Superfund enforcement exemptions, and more No Child Left Behind law exemptions.

The Founders created the Electoral College, but 48 states eventually enacted state winner-take-all laws.

Unable to agree on any particular method for selecting presidential electors, the Founding Fathers left the choice of method exclusively to the states in Article II, Section 1
“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors….”
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly characterized the authority of the state legislatures over the manner of awarding their electoral votes as "plenary" and "exclusive."

Neither of the two most important features of the current system of electing the President (namely, universal suffrage, and the 48 state-by-state winner-take-all method) are in the U.S. Constitution. Neither was the choice of the Founders when they went back to their states to organize the nation's first presidential election.

In 1789, in the nation's first election, a majority of the states appointed their presidential electors by appointment by the legislature or by the governor and his cabinet, the people had no vote for President in most states, and in states where there was a popular vote, only men who owned a substantial amount of property could vote, and only three states used the state-by-state winner-take-all method to award electoral votes.

The current winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes is not in the U.S. Constitution. It was not debated at the Constitutional Convention. It is not mentioned in the Federalist Papers. It was not the Founders’ choice. It was used by only three states in 1789, and all three of them repealed it by 1800. It is not entitled to any special deference based on history or the historical meaning of the words in the U.S. Constitution. The actions taken by the Founding Fathers make it clear that they never gave their imprimatur to the winner-take-all method. The winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes became dominant only in the 1880s after the states adopted it, one-by-one, in order to maximize the power of the party in power in each state. The Founders had been dead for decades

The constitutional wording does not encourage, discourage, require, or prohibit the use of any particular method for awarding a state's electoral votes.

States have the responsibility and constitutional power to make all of their voters relevant in every presidential election and beyond. Now, 38 states, of all sizes, and their voters, because they vote predictably, are politically irrelevant in presidential elections.

The National Popular Vote bill is 70% of the way to guaranteeing the majority of Electoral College votes and the presidency in 2020 to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in the country, by changing state winner-take-all laws (not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but later enacted by 48 states), without changing anything in the Constitution, using the built-in method that the Constitution provides for states to make changes.

All voters would be valued equally in presidential elections, no matter where they live.

[The] difference between a democracy and a republic [is] the delegation of the government, the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest."
In a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents."- Madison

Being a constitutional republic does not mean we should not and cannot guarantee the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes. The candidate with the most votes wins in every other election in the country.

Guaranteeing the election of the presidential candidate with the most popular votes and the majority of Electoral College votes (as the National Popular Vote bill would) would not make us a pure democracy.

Pure democracy is a form of government in which people vote on all policy initiatives directly.

Popular election of the chief executive does not determine whether a government is a republic or democracy. It is not rule by referendum.

We would not be doing away with the Electoral College, U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives, state legislatures, etc. etc. etc.

I think it was Woodrow Wilson who said that the constitution is overly constrictive; government needs to follow not the laws of Newton, but of Darwin. Human societies aren't mechanical but organic, and government needs flexibility. Then came the later "thinkers" who developed the "Theory of Literature" that suggests that all texts have both unlimited meanings and no meanings at all.

@govols The last thing you said... the theory of limits, Calculus applied to Literature.
Why? Because people don't have enough aneurysms.

The 2A issues are really complex and push up against the idea that a person really has no authority to regulate another person's right to protect themselves or their families. There is no valid document that can be written to justify taking away rights as a human being. We allow an awful lot of ingress into our personal space by others who are no more worthy than us to make these decisions.

I'd say not only support 2A, but expand this argument to challenge that any person has the right to make you stop possessing natural medicines--or marijuana--or being too drunk. Thing is, people are responsible for their actions. So, if someone gets drunk and shoots someone that didn't deserve to be shot, the action of infringing unjustifiably someone else's rights is punishable. You CHOOSE to be in an altered state, you pay the consequences. But, nobody really has the right to tell you that you can't be in an altered state.

How many laws and rules are there that impinge liberty? And, isn't it interesting that laws, rules, regulations--whatever is in the purview of the government ends up bloated and intrusive.

I'm not sure 2A is the core issue. The issue is government reaching into our lives, because that's what they do. We need to be slapping their hands. The fact that we don't is probably why we are where we are.

Apparently some of them didn't learn anything in elector's college. Probably just partying and going to football games.
By pledging to cast their electoral votes contrary to how their state votes... they violate their purpose.
I think they also violate both logic and the constitution as well. If it's the electors themselves who pledge themselves unto the mob... they should be removed from whatever the hell their office is.
If it's the states themselves, the governors ? They should be censured, fined, slapped in the face, thrashed soundly about the head and shoulders then kicked squar in their gubernatorials.
If they don't believe in the constitution be honest say so, then try to amend it. These attempts to run around it, to obviate are underhanded and not the work of honest men.

@chuckpo Well stated.
Especially the part about "we need to be slapping their hands."
That's why I said this was a gradual campaign of erosion. We should have been slapping their hands a long time ago... when any doofus on the left questioned the constitution.
Of course they had had plans for that too. They've been painting patriots as flag waving zealots for quite some time now. They've actually attached bad connotations to the word patriot.

Still it's not too late for a bit of hand slapping. We just have to slap a lot harder now.

@an_ominous, oh! I love electoral college football! Go bolts!

@An_Ominous, Absolutely. Am I the only one when those clowns said 'flag waiving zealots' that wasn't offended? I'm like, 'yeah--that sounds pretty good.'

Long way between nationalists and bigots trying to squash groups of people. Douche accusations.

@chuckpo Is there a typoid plague... it's not as bad as typhoid... but then again you can't even spell typhoid. I can't believe how many typos I have lately.

@chuckpo Yep... they've gone beyond declaring people flag waving zealots as if it's a bad thing.
Just this week in a town in California... the police department debuted some new cars with the American Flag worked into the logos. People complained because they felt "threatened" by the American Flag.

Jeebus.

I can't even...

Well, yes I can. People who live in America who feel threatened by the American Flag probably feel threatened by a lot of things... they feel threatened by anything that requires a modicum of rational thought. They probably feel threatened by the twisty tie on the bread. I'm virtually certain they feel threatened by the whiteness of the bread.

AOC - actually questioned what Dan Crenshaw had done for 911 victims. Uhhh... he served multiple tours in Iraq and lost an eye in service to his country... bitch.

SNL thought it was clever to mock him. Their default thought was... here's this flag waving one-eyed zealot in Congress. It didn't even occur to them that he was a Seal, who had achieved things most of us could never do. It didn't even occur to them that his sacrifice and service were real and obvious.

When the self-same Dan Crenshaw questioned Ilhan Omar's "some people did something" he was attacked. One media related person called him an "eyeless fuck."

How in the hell do you revere an America-hating antisemitic woman and attack an actual patriot?

Bizarro World.

@An_Ominous, I don't understand. And, there's this self-loathing component. Where does that come from? Why is it progressive or enlightened to hate yourself? Is this ignorance, or something more pathological? I don't know. It's befuddling. I'm not sure I've ever used befuddling in a sentence before--may not ever again. Silly looking word...

Those twisty ties are not not scary. I won't say I'm scared, but I'm not saying I don't keep my eye on them too. They're twisted, and they think it's funny when you start tightening them when you think you're unraveling them. Insipid invention. 1984. I don't know why. It seemed to fit here.

Dan Crenshaw is cool. The AOC thing was incredible. She really should be lauded, because my impression given her intelligence is she should be in a jungle somewhere eating ants with a stick. You can't get elected JUST because you're kind of pretty. I'm not being sexist. Compare AOC to Candace Owens. It's literally like a human being next to a beast. Probably not fair, because Candace is impressive at the top, and AOC doesn't have to be measured to that kind of standard to be a perfectly able human being.

Something is completely broken when you have some pampered kid way in over her head telling a decorated war veteran to go do something about the problems. Umm, he did. What has AOC done besides embarrass herself and all of mankind?

I'm not sure 'bizarro world' covers it.