I bet the Klan is upset with proppsal to do away with this racist Electorial college.

The racial history of the Electoral College — and why efforts to change ...
[www.pbs.org]...
Jan 21, 2018 - Ten states and Washington, D.C., have already agreed to join the compact. ... Attempts to change the Electoral College system that were once seen ... to the party that wins the majority in the state, no matter how close the race.

Kluskers in a knot times up!

The Electoral College Was Born In Racism. Let's Drop Out | Cognoscenti
[www.wbur.org]...
Dec 30, 2016 - Madison proposed an early version of the Electoral College, which ... It's true that the will of the presidential majority has been trampled only a ...

Slavery, Democracy, and the Racialized Roots of the Electoral College ...
[www.aaihs.org]...

The Electoral College and Its Racist Roots | RealClearPolitics
[www.realclearpolitics.com]...
Nov 20, 2016 - The Electoral College and Its Racist Roots | RealClearPolitics. ... Our peculiar way of electing presidents is rooted, in part. in the founders' ..

Quote
riverhousebill
I bet the Klan is upset with proppsal to do away with this racist Electorial college.

The racial history of the Electoral College — and why efforts to change ...
[www.pbs.org]...

It seems a Reminder is in order here -

THE DEMOCRATS ARE THE PARTY OF THE KKK

Read this -

Yes, Democrats DID start the Ku Klux Klan (and it’s still the party of racism)

By Joe Jarvis - February 07, 2019

[www.thedailybell.com]

I don’t want people to think better of Republicans.

I want people to be as critical of Democrats as they are of Republicans.

Both parties are really terrible. But the Democrats too often get a pass because they are better at branding and marketing.

The last time a Republican Presidential candidate got more than 15% of the black vote was 1960.

And yet the Democrats had a former KKK member in the US Senate until he died in 2010. In fact, Robert Byrd wasn’t just in the KKK, he recruited 150 friends to start a chapter!

Robert Byrd used the N-word on live television in 2001. And then was re-elected as the Senator from West Virginia in 2006.

As you can see, racism in the Democratic Party runs deep.

And this shouldn’t surprise anyone who has any knowledge of history.

Yet Politifact confirms that the Democratic Party honored the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan when he spoke at the 1868 Democratic National Convention, shortly after the Klan was founded.

Which brings us back to the original question, did Democrats start the KKK?

Yes!

It was founded as a political organization to intimidate black and Republican voters in the south during reconstruction after the Civil War.

According to History.com:

[T]he KKK engaged in terrorist raids against African Americans and white Republicans at night, employing intimidation, destruction of property, assault, and murder to achieve its aims and influence upcoming elections.

There were two political parties… and the Ku Klux Klan aimed to influence elections AGAINST the Republican party.

Well, that certainly sounds like Democrats started the KKK, doesn’t it? And they started it for overtly political purposes.

The KKK was a political tool used by Democrats to help the Democratic Party win elections.

And that is a FACT.

Of course, another major strategy of covering up racist Democratic roots is saying that it isn’t the party today that it once was.

Some people even say the parties flipped at some point… so Democrats get credit for Lincoln (who was a Republican), and Republicans get credit for the KKK (which was founded by Democrats).

Well, when exactly did the parties suddenly and miraculously switch platforms?

Neither party added proposed anti-KKK positions to its platform at the 1924 conventions.

In 1963, the Democrat Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, stood blocking a doorway, refusing to allow a black girl to enter a white school that had just been desegregated by law.

And if the Democrats were still racist in 1963, that means Democrat hero Franklin D. Roosevelt was part of the old racist Democratic party. (Big surprise, that the guy who put Japanese Americans in concentration camps was racist).

Some people would say that the flip occurred with the election of President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. After all, George Wallace lost the primary against Johnson, which seems to be a rejection of Wallace’s racism.

Plus, Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Still, only 69% of Democrats in the Senate voted for the Civil Rights Act, while 82% of Republican Senators voted for it. In the House, it was even worse, with just 63% of Democrats voting in favor, and 80% of Republicans supporting the legislation.

However, Johnson went on to push “Great Society” legislation throughout the rest of his Presidency, aimed at reducing crime and poverty, and expanding the welfare state and social safety nets.

You might think this would be a great thing to promote equality for disenfranchised blacks.

But historian, sociologist, and economist Thomas Sowell (who is black by the way) has a different perspective (emphasis my own):

Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the Civil Rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.

Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress…

Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent.

The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later, after a legacy of liberals’ law-enforcement policies.

The articles which talk about 'the racist history of the Electoral College' are referring to the fact that the slaves were counted as 5/8 of a person.

The south/slaveowners wanted them counted as a whole person (it was for population to determine the number of electors.) The North Democrat Racists didn't want them counted because they were not voting citizens, and they knew it would tip the balance of power in Congress and the Electoral College to the southern states. It seems counterintuitive, but the 3/5 compromise was a good thing if the alternative was to count the slaves as 1 and give the south even more influence. Slaves not being counted at all was what the Racist Democrat North wanted but in the end they compromised on 3/5.

In other words - the Racist Democrats in the North did not want to count the slaves at all and did not want to give the slaves the right to vote.

So those articles stating 'the racist roots of the Electoral College' is actually referring to the RACIST NORTHERN DEMOCRATS who did not want the slaves to be counted and did not want the slaves to vote.

"Racist Roots" means the DEMOCRATS RACIST ROOTS.

*********

Democrats were pro-slavery and tried to block the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The fact that the Democrats had an agenda in creating the Electoral College does not negate the fact that it remains the most fair system of electing a President. Take slavery out of the question and what have you got? A system that balances the power of the population by state. This prevents only those states with large populations from carrying the day.

*********

The reason the College was created is very simple, the States were meant to elect the President as their international representative with Congress being the voice of the citizens.

Donald Trump; Four generations of a slave family, Smith's Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina, circa 1862. (Getty/Mandel Ngan/Wikemedia)
Born of slavery, the Electoral College could stand against racism in 2016 — and stop Donald Trump
Part of the Electoral College's original purpose was to protect slave-state power. Will it redeem its history now?
When reading Jennifer flat version of history, of Electoral College, be advised Keep Boots On!

Check this version out.

History often comes full circle. It can be darkly ironic as well. The Electoral College, an institution that helped to protect the white supremacist ignominy of black chattel slavery could now become the instrument used to stop Donald Trump, the avatar of contemporary white racism.

Politics and history are messy and complicated. Many people prefer simple stories about America’s past and present. In the flat version of history, the Electoral College was created in the 18th century by the Framers as a council of elders who would serve as a check on the passions of the public, because they understood how such feelings could all too easily sweep through a democracy like a forest fire if left unchecked.


In reality, the Electoral College was part of a larger compromise that tried to balance the economic interests of different regions as well as the competing desires of various elites. That compromise created a hybrid federal system of government that gave equal representation to each state (in the Senate) but also allowed for representation on the basis of population (the House of Representatives).

America was also a racialized “democracy” where several million black people would eventually be owned by whites as human property. The enslavement, exploitation, rape, and destruction of black bodies were the economic engine that drove the American economy. Thus, by both design and intent, the United States Constitution was a pro-slavery and pro-Southern document. The Electoral College was central to maintaining America’s white supremacist slavery regime.

Writing for PBS NewsHour, Kamala Kelkar explains:


[James] Madison knew that the North would outnumber the South, despite there being more than half a million slaves in the South who were their economic vitality, but could not vote. His proposition for the Electoral College included the “three-fifths compromise,” where black people could be counted as three-fifths of a person, instead of a whole. This clause garnered the state [of Virginia] 12 out of 91 electoral votes, more than a quarter of what a president needed to win.

“None of this is about slaves voting,” said [legal scholar Paul] Finkelman, who wrote a paper on the origins of the Electoral College for a symposium after Gore lost [in the 2000 election]. “The debates are in part about political power and also the fundamental immorality of counting slaves for the purpose of giving political power to the master class.”

Time Magazine’s Akhil Reed Amar further details how the Electoral College helped to protect chattel slavery:

If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.

Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.

The 1796 contest between Adams and Jefferson had featured an even sharper division between northern states and southern states. Thus, at the time the Twelfth Amendment tinkered with the Electoral College system rather than tossing it, the system’s pro-slavery bias was hardly a secret. Indeed, in the floor debate over the amendment in late 1803, Massachusetts Congressman Samuel Thatcher complained that “The representation of slaves adds thirteen members to this House in the present Congress, and eighteen Electors of President and Vice President at the next election.” But Thatcher’s complaint went unredressed. Once again, the North caved to the South by refusing to insist on direct national election.

This contradiction between slavery and freedom would require a civil war (which in many ways was a second founding) and the deaths of 750,000 Americans to partially resolve.

For various reasons, the relationship between chattel slavery and the Electoral College is not widely understood by the American public. The Electoral College can be seen as a vestigial organ on the American body politic that, like an appendix, can be ignored until something goes horribly wrong. In this case, that means when the popular vote is thwarted, as with the infamous Bush-Gore election in 2000 (and again this year). More generally, most white Americans have still not come to terms with the way slavery and white supremacy are central to the country’s history and not a mere inconvenience or asterisk on it.


The Electoral College could choose to deny Donald Trump the presidency on several grounds. Because of his refusal to sell off his assets and to stop doing business abroad, Trump is in clear violation of the Emoluments clause of the Constitution, which forbids the president from financially profiting from the power of his office.

Second, Donald Trump may have encouraged a foreign power, Russia, to interfere with the presidential election. As reported by the Washington Post last Friday, the CIA now believes that Russian intelligence agents or their proxies interfered with the American presidential election with the goal of electing Donald Trump and undermining Hillary Clinton. That alone should disqualify the president-elect from office. As explained by Alexander Hamilton in "Federalist No. 68," this is the very scenario from which the Electoral College was designed to protect the United States:


Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one quarter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?

One of the redeeming features of America’s political culture is an ability to learn from the past and to view democracy as a work in progress. This long arc of progress does bend, sometimes upwards and at other times downward. But in total the United States has shown a remarkable ability to expand its understanding of democracy and personal liberty — even though the election of Donald Trump represents a significant deterioration.

In these dark moments, hopes and dreams are powerful acts of personal resistance. To that end, we can hope that the Electoral College will stop Donald Trump when it convenes in the state capitals on Dec. 19. Under the Constitution, the electors are free to stand against the bigotry and racism of Trump. They are much more likely, of course, to defer to their historic origins as defenders of those heinous traditions



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/01/2019 04:57AM by riverhousebill.