Dear Republican Members of The Electoral College:
Please do something for your country that the leaders of your party, who collectively were more cravenly concerned about clinging to their titles and future millions as lobbyists and consultants, could not and would not do; be patriots.
Put the well-being of your country above all else and do not make Donald J. Trump President of the United States.
You have the power, authority, and I would say the duty to do this.
Until recently I was a big advocate of eliminating the Electoral College. Like millions of my fellow Americans I could not see the value of this 18th Century appendage to our Constitution.
Like so many of us I’d forgotten so much about how our Constitution came to be, and I was an American History major in college. In fairness I went to a tiny college in central Georgia, which believed America didn’t really begin until you were well south of the Mason Dixon Line.
From what little I recalled of those lessons, I believed that a system that relied on electors to choose the President and Vice President came into being primarily to satisfy the concerns of Southern States. With smaller voting populations than the larger Northern states, which had a more diffuse franchise, Southern members of the Constitutional Convention feared their voices would not be heard on important issues of the day, primarily slavery.
As it turns out, there was a great deal more thought on the part of the framers of the Constitution than meets our foggy recollection.
As Douglas Anthony Cooper recently wrote for the Huffington Post,
Alexander Hamilton was explicit: this mechanism was designed to ensure that “the office of president will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” In short, it was designed to prevent just this situation: the rise of an unqualified demagogue like Donald Trump.
James Madison in Federalist No. 10, among the most highly regarded of all American political writings, argued against, “…an interested and overbearing majority” and the “mischiefs of faction” in an electoral system. He defined a faction as,
“a number of citizens whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
Your ability to vote for the well-being of the nation regardless of party allegiances is both Constitutionally provided for, as well as protected.
Despite our never having used these provisions before and our collective amnesia of the creation of what is now called the Electoral College, the situation we now find ourselves in is precisely one the framers foresaw.
The ability of electors to vote in the best interest of the rights and freedoms of all citizens, as well as to protect the nation from the incompetence “of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications,” is yet another example of the checks and balances established by the framers to protect and preserve the republic.
I realize some of you may ask, “but what of the will of the people?”
At this writing the results clearly show the will of a great majority of the American people is to not make this man President. Between 700,000 and 800,000 more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than Donald Trump and that total is expected to reach one million. Add to that the final vote tallies of the two 3rd party candidates and you will see nearly 7,000,000 more votes were cast against this man than for him.
As for party loyalty, your abstention from or voting against Donald Trump will not change the fact that Republicans will still have full control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
It is only the assumption that the structure of the Electoral College, which still weights votes in smaller states more heavily than those of greater population density like California, Oregon, Washington, and New York, will make the least qualified individual in the history of the republic President.
Donald Trump is not and will not be President Elect of these United States until your votes are cast, tallied, and recorded.
I beseech you; cast your votes not as party members but patriots.
And, as a reader of this column I beseech those of you in red states who believe the United States should not be run by any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications, please contact the electors in your state and demand they place country before party.
You can find a complete list of your states electors here, List of United States presidential electors, 2016.
