Mr. President, I rise to speak briefly and for the first time in what I believe will be an extended debate on the matter before us, Senate Joint Resolution 28. I wish to address this subject in the context, as I see it, of the historical experience of the American Constitution and the American political system.
I suppose the first thing to say, Mr. President, is that there is no fact more singular about our Constitution than its durability. As a written constitution, it is the oldest in the world save only for the medieval Constitution of Iceland, which still persists in that small nation. No other large industrial, and certainly no continental, nation has anything like our experience of a sustained and stable government under a constitution basically unchanged from its original construction.
We, I think, do not understand how singular this history is; and if I may make a personal comment, I recall that one afternoon in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations, in the course of a long debate on a not altogether absorbing subject, I found myself looking at the two large scoreboards, as one might say, located in the front of the Assembly Hall, on which the member nations are listed and where their votes are recorded.
I found myself asking how many of the 143 — now 154 — nation member of the U.N. had existed in 1914 and had not had their governments changed by force since 1914. It was not a great exercise to determine that in that great universe of nations, exactly seven met both those criteria, that they both existed in 1914 and had not had their form of government changed since. READ THE REST
I always liked Daniel Moynihan; he was one of my favorite liberals.
But I’m unsure that I understand his argument on the Electoral College. I “think” he’s arguing that the electoral college can, as it were, construct a majority even when the popular vote is fractured. So it helps to avoid constitutional chaos when majorities do not exist. (If true, then his argument seems a bit more wordy than necessary.)
I think I agree, although Clinton never had popular majorities, yet did have electoral-college majorities (as did Lincoln). And, obviously, Bush.
Still, that wasn’t the original reason for the electoral college. Given extremely high travel costs back then, information moved with some difficulty. So it made sense for local voters to elect local elites to a deliberative assembly that would meet only to elect a president.
I’m unsure that framers would have created the institution if information moved even a fraction as rapidly back then as it does today. And the institution is not listed as one of the “advances in the science of politics” by Publius in The Federalist (which Moynihan invites us to read into the argument).
Still, I think the institution serves a useful purpose, even if its usefulness was unanticipated.
Hey Mark,
Please blog on the links if you think others are interested. My quibble, such as it was, was Moynahan’s implied inclusion of the electoral college among the advances “in the science of politics,” in Fed. # 9.
I’d of course be interested, but don’t waste your time just to satisfy me. I suspect that I can locate the passages pretty quickly in my “Federalist concordance.” (I know, sounds funny, and really anal. But someone developed one, and I own it.)
Jim, I found references in the Federalist papers where Madison compared the Electoral College to the Senate and spoke of it as a brake on the problems of democracy.
I’m in a rush but will blog quotations with links later.
So maybe Publius was the wrong source for Moynihan to use.