Our Electoral College System Will Save Us from Trump
Sherwin Markman • August 18, 2020
There may be many things wrong with our Electoral College system, but at this moment in our history, when Donald Trump is threatening not to accept the results of the presidential election, our system is poised to save our democracy from his totalitarian posturing.
The beauty of our federalism is that voting for president takes place, not in any national forum, but in state-by-state elections. Each state is tasked by the Constitution with choosing its electors, who will vote for president as directed by the popular votes of each separate state. As recently decided by the Supreme Court, those electors must vote in accordance with their separate popular votes, and nobody can make them do otherwise. And so it is that no Trump tweet or attempted order can interfere with those separate 50 state outcomes.
This is how it will work if and when Trump loses the vote in November: On November 3, each state will separately vote for president by choosing its electors. Without question, if he is losing the election, Trump will deride and endlessly threaten. But also without question, his fulminating will not work. The essence of our system is that neither the president nor indeed the executive branch has any constitutional or practical power to affect our presidential election, and it is almost impossible to imagine any successful attempt by Trump to interfere in those 50 separate elections. There is not a whiff of evidence that any of the 50 state legislatures which have those election powers has any inclination to interfere with the popular votes of their respective populations. Moreover, the fact that one can imagine unconstitutional scenarios is not evidence that anything like that has any chance of occurring.
Thus, on December 14, the electors separately chosen in each of the 50 states will meet separately in those 50 states and cast their votes for president, again as separately directed by their state’s popular votes. Those votes will be reported to the Senate before the end of the year. There is no chance that our out-of-control president could successfully interfere with that.
On January 7, 2021, in a joint session of the newly elected Congress (and not the current Congress), the electoral votes will be counted and Trump’s defeat will be certified. There is no way that Trump will have the power to stand in the way of that outcome; there will be no American institution of authority who will follow him down that path. In my view, he will never even dare to try.
So it will be that on January 20, 2021, a new president will be sworn into office, and our democracy will be preserved.
Sherwin Markman, a graduate of the Yale Law School, lives in Rock Hall, Maryland. He served as an assistant to President Lyndon Johnson, after which was a trial lawyer in Washington, D.C. He has published several books, including one dealing with the Electoral College. He has also taught and lectured about the American political system.
Common Sense for the Eastern Shore
More than 30,000 of our neighbors in Maryland’s first congressional district will lose their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid because of provisions in the GOP’s heartless tax cut and spending bill passed last week.
Right now, Congress is working on a fast-track bill that would make historic cuts to basic needs programs in order to finance another round of tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations.
The House Agriculture Committee recently voted, along party lines, to advance legislation that would cut as much as $300 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP is the nation’s most important anti-hunger program, helping more than 41 million people in the U.S. pay for food. With potential cuts this large, it helps to know who benefits from this program in Maryland, and who would lose this assistance. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities compiled data on SNAP beneficiaries by congressional district, cited below, and produced the Maryland state datasheet , shown below. In Maryland, in 2023-24, 1 in 9 people lived in a household with SNAP benefits. In Maryland’s First Congressional District, in 2023-24: Almost 34,000 households used SNAP benefits. Of those households, 43% had at least one senior (over age 60). 29% of SNAP recipients were people of color. 15% were Black, non-Hispanic, higher than 11.8% nationally. 6% were Hispanic (19.4% nationally). There were 24,700 total veterans (ages 18-64). Of those, 2,200 lived in households that used SNAP benefits (9%). The CBPP SNAP datasheet for Maryland is below. See data from all the states and download factsheets here.
Apparently, some people think that the GOP’s “big beautiful bill” is a foregone conclusion, and that the struggle over the budget and Trump’s agenda is over and done. Not true. On Sunday night, the bill — given the alternate name “Big Bad Bullsh*t Bill” by the Democratic Women’s Caucus — was voted out of the House Budget Committee. The GOP plan is to pass this legislation in the House before Memorial Day. But that’s not the end of it. As Jessica Craven explained in her Chop Wood Carry Water column: “Remember, we have at least six weeks left in this process. The bill has to: Pass the House, Then head to the Senate where it will likely be rewritten almost completely, Then be passed there, Then be brought back to the House for reconciliation, And then, if the House changes that version at all, Go back to the Senate for another vote.” She adds, “Every step of that process is a place for us to kill it.” The bill is over a thousand pages long, and the American people will not get a chance to read it until it has passed the House. But, thanks to 5Calls , we know it includes:
Let's talk about our Eastern Shore Delegation, the representatives who are supposed to fight for our nine Shore counties in Annapolis, and what they actually got up to this session.
For the first time in recent memory, Virginia Democrats have candidates running in all 100 House of Delegates districts — a milestone party leaders and grassroots organizers say reflects rising momentum as President Donald Trump’s second term continues to galvanize opposition.
