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Rioters who do property damage need to be arrested, prosecuted, and to have a police record that follows them around and makes it hard to find employment. Consequences work both ways. If you do bad things and there are no real consequences, you’re quite apt to go out and do it again, because it’s fun to do real damage and get away with it. It is simply human nature, and the founders, when they were struggling for independence from England, thought long and hard about human nature and how it works.
If you struggle and work hard and are well rewarded for your efforts, the consequences are that you want to do it again, and maybe those who saw your success will struggle as well.
Yes, I know, some people firmly believe that we put people in prison simply because of the color of their skin, which is nonsense.
Democrats loathe the Electoral College and intend to abolish it at the first opportunity. Yet the founders carefully established it to protect the smaller, less populous states, so that every state would have an equal voice in the union. Democrats just want to be in charge permanently, and don’t really care who they have to step on to get there.
Human nature is kind of a mess. People are selfish, generous, mean, cruel, thoughtful — a mix of all the possible qualities out there. We always remain hopeful that the better nature will win out, but hope remains eternal.
Through all the “Black Lives Matter” protests and demands for reparations and payback, there were some plaintive voices out there that didn’t get enough attention. Jason Riley, who is black, and writes for the Wall Street Journal, has a book out with the rather intriguing title “Please Stop Helping Us.”
Oddly, a few months back a young black high school senior was written up in the national news for walking 3 miles every day to a public library that offered homework help. His efforts earned him letters of acceptance from over 20 colleges and universities, including the one he most hoped to attend. No further notice, no celebration.
Shortly after that, a young black woman who was valedictorian of her class with perfect attendance got a brief article in the media, because she was awarded something like $450,000 in scholarship money. Nobody bothered to report that’s the way the world works. You work hard and put your soul in it, and you are often rewarded by accomplishing your goals.
Neither of the stories got any particular attention as far as I know, but there’s a real lesson there.
A writer at the Opinion Page of the Wall Street Journal remarked several years ago that “Elizabeth Warren has only a child-like understanding of economics.” That was so spot-on that I’ve always remembered it.
✔ @ewarren
The New York Sun had a very good editorial yesterday on “The Electoral College Angst.” You have undoubtedly heard Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez out advocating the removal of the Electoral College from the U.S. Constitution.
As we hurtle toward the 2020 election, some 15 states have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. They would use in a new way the constitutional system in which each state chooses in November electors to meet in December to decide who will be president. Had the compact been in effect in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have been president — though 30 of the 50 states reckoned she was less fit for it.
This is not an occasion for panic. The states that have joined the popular vote compact account for only 190 electoral votes. The compact doesn’t go into effect until it has enough states with the 270 electoral votes needed to decide the presidency. All it would take now, though, is a few red states turning blue enough to join the compact, and — presto — we’d elect our presidents by the national popular vote.
The advocates of such a constitutional amendment ending the electoral college isn’t going to happen, but the real problem seems to be that so few understand why the Constitution is written in such a way. Which leads to another problem.
I’m beginning to think that before someone runs for national office, they should be required to pass a test in the Constitution, to justify their qualifications for such an office. Maybe start with the basic naturalization test that new citizens have to pass and add a little more history and some constitutional questions. As it is we seem to have way too many members of Congress who seem to be at least somewhat unfamiliar with our founding document.
We seem to hear from AOC on a nearly daily basis, incensed about laws she should, as a college graduate, be familiar with, and she clearly is not.
Nevada governor Steve Sisolak (D) today vetoed a bill which would have pledged Nevada’s six electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote for the President of the United States, or in other words nullifying Nevada’s voters and allowing California, Texas. Florida and New York to decide all of our elections. It would really simplify things – the rest of us could just not bother to vote, and candidates would save all sorts of money.
What is appalling is that a legislature would produce such a bill, or that our schools should be so deficient in teaching the basics of what our founders struggled to do when they devised the Constitution.
The origin of the whole thing was, of course, Democrats’ rage that Hillary won the popular vote and lost the general election. But the Left is fairly unfamiliar with the Founders, interested only in whether they owned slaves or not — because they learned their history from Howard Zinn, and assume that this country is evil, and will not be improved until governed entirely by the Left, or something like that. If you need a copy, the Cato Institute has dandy little pocket-sized versions as does Amazon.
Harvard professor and historian Bernard Bailyn, who has likely studied more of the early pamphlets than any other scholar, asserts that “influential in shaping the thought of the Revolutionary generation were the ideas and attitudes associated with the writings of Enlightenment rationalism—writings that expressed not simply the rationalism of liberal reform but that of enlightened conservatism as well.” “In pamphlet after pamphlet the American writers cited Locke on natural rights and on the social and governmental contract, Montesquieu and later Delolme on the character of British liberty and on the institutional requirements for its attainment.”
That’s from Mark Levin’s new Unfreedom of the Press (which I recommend). I also recommend Wilfrid McClay’s Land of Hope which I haven’t read yet. which is reportedly a refutation of everything Howard Zinn wrote by a highly recommended historian.
Hillary is still touring the country on her perpetual “What Happened” First Woman Whine presentation. She simply cannot get over herself. She was destined to be the first woman president, and now she is demanding that we eliminate the Electoral College, because she is right and the Founders were wrong. She joins Maxine Waters on the most embarrassing Democrat list.
There is no such thing as a national popular vote. That is not the way our electoral system works, and ill-informed reporters simply prove that they are unfamiliar with the Constitution as well as the law.
As supposedly the most qualified candidate ever to run, Hillary exhibits an astonishing unfamiliarity with the United States Constitution and the reason why the founders invented an Electoral College. Michael Ramirez explained visually what would happen if we elected presidents by some kind of national popular vote.
In that case only four states would determine who the president should be and the rest of the country could go hang. The other states simply would not count. The electoral college assures that the votes of even the smallest or least populated states matter. And if we are to have a country where everybody matters, it’s important. The number of states and their population has changed a lot since the founders were struggling to do right by succeeding generations, but we should be eternally grateful for their wisdom.
The idea of Hillary’s qualifications for being president were based entirely on her job titles: First Lady, Senator, Defeated Candidate, Secretary of State. I’m not convinced that being married to the President is a qualification. She was elected to a safe Democratic seat when Daniel Patrick Moynihan retired. Her accomplishments as a Senator were carefully enumerated by the Huffington Post. She dropped out to run for the presidency, lost, and Obama appointed her as Secretary of State. The accomplishments in that office amounted to a lot of travel, and a “reset button” for the Russians as a joke, but she could not even get the Russian language correctly translated.
Benghazi was a disaster, her ambassador begged for help, for more security, warned that the situation was getting out of hand, and died along with his aide, and two CIA contractors who were trying to save the embassy staff. It was not the fault of someone who made a video that no one ever saw.
Her “carelessness” with classified documents convinced many voters that she was unqualified for office. Anyone who paid attention to the news knew that Moammar Ghaddafi was a bad guy, but he had given up any effort to get nuclear weapons when he saw what happened to Saddam. But he kept a lid on a very troublesome country. Hillary decided that he should be eliminated, and set loose all sorts of terror. Today the Islamic State controls Libya, and much of the population had to flee for their lives.
Somehow, she never seemed to have done her homework, nor to have studied up to have some expertise on a subject, any subject. But that was just an impression.
Somebody remarked today that the ultimate payback will be when Nikki Haley is inaugurated as the first woman president.
Hillary’s “victory” in the popular vote took place entirely in California, because the state is so populous, and so far left. Had California seceded, as some Californians were insisting until the rest of us suggested that they could rejoin Mexico, Hillary would not have had a popular vote win. And this is why the Constitution makes it clear that the popular vote does not matter, because all of our states must have a voice.
If Democrats would take a little time out from their fulminating and just read the Constitution—they might appreciate what a wondrous document it is, and how fortunate we are that the founders wrote it. We are the envy of the world, and yet other countries can seldom be enticed into giving the power to the people, rather than to the reigning government.
Our battles to retain that power— “this government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth”— are a constant interest and inspiration to the world. Or why did you think whatever we do here makes front page news in the newspapers and broadcasts of the rest of the world? And why our enemies like ISIS and Iran want so badly to destroy us? Our freedom is, of course, messy, and they sneer at the mess without understanding that’s the nature of freedom.
Sorry, Democrats—Donald Trump is the President-Elect. The Electoral College has voted, and your death threats, protests and total unfamiliarity with the Constitution have gone for naught. It got a little odd here and there, one woman in Wisconsin screamed at electors “You don’t Deserve to Be in America”, and “This is My America” as the Police dragged her out.
Here in Washington State, although Hillary Clinton won the state, 4 faithless electors voted 3 for Colin Powell and one for Faith Spotted Eagle. (?) The electoral College ended up 304 for Donald Trump and 227 for Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump actually gained votes in Jill Stein’s recount. Hillary got the defectors. (numbers corrected)
Michael Barone, a long-time close observer of the political campaign business, said that this year the rules seemed to change. As technology is changing our lives in unexpected ways, it is also changing the political scene.
American Elephants 