JAMELLE BOUIE
Oct. 3, 2023 (NYTimes.com)
Opinion Columnist
Last week, President Biden gave a wide-ranging interview to John Harwood of ProPublica that touched on his presidency, the Republican Party and the present state and future status of American democracy.
Early in the interview, Harwood asks Biden whether he thinks the threat to democracy is broader than the refusal of Donald Trump and his allies to accept election defeats:
As you think about the threat to democracy, do you think about it specifically as the refusal to accept election defeats and peaceful transfer of power? Or does it more broadly encompass some of the longstanding features of democracy — like the Electoral College, the nature of the Senate, the gerrymandering process — that sometimes thwarts the will of the majority?
In his answer, Biden more or less confirms that, yes, when he speaks of the threat to democracy, he specifically means the threat coming from the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. For Biden, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are the “underpinnings of democracy.” The issue, for him, is that MAGA Republicans would try to overturn elections and “prevent the people’s voice” from being expressed, not to mention heard.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 8, 2023, Section SR, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Biden Must Look Beyond Trump.
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OccupySF.net co-editor comment:
The Electoral College was established in 1804 by the 12th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, but can it pass the “equal protection” test of the 14th Amendment which was established in 1866?
Consider the following:
Wyoming population 578,803 (2021) has 3 electoral votes = 192,934 per electoral vote;
California population 39,240,000 (2021) has 55 electoral votes = 713,455 per electoral vote.So it takes almost four California voters to equal one Wyoming voter.
The Equal Protection Clause was part of the 14th Amendment (passed in 1866), which, I would think, supersedes the 12th Amendment which established the Electoral College in 1804.
If we have equal protection under the U.S. Constitution, isn’t it reasonable to conclude that the Electoral College is unconstitutional on the basis that my vote in California is only worth about a quarter of the value of somebody who’s voting in Wyoming?
–Mike Zonta, Co-editor of OccupySF.net
