I know I shouldn't, but I read the twitter responses to AOC's tweets about the Electoral College. Is there anything more depressing than "discussing" the EC with Republicans? A solid 80% of them have no concept of how math works to begin with, a further 19% grasp the math but have no idea of the actual historical rationales for the EC, and the remaining 1% who grasp both the math and the history have no actual defense for continuing to use it. And yet there is so much fucking smug bullshit about it.
Trust me: just about everyone I know up here thinks it’s utterly laughable that your country as this. It’s bad enough your government still makes you use the penny as currency.... There’s simply no fucking defence for it, other than “It allows us win, when we actually don’t.”
I like the fact that the Electoral College actually gives the individual states the power to elect the President. Instead of Florida, Texas, California, and New York having the choice. I'm from a small state. Trump (who I'm no fan of) did win the popular vote in every state that he received electoral votes in. Take away the electoral college and 6-10 states will decide for the other 40. Which is total Bullshit. America is a republic and the Constitution is Law. I don't care who wins but living in Mississippi I'd like to think that the states nowhere near me cant run over my states electoral votes. Even though we dont have many.
Yeah, I can see the argument for and against the electoral college. On one hand Trump beat Hillary in the number of counties won across the country 2626-487. On the other hand, there is the argument that a voter in Wyoming has something like 3.5x the power of a voter in California. I do think that doing the electoral college by state does not make a whole lot of sense, except in the small states. I would say that it should be done based on congressional district (1 vote for each), but that's an idea that would be terrible in practice.
That’s the thing about not having the electoral college. Individual states wouldn’t decide anything because every vote would count the same. It’s a conservative talking point to purposely conflate and confuse how the electoral college works by still acting like certain states would decide election outcomes. Yes there are population concentrations is larger cities. But every vote would be gettable. Conservatives in California can vote without feeling like their vote won’t count. Just like a liberal in Nebraska can cast their vote and know that it also means something.
Counties are almost completely arbitrary divisions. For example Los Angeles County, California contains 10 million people, 4,751 mi² of land, and 18 Congressional districts, whereas Loving County, Texas contains 134 people, 677 mi² of land, and a fraction of one Congressional district. It doesn't matter how many counties Trump won because states use completely different standards for creating counties. California for example has 58 counties whereas Texas has 254.
Someone smarter than me please explain this tweet. More specifically, why someone would tweet it, completely unsolicited.
This quote represents such a complete misunderstanding of how the US government works on so many levels I barely know where to begin. The short answer is no, there would not be a constitution rewrite after a democrat just won the presidency through the electoral college, much less during a lame duck period. The purpose of the electoral college is to ensure a candidate wins through votes across the whole country. The idea is pretty simple. Say a candidate is hugely popular in a few heavily populated states where he/she absolutely kills it. Wins something like 90% of the vote. This candidate performs relatively poorly in most of the rest of the country, but is losing by more like 65/35. Not doing well, but isn't getting crushed like their opposition did. He/She won because you have a very homogeneous voting bloc in densely populated areas even though he/she is considered a bad candidate throughout most of the country. That's the idea anyway. The candidate wins by running a campaign for what is actually a small area of the nation and then just scoops up the base elsewhere without even bothering to play to the middle. To act like someone is outright wrong, or conflating things by being for the EC is really pushing it. All things being equal I would rather go to straight popular vote for the presidency. That said it's been the same goddamn rules for 200+ years, and this is another example of democrats crying about how they lose elections 'unfairly' instead of taking accountability for the failures within their own party.
An example of why Presidents don't just tweet classified information willy nilly: https://twitter.com/cgbassa/status/1167578706379988992
That’s some scary shit. There’s a whole community of amateur satellite trackers out there so the info he tweeted could have been accomplished by anyone with a little knowledge of where to look and a calculator. I think it’s reasonable to assume that national governments could get a lot more info out of that picture. Or at the very least, a lot more accurate info.
I'm curious... if it is indeed secret info, yeah, sure, maybe he does have authority to release it... but if it hasn't been declassified, then isn't Twitter legally obligated to not host it? I'll be interested to see how this plays out, just from a "safe harbor" perspective that most carriers (like Twitter) fall under.
Legally the President is the root classifying authority, so he can declassify anything he wants to at any time. There is some legal argument as to whether his sharing classified information in a reckless and casual manner (something that we really didn't think would ever come up) constitutes declassifying the information, or merely authorizing the audience to hear the classified information. In either case, given that he posted it directly to Twitter, that would seem an ironclad defense for Twitter to be hosting it.
https://twitter.com/wxdam/status/1169308075662151680 This might be the pettiest crime I've ever seen a politician commit. He fucking doodled on an (old) hurricane forecast in order to avoid admitting he was wrong in an earlier tweet. I take back everything I've said in the past about how he should be impeached for his many serious crimes and failings; I think he should be impeached for this crime and this crime alone, just for the pure irony of such a petty man being taken down by such a petty violation.