An Open Letter to the Electoral College

©2016 by John LaTorre

Permission to reprint this in any form is hereby granted, provided that the author and source be given due credit.

To be specific, this is an open letter to those members of the Electoral College who are pledged to vote for the Republican candidate. Please hear me out, because I’m going to ask you to do something that few have ever done before, and I need to give you my reasons for it. Please read this with an open mind.

I’m an ordinary citizen, not a politician or journalist, but I have something on my mind that is certainly on your minds, as well, and it’s my hope that my thoughts may help to guide yours.

It’s no secret that this recent election is unprecedented in modern history. And your place in modern history is also unprecedented. As the Electoral College, you’ve always had power that, for the most part, you’ve never seen the need to exercise. But you need to exercise it now, because your actions could influence the future of the country far more than any Electoral College has in the span of American history.

The Founding Fathers, as you know, realized that most elections are straightforward and don’t require anything more than your conveying the votes of your constituents to the Senate, so that they can be counted. And that’s the way it’s been since your College began. But they also realized that there would be circumstances where an election would be so out of the ordinary that some sort of moderating influence would be necessary to ensure the stability of the country.

This is, I believe, such a circumstance. I believe this for three reasons.

First, it seems that the Democratic candidate has won the popular vote by a considerable margin. If this had been any other election, we would have the usual discussion about whether or not the Electoral College should be disbanded in favor of a popular vote. But this has not been any other election. We now know that the voting process appears to have been tampered with in several of the swing states, with no attempt so far to reconcile the results of electronic voting and paper ballots, and that “Gerrymandering” has been taken to extremes in several other areas. All this may be legal, but that doesn’t make it fair or just. And the Electoral College has a unique ability to restore justice and fairness where it is lacking.

Second, the Republican candidate was elected to office on the basis of several sweeping promises, and we now hear that he is breaking those promises even before you cast your votes. This is not the man your constituents thought they were voting for.  This is a man who would say anything to get elected, without any guiding principle except for what directly benefits him or his family. He has already demonstrated a desire to blur the lines of public service and private emolument, to treat a free press as an adversary rather than a critical part of the American political process, and to hold contempt those who would suffer most from a resurgence of violence against those with less power … black people, gay people, handicapped people, women, Muslims, and any number of others. He is filling his cabinet post with billionaires with no experience in the fields they are expected to be conversant with, and whose personal interests run counter to the positions they are expected to fill. And he is already boasting of taking revenge – his word, not mine – on those members of your party who did not support him.

You know all this. You have seen it, as plain as day. And you know that putting the Presidency in the hands of a man like this cannot be beneficial to the political process to which you and your party have dedicated their lives and careers to.

Third, a fair election depends on an informed electorate. That has not been the case in this election, because the media have failed to provide them with fair, unbiased reporting. Instead, we have a candidate that was given a vast amount of free publicity (over a billion dollars’ worth, by some estimates) simply for saying outrageous things. The media have seldom fact-checked the statements of the candidates, resulting in an environment where the electorate was forced to rely on two separate and inimical streams of public information, purveyed by online sources that filtered out anything that ran counter to their own political agendas, both on the left and right sides of the spectrum. This was most egregious in the Republican candidate’s campaign, where he made claims that were proven to be unsubstantiated or simply contrary to known facts, while the media sat silently by without calling him out on it. How could the voting public be expected to make an intelligent decision under these circumstances?

To make matters worse, I read in the morning newspaper that foreign powers have flooded the social media with posts that were designed to hamper the Democratic candidate and favor the Republican candidate, in an attempt to influence the election. We should all be appalled at this attempt by a foreign government to sway our electoral process.

That’s why the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College. To be sure, part of its purpose was to ensure that those living in states with smaller populations had a disproportionate influence on the outcome of elections. But that’s not the issue I’m addressing here. The other purpose was to act as a sort of safety apparatus, much like the fire hose behind a glass panel that you see in some public buildings, under a sign that says “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass.” It’s put there with the expectation that nobody has to use it, like the powers of the Electoral College to disregard a constituent population’s vote. So far, we haven’t needed to use it. But we can, and we should recognize that there are times when we should, and that this may be one of those times.

Which brings us to the second purpose of the College: to allow people with more experience in the political process, with cooler heads than the general population, and the wisdom gathered from years of watching the political scene and how government really works, to use that wisdom and experience to shape the course that they think best for the country, even though that course may go against the wishes of the electorate. Our Founding Fathers could not have foreseen the type of cyber-attacks and electronic vote tampering that this last election has produced, but they knew how demagogues could sway opinions and carry votes, and how necessary it was to provide an opportunity for cooler heads to prevail.

It won’t be easy for you to defy your party’s wishes. For many of you, it would be political suicide, at least for a while. You were appointed as an Elector on the premise that you wouldn’t go against the popular vote in your area, and you would have to break that promise. The fact that you have the power to do this legally won’t be much help here. You will incur disfavor. Even worse, many of you may receive death threats, from that small contingent of the people who voted for your candidate and who trade in the coin of violence and coercion. (And, as you have seen in the past few weeks, you have seen how emboldened these people have become to spend that coin, to an extent that is unprecedented in modern American history.) I’m sure the Founding Fathers foresaw this, too, and trusted that an Electoral College would have the courage and moral fiber to do the right thing, regardless of the consequences. When they began this country, they pledged their lives, their liberty, and their sacred honor to that cause, regardless of the consequences. And they were confident that future generations would produce people with a similar commitment to honor, and that they could put that responsibility into capable hands … into your hands.

I do not envy you. I wish you didn’t have to make this decision. To be honest, being a hero isn’t easy. Most true heroes didn’t want the job. James Meredith and Ruby Bridges didn’t want to be heroes. They just wanted to go to school. The men and women that rushed to help the victims of September 11, 2001 didn’t want that disaster to happen. They would much rather have lived their usual lives instead of battling fires and breathing air laced with asbestos. When John Kennedy was asked how he became a World War II hero, he famously answered, “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.” But when they were called, they answered, regardless of the consequences. That’s what made them heroes. You have that opportunity to be a hero now.

As you know, if you’ve studied American history, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial resulted in an acquittal by a single vote. What you may not know is that a number of Republican senators defied their party and voted for acquittal. As a result, none of these senators were elected to office again. Many of them had turned down bribes from the party, in the form of office appointments or diplomatic positions, which had been offered if they switched their votes. So they suffered considerable damage to their careers. But in time, they were recognized and honored as heroes. People came to respect their courage and integrity.  If you likewise defy your party and vote for the common good, I believe that people will in time respect you as well. And your grandchildren will be able to say that their grandparents saved the country from its closest brush yet to political chaos.

So your choice is clear. You can play it safe, do what is expected, retire to your homes and lives as though nothing had happened, and slip into history’s dustbin. Or you can vote your conscience, accept the consequences, and join the Founding Fathers as true patriots. It won’t be an easy decision. But our Founding Fathers counted on you to make the right one. And we are counting on you to make the right one, too.

Good Golly, We Miss You, Molly

©2016 by John LaTorre

Once upon a time, there was a writer named Molly Ivins. She was a good ol’ girl from Texas and never forgot that, although she was born in California and educated at Smith College and Columbia University. And she was that rarest of the rare: a hard-nosed Texas liberal along the lines of John Henry Faulk, Ann Richards, Bill Moyers, and Jim Hightower (all of who were her personal friends). She became a columnist for a number of publications, where she displayed a flair for showing us the humor, insanity, and significance of politics on the state and national level. She died in 2007.

It’s a real temptation to fill out this essay with nothing but quotes from her, because she was one of the most quotable people of the twentieth century. There are going to be a lot of them, anyway, because nobody could articulate what was on her mind than she could. I beg forgiveness from Random House and everybody else who owns the rights to her work now, but it can’t be helped. And I encourage you to read her books first hand; most of them are still in print, beginning with Molly Ivins Can't Say That, Can She? and continuing nearly up to her death.  She often said that, in her view, the primary function of journalism was to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. I don’t know if that was original with her, but there is no better phrase to sum up her career.

The book I’ll be quoting from here is Nothin' But Good Times Ahead, published in 1993. Written a quarter of a century ago, it has an astonishing relevance to the current political campaign. In that race, a slick liberal policy-wonk lawyer named Clinton is running for president in a race against a billionaire populist with no government experience and a Republican who, when not reading from a TelePrompter, come across as an incoherent salad of scraps of words and ideas. The main difference is that the Clinton is now female, and the other two candidates have been combined into one.

The billionaire populist at that time was H. Ross Perot. “Ross Perot is fundamentally a superb salesman. So superb that it amounts to a form of genius,” Molly wrote. “Over the years, he has become far more sophisticated in his analysis of political issues, but he retains the glib salesman’s tendency to reduce complex realities to catchy slogans… He is still given to the sort of sweeping statements he made twenty years ago: ‘Pollution? That’s an easy one. No question about it … Give me the choice of having all those industries dumping pollutants into the rivers or the choice of having no factories, and I’ll have the factories. I can clean up the rivers in five years.’ This is not a man who has grasped the concept of dead oceans.” Any more than Trump grasps the concept of climate change, it seems.

In the same article, Molly pointed out the futility of electing rich people with no government background to office, without them even running for a city or county office first. “Why do they always want to buy the governorship or senatorship? Or, in the case of Perot, who’s richer than God, the presidency? It’s enough to make you yearn for the good old days, when rich guys just bought racehorses and yachts.

“Because when these rich guys get into office, we find they’re disastrous as political leaders. They’re so accustomed to working in hierarchical, top-down organizations—where they can fire anyone who doesn’t jump high enough—they go berserk with frustration when nobody jumps at all. You can get elected governor, but you can’t fire the Legislature, or even the Egg Marketing Advisory Board. Our last Big Rich Governor was Bill Clements, ’87 to ’91, who, when he tried to learn Spanish, inspired the observation, ‘Good, now he’ll be bi-ignorant.’”

 But Perot’s biggest problem was his shaky grasp of reality. “Ross Perot is a liar,” Molly wrote. “It’s really quite striking and leaves me with a certain respect for professional politicians, who lie with such artistry, such deniability, such masterful phraseology that they can always deny their denials later on.

“Perot lies the way Henry Kissinger used to lie but without Kissinger’s air of grave, weighty authority. Perot just flat-out lies. What’s more, when he lies, he accuses everyone else of lying. He never said this; he never said that; he never said the other. They’re making it all up. They’re all liars.” And twenty-four years later, we’ve got Lyin’ Ted, and Lyin’ Hillary. Déjà vu.

Elsewhere, Molly describes Perot’s penchant for seeing all adversities as conspiracies, in a way that seems to presage Trump’s allegations that the upcoming election will be rigged against him. “That squirrelly little part of his brain that will never allow him to admit he’s wrong about anything comes up with these fantastic rationales for his own flaky behavior. A Perot presidency would be like the time of the papist plots in England. Conspirators sighted everywhere, evidence no object.” Elsewhere, she brings up a weird tale about how Republican dirty-tricksters were going to torpedo the wedding of Perot’s daughter Carolyn. “In true conspiracy-nut fashion, Perot has decided that anyone who doesn’t believe his conspiracy theory is part of the conspiracy. Does the FBI fail to find a scintilla of evidence to back up Perot’s claims? Why, then, the FBI is clearly a tool of the dirty Republicans. Do the police say that Perot’s source on this ridiculous alleged plot is a well-known fantasist? Why, then, the police must be in on it too!”

And, of course, the media were favorite targets. Perot was notoriously sensitive about how he felt the media were against him, about which Molly wrote, “…he would blame it on the media being unfair, for not putting the right interpretation on what he said or meant to say, and he would then attempt to instruct or lecture the press on how we were to interpret him. It was painful to watch. When you run for public office, you don’t get to decide what other people think of you.” Today, it’s even more painful to watch the press corps hustled into chicken-wire enclosures at rallies, where they are pointed out as enemies and targeted for humiliation. As in other areas, Trump is going even further than Perot, or any of his other fellow candidates of the previous century, had ever dared to go before.

While Perot was better at grabbing headlines, he turned out not to be serious challenger to the incumbent President. The parallels here are less distinct, but there is a common thread that Bush’s re-election campaign suffered from a lack of vision, offering little guidance beyond the general sentiment that the best way to govern is to let business do its thing and wait for the inevitable prosperity to trickle down to the people who need it. In this sense, Bush reflected the prevailing Texas philosophy that the primary purpose of government is to foster a hospitable environment for “bidness,” the citizenry be damned. Likewise, Trump thinks that the best way for the economy to improve is to make government get out of the way and let business do business.

I find another parallel. Molly’s descriptions of George H. W. Bush’s appearances on television remind me a lot of Trump’s appearance at the debates and at his rallies. “George Bush without a TelePrompter can scarcely produce an intelligible sentence. I’ve been listening to him since 1966 and must confess to a secret fondness for his verbal dyslexia. Hearing him has the charm and suspense of those old adventure-movie serials: Will this man ever fight his way out of this sentence alive? As he flops from one syntactical Waterloo to the next, ever in the verbless mode, in search of the long-lost predicate, or even a subject, you find yourself struggling with him, rooting for him. What is the man trying to say? What could he possibly mean? Hold it, I think I see it!”  As someone who has found it impossible to clearly diagram any impromptu sentence of Trump’s that is over fifteen words long, I find the resemblance striking. (And it might be worth noting that the hand gestures Bush used in his speeches were choreographed by one Roger Ailes, whom Donald Trump recently recruited for the same purpose.)

Molly also wrote a lot about the disparity in wealth. He pointed out that while the eighties and early nineties saw one of the greatest increases in productivity in modern history, almost all the wealth created by that productivity went to the top one percent. That’s even more true today. And she also saw how our communications companies were agglomerating: “At the end of World War II, 80 percent of American newspapers were independently owned. Today [1992], almost without exception they are owned by one of fifteen chains.” And now it’s fewer than that, and it’s also true of television and radio as well … in fact, it’s often the same chains.

And I could go on for pages and pages about some of the other subjects that Molly raised in essays in this book: health care, the rise of women’s political power, the artful use of redistricting to deprive people of political power, and the effects of unemployment. (After the paper she worked for went belly-up, she compared the experience to having her horse shot out from under her.) That such a book, written almost a quarter of a century ago, is still relevant to our current situation is a marvel. Or maybe not. She was only seeing what any intelligent, clear-headed commentator could see on the horizon. The big issues haven’t gone away, despite our fervent wish that they would.

Our world is not devoid of political commentators, of both liberal and conservative stripes, but seldom do we hear one with such a fine ear for the humorous. We have Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and John Oliver, and their mentor Jon Stewart, but these people come off more strident than Molly ever did. Even her enemies liked her, and she liked most them as people if not as politicians. “George W. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer,” I heard her say at a lecture just before she died, “but there’s not a mean bone in his body.” She had similar kind words for most of her subjects, even as she pilloried them in the press when (in her opinion) they went all stupid on her. She couldn’t have done otherwise, and I doubt that they’d have let her do otherwise. She loved practical jokes, even when they were played on her (she recounts the time that Perot called her to complain about his treatment. He called collect, and she took the call without thinking that maybe Perot could have paid for it himself).

People either loved or hated her writing, but mostly they respected it, because it was well researched. She had her facts straight, and they knew it. When asked for her opinion on what government was supposed to do, she would quote the preamble to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence: “I believe government should be used in order to form a more perfect Union, to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. God, as the architects say, is in the details.

“I believe that all men and women are created equal. That they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I believe that governments are instituted among men and women, driving their just powers from the consent of the governed, to secure these rights. And that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.”

All well and good, but then she adds: “I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults. If Texas were a sane place, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.”  And in the last essay of the book, she wrote: “The thing is this: You got to have fun while you're fightin' for freedom, 'cause you don't always win… And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”

But go thee now, and get some Molly for yourself. She’s in bookstores, she’s in libraries, she’s on the Internet. And she’s more relevant than ever. God, I miss her.