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Menu There is no diplomatic solutionIsrael should declare three nos;
no to nuclear Iran, no to two-state solution, no to bi-national state
no to nuclear Iran, no to two-state solution, no to bi-national state
@ Bear Klein:
BK, not only is the USA a constitutional republic of its constituent states, but it is not a democracy in the fullest sense of that term, and never has been a democracy.
As a matter of fact, many constitutional scholars hold that the founding fathers of the 1780s distrusted democracy, which was regarded as as a legalized form of mob rule. Certainly, the events of the bloody and terrible French revolution confirmed that observation.
In any case, and irrespective of views popular today, the terms “democracy” and “democratic” appear nowhere in either the Declaration of Independence in 1776 or the Constitution of the United States which was crafted a few years after the War of Independence.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
@ ArnoldHarris:The USA is a republic of the states it is not a direct democracry it never was.
Every election for 240 years has been decided by the vote of the electors except for three which were decided in the House of Repesentatives when no candidate received a majority of the electors.
http://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Electoral-College/
So maybe Trump won the popular vote. Or maybe Clinton won the popular vote.
But none of the above counts for anything. Under the Constitution of the United States, only the state electors have the last word on who wins presidential elections in the USA. Your candidate wins the election in that state, then the electors for that state are pledged to support your candidate.
Anyone who has studied the specific history of the drafting, compromises, and ratification of the Constitution of the USA by the 13 founding states, as I have done, understands that without provision for a state-by-state electoral college, the Constitution almost certainly would not have been ratified back in the late 1780s.
None of the states with relatively small voting populations would have permitted Virgina and Massachusetts — the California and Texas of that era — to permanently control access to the US presidency. Which means that without an electoral college, the United States of America would never have been anything more unified than the Confederacy of the American civil war.
And that also is why none or all of the population-heavy states of the current era shall ever be able to destroy the electoral college provision, because no super majority of all the US states is ever likely to ratify such a constitutional amendment.
Maybe this country is supposed to be a democracy. Or maybe it isn’t. I couldn’t care less about democracy. Because one thing is certain and always has been: The United States of America is a constitutional republic, and folks like me intend to keep it that way.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker