Tom Moran Warns of the Long Term Danger of a Presidential ‘Climate Emergency’ Declaration

In 2020, as America grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic, I worried that President Donald Trump’s invoking of the Defense Production Act (DPA) to cope with the the Health Emergency would be a dangerous precedent that could clear the way for a Democratic President to declare a “Climate Emergency,” giving the federal government totalitarian executive powers. 

Alas, President Joe Biden is getting pressure from Congressional Democrats to do just that — declare a Climate Emergency in order to impose draconian Leftist climate change policies that he can’t get through Congress.  

Fortunately, Biden is resisting the idea, so far. And pushback is developing, including from some on the Left. Tom Moran, editorial page editor for the New Jersey Star-Ledger, strongly condemned the idea in no uncertain terms. In No, don’t declare a climate emergency, Moran warned about a power that “could quickly spin out of control.” “The threat of authoritarian rule by unchecked presidents,” Moran presciently observes, “is easy to see.”

To be sure, Moran includes the obligatory Leftist Chicken Little panic mongering hyperbole about climate change. “the climate crisis is spinning out of control as Congress fiddles.” “The climate crisis is causing chaos and suffering across the globe and promises to get much worse.” And the like.

But, paradoxically, the fact that Moran is a card-carrying climate catastrophist gives his warning all the more credibility. He rightly sees the threat of American authoritarianism to be a much greater danger than anything climate change can throw at us. 

And as I viewed Trump’s DPA declaration as the crucial precedent, Moran reaches back further:

Three years ago, President Trump declared a state of emergency so he could use money from the defense budget to start building his wall along the Mexican border.

The reason was simple: He lost the political fight in Congress, so he used these powers as an end-run around our democracy. Another norm broken.

It was the first time the emergency laws were abused like that, historians say. The laws were intended to help a president cope with true emergencies that could not wait for Congress, like hurricanes, pandemics and invasions. Using it to defy the will of Congress was new.

Moran consults Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice:

“What Trump did with the emergency powers is exactly what Congress said he couldn’t do,” said Goitein.

Now, progressives want to break the same norm, and are pressing President Biden to declare an emergency over climate change, having lost the fight in Congress. It’s another end-run.

“I understand the temptation,” Moran says,

But Goitein, at Brennan, warns that this could quickly spin out of control, that if Biden declares an emergency over climate, a Republican president could declare an emergency over, say, abortion, and impose a nationwide ban.

“When Trump did this, you could argue it was an aberration, because he was an anomaly in every way imaginable,” she says. “But if Biden now uses it this way, to get around Congress, that would really shatter the norm.”

Philosophically, this is the kind of good political thinking that we rarely see any more. On this issue, Moran is channeling the same reverence for the importance of principles as the Founding Fathers.

The Founder' reverence for principle is demonstrated in these excerpts from James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments". In his dramatic defense of religious liberty in opposition to Virginia's proposed tax to support the Christian Church, he said:

[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. (Emphasis added.)

The principle James Madison was referring to was the one underlying a Virginia law, known as “A Bill establishing a provision for Teachers of the Christian Religion”. He understood that once any governmental “department of power overleap[s] the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people, . . . there is no way to contain that power, because . . . the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his Religion according to the dictates of conscience . . . is held by the same tenure with all our other rights.” (Emphasis added.) Madison elaborates on this crucial point:

Either we must say, that they may control the freedom of the press, may abolish the Trial by Jury, may swallow up the Executive and Judiciary Powers of the State; nay that they may despoil us of our very right of suffrage, and erect themselves into an independent and hereditary Assembly or, we must say, that they have no authority to enact into the law the Bill under consideration.

Notice the broad sweep of the rights that Madison saw threatened by a single religion-funding bill in a single state. The same can be said about a single climate change emergency declaration, whether at the federal or state level. The principle behind a climate emergency declaration threatens all of our rights.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Tom Moran is no equal to the Founding Fathers. That said, keep Madison's wisdom in mind as you read this editorial, and you can appreciate the power of Moran’s warning.

Moran offers more examples of the consequences of the abuses of presidential emergency declarations, including George W. Bush’s broad violation of Muslim-Americans’ rights under a national security declaration following 9/11: 

But if this norm is broken, presidents of both parties could claim emergency powers that are more far-reaching, Goitein warns, especially when a president declares a national security emergency.

“The real scary ones give a president the power to shut down communications facilities in an emergency, and to freeze assets and block financial transactions,” she says.

Which, if Goitein is correct, was exactly what was done to Muslim Americans. 

If I read Goitein’s premise correctly, she is basically saying there are effectively no limits on what the executive branch can impose under emergency declarations. What can political authorities not do as justified under the alleged need to “fight climate change?” Sounds like totalitarian powers to me—or at least as close to totalitarian as a president can get away with. And if the recent COVID pandemic is any indication, politicians can get away with quite a lot of usurpations of our liberties. 

Perhaps that’s why, as Moran points out, “Congress is considering reforms, like imposing tight time limits on emergency powers unless Congress votes to extend them.” 

That’s encouraging. “In the end,” Moran concludes, 

the emergency declaration seems like a political stunt, a way for Democrats like Booker to signal their concern and militancy, to answer the frustration in the party.

But it wouldn’t help much in the climate fight, and it would weaken our democracy. That’s a bad deal.

It sure is a bad deal—and, I will add, for our republic.

Kudos to Moran for clarifying the immense dangers inherent in any climate emergency declaration. I hope Biden will heed it.

Related:

‘Climate Emergency’: A Nonsensical, and Dangerous, Misuse of Words

As We Endure Through COVID-19, Dems Gear Up for ‘Climate Crisis’ Authoritarianism

Did Trump’s Defense Production Act Invocation Clear the Way for the Democrats’ ‘Climate Crisis’ Authoritarianism?

‘Climate Crisis’: The Dem’s Path to Totalitarian Socialism

Rand Paul, Title 2, and the Importance of Principles

The Real Danger is Not Too Much Heat, but Too Little Reliable Low-Cost Energy

This summer’s heat waves are triggering the predictable hysteria among the climate elites. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial, Europe's lead role fighting climate change falls victim to a massive heat wave, is following that script to a tee. The hysteria is complete with the always-reliable Chicken Little hand wringing about “saving the planet from the climate crisis.” 

But while this editorial, which also ran in the 7/23/22 NJ Star-Ledger, laments people prioritizing keeping cool and safe over “fighting climate change,” the real lesson to be drawn from these not-really-unprecedented heat waves is that it is not the weather that we should fear. The real danger is the prospect of running short of the reliable, low-cost energy we need to protect ourselves from these climate dangers due to the Left’s long-running War on Fossil Fuels coupled with their continuing efforts to stifle nuclear power. 

My mission is and has long been to save humanity from the crusading planet savers. That “European countries are now backing away from their commitments to meet carbon-neutral goals” may be bad news for climate catastrophists. But it’s actually good news for humans. 

Related Reading:

Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less by Alex Epstein

Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters by Steven E. Koonin

Fossil Fuels and Climate Change: Remember Life Before Them

A Humanist Approach To Environmental Issues—Alex Epstein @ Forbes

The Suicidal Demonization of Fossil Fuels

Climate Change Catastrophists Who Oppose Nuclear have Anti-Humanist Premises

The Real Reason They Hate Nuclear Is Because It Means We Don't Need Renewables--Michael Shellenberger

Japan's Earthquake Recovery: "Green Energy's" Failed Test

QUORA: ‘Why, even if the evidence is overwhelming, do many deny the risks our planet is running with climate change?’

 QUORA: ‘Why, even if the evidence is overwhelming, do many deny the risks our planet is running with climate change?’

My answer:

Why, even if the evidence is overwhelming, do many deny the monumentally greater benefits of fossil fuels as compared to the modest risks our planet is running with climate change?

Related Reading:

Fossil Fuels and Climate Change: Remember Life Before Them

A Humanist Approach To Environmental Issues—Alex Epstein @ Forbes

The Suicidal Demonization of Fossil Fuels

Reply Responses to QUORA: ‘Is Ayn Rand wrong about altruism?’ — 2

I received several comments to my QUORA answer to Is Ayn Rand wrong about altruism?

From Eddie Pilchard 

She applied pure philosophy to human beings, and her experience of human beings was… unusual. Moreover, she had a circle of followers who, through an almost religious belief in her put her needs before their own in extremis, including a woman who willingly let her husband have a relationship with her. Sounds almost… altruistic..?

The definition she gives for altruism is a textbook one; but in reality few people live their lives entirely without regard for their own needs. Most altruism is in the form of altruistic acts not an entirely altruistic life. You may do something supremely kind at your expense without it being to such an extent you could be said to entirely put others first.

And that's my major issue with Rand: she didn't know real humans. Her experiences were of unusual and extreme circumstances, not of the average. And so she describes scenarios and personalities that are based on academic and false assumptions. As for the visions she paints, rather than a utopian idea of how the world might be they all share one thing: that in reality to live in her future world - if applied to people as they really are - would be just awful. [sic]

My reply:

Actually, Ed, I have found Rand’s thinking on this subject very relevant to real life (though not always her particular application to her life). It is up to each individual to apply philosophic principles to her/his own life, and one does not have to agree with every aspect of Rand’s (or other Objectivists’) individual choices to find value in Objectivist principles. 

Rand sharply distinguished between altruism and rational benevolence/generosity. This has been very helpful in how judging and shaping relationships with others fits into my hierarchy of values.

It is true that “in reality few people live their lives entirely without regard for their own needs.” Altruism has its greatest, and most destructive, application in politics. Note that few people in their personal relationships would demand the sacrifice of others’ wealth or interests for their own needs or interests. But, when turning to politics, where the reality is more abstract, these same people often have no problem expecting the state to forcibly redistribute others’ wealth—hence, the spreading entitlement mentality and our runaway welfare state. Note the politicians’ incessant calls for sacrifice. Altruism, even when only part of an “average”, is a malignancy.

And yes, altruism does get and has been applied in its extreme. The utopian visions of communism and fascism are based on the complete subordination of the individual to “others”, with the state as the embodiment of the others, in the cause of some collectivist good, with real life devastating results. These atrocities cannot and have not been justified or implemented except by reference to the strict textbook definition of altruism, coupled with the explicit rejection of the individual’s rationally self-interested right to his own life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

I have found Rand’s observations on altruism, and Objectivism more broadly, to be well-grounded in reality and a good guide to practical living.

Related Reading:

Reply Responses to QUORA *: ‘Is Ayn Rand wrong about altruism?’

Is Science Catching Up to the Objectivist Ethics?

"Give Back" is a Sinister Ploy to Guilt Achievers Into Giving Up What They Have Earned

Is It Now ‘Respectable’ to be a Moocher?

The Worship of Need: The Path to Communism

Our Pick-Pocket Nation

Bezos Should Focus On Running His Company

The Overturning of Roe v. Wade and the Left’s Double Standard on Privacy Rights

 The Overturning of Roe v. Wade and the Left’s Double Standard on Privacy Rights

Well, they did it. On June 24th, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned 1973's Roe v. Wade. After two terrific decisions upholding inalienable individual rights regarding self-defense and educational freedom, the SCOTUS took a sledgehammer to inalienable individual rights regarding first trimester abortion. I have two observations:

• While conservatives are generally better than liberals for individual rights, conservatives misinterpret the Constitution, the Founding principles of this country, and the Declaration of Independence. They don’t understand rights, where rights come from, or the relationship of rights to the Constitution. This is why I long ago abandoned identifying with the conservative movement.

• The liberals double standard is blazingly clear. Their long standing obsession with democracy should have them cheering this decision. To them, the vote is everything. Biden himself recently stated, “The fundamental right to vote is the right from which all other rights flow.” This means no right is inalienable, and all rights are subject to the vote. Well, in the majority opinion, Alito stated “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.” Well, returning the fate of abortion rights to elected representatives is exactly what rights flow from the right to vote looks like. The liberal vote-worshippers got exactly what they wished for. Why are they complaining? 

I explain my observations in detail in my post In SCOTUS’ Draft Opinion Overturning Roe Abortion Ruling: Double Standards of Left and Right Exposed. The actual decision, authored by Sam Alito, s substantially reiterates the main arguments of the draft.

I have one more observation regarding the Left’s double standards. In his decision, Alito wrote that the Roe decision "was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text. It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned."

My emphasis. The Left cheered this decision. Yet, their actual support for privacy rights is very selective. Regarding the all-important right of freedom of speech, the Left’s vaunted support for privacy goes up in smoke as they push for mandatory public disclosure of donor lists of political advocacy groups. 

Their big bogeyman is so-called “dark money,” which is another term for anonymous speech. Anonymous speech is a direct derivative of the right to privacy, which sits at the very heart of the Roe v. Wade decision. 

This is no minor matter. The right to free speech is the primary non-violent means of settling disputes and keeping political leaders accountable and, most importantly, giving individuals the means of connecting their thoughts to reality. Once again, the Left is hoisted by its own petard.

Related Reading:

Why Free Speech and Spending on Speech are Inextricably Linked

N.J. AG Confirms: State’s Disclosure Law is about Stifling Political Accountability

The Anti-Free Speech Fallacy of ‘Dark Money’

‘Dark Money’ is Free Speech. Protect It

Making Private Donations Anonymously is a Right

NJ’s ‘Dark Money’ Bill is an Assault on Free Speech

Juneteenth: What The Seattle Times Gets Right—and Terribly Wrong

In a Juneteenth editorial, Celebrate Juneteenth as America’s spiritual rebirth, the Seattle Times offered up its take on the newest official national holiday. It wrote;

“Juneteenth National Independence Day” describes a holiday for a nation ready to start living by its founding principles of equality and its promise of a more perfect union. 

This is true. The American Revolution, which was fought on the premise that all men are created equal, could never be complete until all men, and of course women, were all truly free and equal before the law. But the Times immediately undercut that observation:

If slavery is America’s original sin, then Juneteenth is a celebration of its baptism.

Original Sin is the premise of perpetual unearned guilt for sins committed by others before birth.  It holds that the sinner can only be cleansed through some act of Redemption, however that is defined. In Christianity, it means all people are irredeemably corrupted by Adam’s Fall, with the only salvation being eternal subservience to God’s saving grace. In its American incarnation, the nation—and all people therein—is irredeemably corrupted by slavery, with the only salvation being eternal subservience to . . . what?

To today’s new Original Sin revisionists, the object of salvation takes the form of the state rather than God, in the form of imposing whatever reactionary coercive scheme it deems necessary for redemption. When will America finally pay enough penance? Never. Not after 157 years; not after a Civil War; not after the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments; not after the 1964 Civil Rights Act; not after the gargantuan welfare state; not after Wokism; not after the tremendous cultural progress on racial attitudes of the past 60 years. Never. Because America, and Americans, will always be corrupted by the slavery in its early decades. That is the nature of Original Sin. Christianity teaches that in Original Sin

. . . all mankind is joined to Adam in both the guilt and the corruption of his first sin. All men and women are joined to Adam both by natural generation and by his covenantal headship. As a people who from our birth are corrupted by sin, we share in Adam’s guilt before God, a guilt imputed to us under the covenant of works. Moreover, men and women are so corrupted morally and spiritually by our natural union with Adam that we are totally depraved.

Substitute Americans for mankind, slavery for sin, and society (or the state) for God, and you get the purpose of anyone who preaches that slavery is an American Original Sin. America is irredeemably depraved. Making clear the irredeemable nature of that depravity, Christianity goes on:

All our human faculties are corrupted by sin so that we have an inborn tendency to commit sin. Moreover, our total depravity renders us spiritual[ly unable [to] love God or believe his gospel and be saved until we are first regenerated by his sovereign grace. Original Sin provides us with a biblical understanding of ourselves and casts sinners in utter reliance on God’s saving grace in the gospel, with no confidence in the flesh and with all the glory for our salvation belonging to the Lord. 

This means a life of humbly seeking God’s grace in the words of whomever presumes to know that gospel, but ultimate redemption must wait until after death. Likewise, every achievement of every American since the Founding, big and small, is tainted. Ultimate redemption must wait until every last vestige of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has been expunged from Americans’ psyches—i.e., until after death, the death of America. In the meanwhile, we must be in utter reliance on the state’s sovereign and saving grace. Doesn’t sound like America to me.

Of course, the canceling (i.e. spiritual, or philosophical, death) of America through perpetual guilt is exactly the point for the Original Sin revisionists. What the Seattle Times gets terribly wrong is that identifying slavery as America’s Original Sin is to repudiate the very principles that the Times calls on us to live up to. The irony—or intent—of tying slavery to America’s philosophic origin is precisely to repudiate the Founding principles.

Ask yourself why. I have. 

America’s Founding principles contradict the basic premise of slavery. America’s Founding principles signed the death knell of slavery. Juneteenth simply completed the mission of those principles. The Seattle Times calls Juneteenth’s celebration of the liberating of America’s last slaves a spiritual rebirth. But how can you have a spiritual rebirth by first killing the original spirit? Original Sin essentially condemns those principles to eternal damnation. How does one celebrate Juneteenth by damning the principles that made the holiday possible in the first place? 

Professor Jason D. Hill, author of We Have Overcome, aptly calls the abolition of slavery America’s Second Founding. America was born of Original Virtue—the radical, revolutionary principles that signed the death warrant for slavery everywhere on Earth—the moral equality of every individual regardless of skin color, creed, cultural background, gender, or anything else. Everybody has the inalienable right to self-governance based on rights to life, liberty, and property. That is America’s Original Virtue. Why would anyone want to cancel that virtue? Answer that, and you will see the motive behind anyone who has ever preached slavery as America’s Original Sin. 

Until we reject the idea of Original Sin, we could never fully honor the abolition of slavery from America’s shores, because we would be repudiating the cause. By the time of America’s Founding, slavery had been tolerated everywhere for thousands of years. This nation’s particular brand of African slavery was brought to these shores by the British long before America’s Declaration of Independence.* America did not originate slavery. America inherited slavery. Properly understood, slavery was a birth defect—a sin that contradicted its principles, but not any kind of original sin. You can have slavery as America’s Original Sin. Or you can have America’s innocent, virtuous spiritual essence. But you can’t have both. Without grasping that realization, you can never get America right. 

* [The Founding Fathers recognized this. Listed among the grievances in Thomas Jefferson's original rough draught of the Declaration of Independence was this accusation:

he [His Majesty] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

[This passage was removed from the final document by committee. But it shows that the Founders understood slavery to be contrary to what they were fighting for, even as they made political compromises to assuage the slaveholders among them (which included Jefferson himself.]

Related Reading:

If Not for the Fourth of July, We’d Have No Juneteenth.

The Collectivist Left Appropriates an Inhumane Christian Doctrine to Obliterate Americanism

July 4, 1776: Words that Will Never Be Erased

On This Constitution Day, Remember the Declaration of Independence

The 'New American Socialists' Dilemma: The Declaration is as much anti-Socialist as anti-Slavery

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Fundamental Principle of America

The Founders Were Flawed. The Nation Is Imperfect. The Constitution Is Still a 'Glorious Liberty Document.'

“As part of its ambitious “1619” inquiry into the legacy of slavery, The New York Times revives false 19th century revisionist history about the American founding.” -- Timothy Sandefur

QUORA: ‘Where do you stand on the question of deleting the electoral college as it can and has clearly obviated the vote of the majority twice in recent history?’

QUORA: ‘Where do you stand on the question of deleting the electoral college as it can and has clearly obviated the vote of the majority twice in recent history?’

I posted this answer:

The Electoral College did not and does not “obviate the vote of the majority.” True, the Electoral College count sometimes doesn’t align with the national popular vote count. But, so what?  There is nothing sacred about the national popular vote. The Electoral College breaks down the election into 51 separate popular vote contests—the 50 states and the District of Columbia. To understand why this is necessary, one must consider its purpose within the broader context. 

The Electoral College is part of the constitutional checks and balances designed by the Founders to prevent concentrations of government power. For example, the United States Constitution supersedes the state constitutions, allowing the federal government to act as a check on states’ power. Likewise, since the elected legislatures of the states have the responsibility under ARTICLE II, SECTION 1, CLAUSE 2 of choosing the electors "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct," the states can act as a check on federal power.

Also, the Electoral College acts as somewhat of a power balance between large and small states.

Likewise, the Electoral College acts as a check on populism, which can be quite tyrannical. Instead of one huge national majority acting as a single overbearing power, candidates must win enough smaller majorities among the individual states (and the District of Columbia), each of whom may have differing interests, to accumulate the necessary electoral vote majority. The point is to check populist power as a means of limiting concentrations of government power, by inserting the elected legislatures between the popular votes and the presidency. This is believed to be a way of tempering the more irrational democratic mob impulses that occasionally arise among the people. (The state legislatures can, of course, change the method of allocating its electors. And the people can, of course, change the legislature at election time in their respective states. To repeat, the Electoral College does not “obviate the vote of the majority.” It all, ultimately, goes back to the voters.)

America was never to be a nation of majority rule. It was to be a country of individual self-rule--that is, of individual rights. Individual rights, not the wishes of electoral majorities, is what government is intended to protect. Constitutional scholar Timothy Sandifur on James Madison’s thinking:

“In ‘the extended republic of the United States,’ a ‘great variety of interests, parties and sects’ would prevent ‘a coalition of the majority of the whole society’ from coming together in ways that might harm the minority or the individual.

“There was always a risk of oppression in any form of government, of course, because factions would seek to benefit themselves at the expense of their rivals. . . The . . . solution was a constitution of limited powers, with a system of checks and balances by which ‘the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.’

“Madison consistently recognized that the essential goal of the Constitution was not to expand democratic authority or give voice to the ‘will of the people’—an idea he regarded skeptically—but to establish a political system that would enable the majority to accomplish its legitimate goals while protecting minorities against oppression. [from The Genius of James Madison by Timothy Sandefur for The Objective Standard]”

This does not mean that populism doesn’t have its place: It gets its expression, for example, in the powerful U.S. House of Representatives. But the intricate structure of checks and balances embedded in our constitution checks populism just as it checks state power, presidential power, court power, and legislative power through its two branches. The purpose of this structure is to protect the primacy of individual liberty, not “majority rule” or “the will of the people.” The Electoral College is a part of that structure, helping to fulfil the goal of breaking up society “into so many parts, interests and classes of citizens.” 

That’s why the Electoral College of the United States of America exists. Eliminating it would cut the states out of the equation, concentrating more power into the national government, thus advancing America ever closer to the very tyranny the College was set up to help prevent. Keep in mind that freedom is not the right to vote. Freedom is the right to live your life regardless of other people’s votes.

Related Reading: 

QUORA: ‘Why does the Electoral College of the United States of America exist?’

Was the Electoral College a ‘Compromise to Protect the Institution of Slavery?’

Voting Rights are Not the ‘Most Fundamental Right’—or Even a Fundamental Right

Avoid ‘Majority Rule’—Keep the Electoral College in Fact and in Spirit

The Conscience of the Constitution—Timothy Sandefur

QUORA: What's to stop a state . . . from making a law that just says their parties electors are chosen by default?'

Does the Electoral College Allow 'a Minority of Americans to Control Us All?'

Avoid ‘Majority Rule’—Keep the Electoral College in Fact and in Spirit

Wouldn't going by Popular Vote be an even worse system than the Electoral College?

QUORA: Can't We Make the Electoral College More Democratic?

All of my posts on the Electoral College, including answers to QUORA inquiries.