Did someone put LSD in Mike Pence’s milkshake? Did he have a drink with a woman who was not his wife without the presence of the woman who is his wife? I doubt if we’ll ever know, but, whatever the cause, I’ll be eternally grateful, because Big Mike, speaking to a friendly (I hope) crowd at the Federalist Society said the following:
I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election. President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone.
So not only did the Indiana wild man explicitly contradict Donald Trump’s most shameless (probably) lie, he implicitly contradicted the Republican Party’s most shameless hypocrisy, to wit: The United States is a republic, not a democracy! The American presidency belongs to the American Electoral College, goddamnit! And NOT the American people! They’re just goddamn bystanders, goddamnit! With no goddamn say in the matter whatsoever!
It's true that the Republican can often win a majority of votes cast in the election of the 435 members of the House of Representatives, but they never win a majority of the votes cast in the election of senators, and seldom—not since 2004—win a majority/plurality of the votes cast for president. Which is why even anti-Trump Republicans insist that the whole point of the Constitution is to prevent, you know, majority rule—because that would lead to the dreaded “tyranny of the majority.”
Well, if the “tyranny of the majority” is bad, then the “tyranny of the minority” would be worse, right? Well, no! That’s what the Founders wanted!
At least, that was the line virtually all Republicans were pushing. That is to say, that’s the line they were pushing, until “Big Mouth Mike” came along and ruined it all, with his fancy “American people” talk. Get it through your head, Mike! If “the people” rule, we don’t!
Afterwords
I have talked, at length, of the Republican Party’s long-running conviction that they can never win an election based on domestic issues, because most Americans are, in the immortal words of the immortal Mitt Romney, “takers”—lazy slobs who will avoid earning an honest dollar with an honest day’s work if they can possibly avoid it. Supposedly, the Founders “wisely” understood this, and therefore jiggled the Constitution until it guaranteed that “mere numbers”, as noted racist William F. Buckley notoriously put it, would not guarantee victory. In particular, the supposed purpose of the design of the Electoral College, assigning at least 3 votes to each state, regardless of its population, is to guarantee that the winning presidential candidate would have a “wide appeal” across the country, rather than overwhelming dominance in a few states. In fact, of course, the weighting simply reflects the fact that, at the Constitutional Convention, representatives of the small states realized that the big states would pay almost any price to get them all in the new union. James Madison’s “Virginia Plan”, which called for proportionate representation in both the House and Senate, was jettisoned. The resulting imbalance in both the Senate and the Electoral College was a result of horse-trading, not principle.
Furthermore, today the imbalance in population between states has vastly increased. According to the 1790 Census, in 1790, Delaware, the smallest state, had a population of 59,000, while Virginia, the largest, had about 747,000, reduced, for representative purposes, to about 625,000, because of the infamous “3/5” rule, as applied to Virginia’s some 292,000 slaves, almost 40% of the whole, so that, for purposes of the new Constitution, Virginia’s population was barely 10 times the size of Delaware’s. Today, California’s population is about 70 times that of the smallest state, Wyoming.
UPDATE
Am I praising Pence for a quibble? In The Conscience of Mike Pence, anti-Trumper Charlie Sykes conscientiously collects all the naysayers who point out that Big Mike did little more than not join one of the most shameless conspiracies in American history, and thereafter tried to pass off January 6 as a mere unpleasantness, a two-inch speed bump on the great highway of life. I mean, no harm, really, so no foul! Right?
Charlie says it says a little bit more about Pence that he would repeat his take on Trump so sharply, but not a whole lot more, and there's no doubt that Mike wasn’t saying that he wanted to abolish the Electoral College. If questioned, Pence would surely revert to the standard Republican boilerplate that the EC was perhaps the happiest of all the Founders’ inspirations. But Mike’s words, even if though he didn’t intend the import I have given them, still have a happy ring. I mean, really, how much virtue can you expect a Republican to have?
1. Delaware had about 11,000 “free white males aged 16 and upward”, according to the Census, while Virginia had about 111,000, Pennsylvania, the next largest state, had about 434,000 overall, and, again, about 111,000 fwma16au. Therefore, Virginia was the largest state by federal representation thanks only to the 3/5 rule. (Pennsylvania recorded less than 4,000 slaves.)
