Mau-Mauing the Trump Electors Progressives misread Hamilton to overrule democratic norms.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mau-mauing-the-trump-electors-1481847829
Even before taking the oath of office, Donald Trump has achieved the impossible—driving liberals to the original text of the Constitution. This strange new respect for the Founders will only last until the President-elect nominates a new Supreme Court Justice, and too bad it arrives as an assault on the Electoral College to elect someone other than Mr. Trump.
This organized political campaign is being conducted in the name of Alexander Hamilton, and not merely because of the Broadway musical. In Federalist No. 68, Hamilton wrote that the Electoral College “affords a moral certainty, that the office of president will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
Progressives are invoking this line to claim Mr. Trump lacks such qualifications. And they are calling on those they call the “Hamilton electors” to vote for Hillary Clinton or somebody else when they meet on Dec. 19. The immediate goal is to peel away 37 from Mr. Trump’s 306-vote majority and deny him 270 votes.
This gambit is being promoted by supposedly lucid Members of Congress, liberal columnists, left-leaning constitutional scholars and Hollywood celebrities. OK, maybe the last group is not-so-lucid, but remnants of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign are also on board. GOP electors report being bombarded with tens of thousands of emails and phone calls.
There is an originalist constitutional case that the electors are supposed to act as an deliberative body who can exercise their own “discernment,” as Hamilton put it. They could vote for anyone they choose.
But the Electoral College as the framers conceived it was never meant to be independent of the popular will. The framers had tremendous respect for the judgment of the people, and the electors aren’t supposed to be de novo second guessers. There have been 150 faithless electors in U.S. history, and only nine since World War II.
The historical record suggests that discernment was meant to be triggered only in exceptional circumstances when new information about a President-elect’s “qualifications” unknown to voters emerged after the general election. Nobody can claim that Americans didn’t understand the nature of Donald J. Trump when they voted.
There have been no revelations. The Russian hacking only divulged material about Mrs. Clinton and the conduct of her staff, not Mr. Trump’s fitness. Some Hamilton renegades claim a vote for Mrs. Clinton is legitimate because she won the popular vote, but everybody knew the electoral rules in advance.
In Federalist No. 68, Hamilton wrote that discernment also depends on the electors being disinterested and insulated from political pressure. The virtue of the Electoral College is to raise “every practicable obstacle” against “cabal, intrigue, and corruption” and other “heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people.” In other words, the coordinated, partisan effort to mau-mau the electors is precisely the sort of politicking and political tampering that the Electoral College was designed to prevent.
The various “Never Trump” movements don’t have a record of success, and this one won’t stop Mr. Trump from swearing on the bible Jan. 20. But a secondary goal of these Democrats is to undermine the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s Presidency before it begins. They want to mobilize opposition to his every decision.
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