A Dangerous Fool Claims ‘Absolute Power’ Over the American Government — How Did This Happen?
According to the Washington Post, Business Insider, and a host of other news media, a buffoon behind a microphone in a televised news conference on Monday afternoon (April 13) declared that he has “total authority” over the government of the United States.
Since I don’t watch the TV news, particularly Fox, I don’t really understand how this fool believes he became the king of a country that does not have a monarch as the head of state and — unless I’ve really missed something big — never has. True, before the United States became an independent country, all its formative colonies supposedly owed allegiance to a monarch who was seated across the ocean.
That person was the King of England. He ruled an empire, including the places in which many Americans live today. But that relationship was terminated a long time ago when the former English colonies agreed to form a new nation based on something called the Constitution of the United States.
This document created the office of “President,” which the fool behind the microphone frequently claims to occupy, on the basis of an openly hacked and fraudulently mismanaged election. In any event, the Constitution clearly enumerates the powers given to the office of President, and just as clearly enumerates those given to other arms of the new federal government. It also explicitly assigns those powers not directly assigned to the president or other components of the federal to “the states and the people.”
The political theory on which this Constitution was based is known — as many Americans seem to understand, but the dangerous fool does not — as “the division of powers,” “the separation of powers,” “the balance of powers,” and “the enumeration of powers.”
All these terms mean that governmental power was intentionally divided among many sources explicitly to prevent the abuse of power — or tyranny — that the American colonies believed they experienced under the rule King George III.
So worried were the founders of the American state over the possibility of the tyrannical abuse of power that they immediately amended their own document to guarantee certain rights explicitly to the American people, so that no future head of government — regardless of what fools or madmen may be occupying that office — could so abuse his power to oppress the people.
No such tyrant could ever succeed in behaving like the monarchs or dictators of other states, so the theory went, because the other arms of government would step in and prevent the abuse.
And yet this account of what the fool said on Monday appears in Business Insider:
President Donald Trump claimed on Monday that “when somebody is the president of the United States” their “authority is total.”
Fact check: That is untrue, according to the US Constitution.
Trump made the statement during Monday’s daily coronavirus task-force briefing.
When a reporter asked him how he would compel governors to reopen their states’ economies during the outbreak, Trump responded: “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be.”
Earlier Monday, the governors of California, Washington, and Oregon said they were working together on a West Coast plan to safely reopen those states, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo unveiled a multistate coalition to coordinate on ways to reopen the region’s economy as the spread of the virus becomes more manageable.
Other news sources reported essentially the same thing, so there is no dispute over what the apparently deranged man behind the microphone and in front of the TV cameras said during a televised “report” to the nation.
So my question is, “How did this happen?”
How did our governing document, the Constitution, allow this farce to play out on the public stage of the most powerful — and therefore most dangerous — country in the world?
The answer, I fear, lies in some other provisions of that same formative document, the US Constitution.
Along with many valuable and enduring insights into the fragile nature of popular government, the foundational document established duties and powers that may have suited the conditions of its own time, 1787, when representatives met to draft and endorse the document, but which are outdated, threadbare, and wholly anachronistic today.
These flaws collectively answer the fundamental question posed above “how did this happen?”
It happened because, according to our understanding and application of election mechanisms created by the Constitution, ‘we the people’ of America actually elected this dangerous fool to the office of President of the United States.
His authority is not, of course, “total” in any respect, and the powers of his office were never intended to be absolute.
And of course — crucially — “the people” never elected Donald Trump President.
But America’s creaky and undemocratic electoral system did. And may very well do it again — unless we put fixes in place. Some of them immediate. Some of them barely imaginable, but still ultimately essential.
And, here’s the dagger point, the power of the so-called Electoral College to choose the country’s next president in a mere six months — barring who knows what viral, or merely human, disabling disaster — will once again twist the national election into a parody of democracy no matter who wins.
Because the Electoral College is immutably itself an archaic, anachronistic, and deeply undemocratic method for choosing the American President.
In 1789, when this system was first instituted, the office of President was not going to be overwhelmingly essential to running a reasonably effective federal government.
The President was not a king, a monarch, or an absolute ruler — not a ‘ruler’ of any sort. A ‘president’ is one who presides over the deliberations of many others responsible for managing the various functions of government.
His single most important power was serving as commander in chief of the nation’s military. Even then that authority was seriously conditioned by the necessity of seeking a Declaration of War from the United States Congress before committing the country to military action.
As students of the Constitution have repeatedly told us, the preponderance of power was granted to Congress, consisting of a large body of officials elected by the people and the states. And the Supreme Court was created to be a functionally independent branch of government, neither under the thumb of the other branches or beholding to partisan politics.
But the world of 1789 no longer resembles the world we live in 231 years later, in almost any respect. We are still ‘human beings,’ though bots and digital logic now make a considerable number of our choices for us. How should we get somewhere? Ask the app on our smart phone. What’s the right word, fact, number, name, spelling? Ask Google. Or the artificial voice that represents one of those ‘operating systems.’
Still, insofar as we remain at all human, and have eyes to see and brains to think, we know we need some fundamental changes in our system of electing our leaders. One of most obvious is that we need a system of national elections — nationally overseen — in which everybody’s votes actually count and everybody’s vote has equal weight.
That is not the case today. As many commentators have pointed out, once our votes have determined our state’s “electors” — the people who actually choose the President, instead of ‘we the people’ — our votes no longer count. That is why we currently have a minority-elected President (the fool behind the microphone) today. That is why we had W Bush, rather than Gore, in 2000, and suffered all the disastrously expensive (in blood and money) disasters that followed.
In a democratically functional election, every eligible voter has one vote, and the candidate who receives the most votes wins. That is exactly what we don’t have now for selecting the President of the United States.
If you voted Republican in 2016 in the state of Massachusetts, once the Democratic candidate won the state’s electors, you votes no longer went toward selecting your candidate for president. They no longer counted for anything!
If you voted Democratic in Texas, once the Republican vote won all of that state’s electors, you vote no longer went toward building a winning total for your candidate.
Why should our votes be erased, simple because in one’s state another candidate received more votes? This is a national election for an important office, not a local vote for dog officer.
It is hard for me to understand how American voters have so long missed or ignored this fundamental truth. This electoral vote system is — and has been for 231 years — structurally undermining the conception of “majority rule.”
In practical terms, the winner-take-all electoral-vote-count shenanigans also means that neither party’s candidate need pay attention to your or my vote in any state of the union other than a half-dozen so-called battle ground states!
Why should the ‘states’ — these accidental constructions of long-ago history — determine who gets elected president rather than the American people?
People are real, flesh and blood. States are abstractions.
As many commentators have sought to explain ever since the heavily manipulated election of 2016 concluded that the candidate with the fewer votes won — how is that acceptable? — and in this case the loser-candidate was also clearly a loser in terms of all the truly essential human qualities — moral decency, intelligence, knowledge of government and public issues, basic honesty, and a willingness to place public good over private gain — the arithmetic of the electoral vote system increasingly skews against the bedrock democratic and egalitarian principle of “one person, one vote.”
The number of electoral votes each state possesses is determined — for reasons that go back to the ‘great compromise’ needed to win the approval of all 13 original colonies — by the number of Representatives and Senators each state has in Congress.
The not-so-great compromise promised smaller ‘colonies’ that they would have as many senators as the bigger ones (two, of course) to protect their ‘interests’ against the domination of the larger ones.
(Again: ‘states’ are an artificial creation. People are real.)
Do we really need this baloney today? I’m sorry but I don’t think that the interests of Delaware or Rhodes Island — if such ‘state interests’ actually exist in today’s world where decisions in America and China, and all the places in between threaten the continued existence of humankind — should come before the interests of the people of the United States as a whole!
But on this enshrined precedent all the less populous states that came after — most of the plains and mountain states; Alaska, West Virginia, and those still modestly populated northern New England states — continued to have as much weight in the Senate as do California, Texas, Florida and New York.
This outmoded blast from the past skewers the electoral college math. Montana has two senators to represent its handful of people. California has only two senators to represent its tens of millions. That means every Montana voter has about 40 times as much clout in the electoral vote system as a California voter does.
And this is no small matter because all of these over-represented under-populated states have, because of historical and demographic factors, a tendency to vote for old, under-educated, anti-feminist, race-baiting white guys. Take a bow, Republicans, that’s who you’ve become.
That’s why Republicans who make laws to suppress the vote of minorities and poor people in their own state have, on occasion, candidly admitted, “If we don’t cheat, we can’t win.”
That’s why the so-called president opposes ‘vote by mail.’ Republicans can’t win that way.
A truly independent Supreme Court would throw out this system in a New York minute — and would have done so generations ago. I don’t know if America has ever had such a Supreme Court since the days of John Marshall. But ever since Republican justices voting on party lines gave an election loser, W Bush, a victory in the 2000 election, we know that the Supreme Court now always has partisan skin in the game.
We need a National Convention to change our election system — right now, do it on Zoom if need be — to a one-person, one-vote, candidate with the most votes wins system.
Failing that, we need a majority of “electors” to stand up and say this business is nonsense and promise to give their anachronistically empowered “votes” to the candidate who gets the most votes from real breathing people.
And even if they so commit, we need to have our votes counted correctly and securely.
We need a voting procedure — in all states, administered nationally by a fully empowered Federal Elections System — to encourage all eligible voters to vote by providing them with an easy method to do so!
If this means they are required to vote in person, then every city and town in the nation must make sure that enough voting places are provided — No more spirit-killing lines! Every time TV cameras show people in urban areas lined up from city hall to hell people watching from home say, “why should I put myself through that?” It also means that the voting rolls are accurate, and that no name has been struck off the list without informing the voter well before election time.
If we don’t do this, how can be sure that we won’t someday be facing a grave national emergency, with a dangerous fool insisting that he is totally in charge of everything?
Oh, right, we already do.
