Comments | andrewducker: Interesting Links for 18-03-2016

andrewducker

Interesting Links for 18-03-2016

Mar 18, 2016 12:00

Sugar tax: What is the UK's most sugary drink? (tags: sugar drinking uk tax ) Reality Check: How soon can Turkey join the EU? (tags: turkey eu ) Why Osborne’s sugar tax is half baked (tags: sugar tax uk viaPatrickHadfield ) What's going on with the UK and sin taxes? (tags: tax uk viaPatrickHadfield ) I have never wanted to be Taylor Swift more ( Read more... )

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bart_calendar March 18 2016, 12:18:52 UTC

The thing is people freaking out about Congress maybe picking the next president really don't get it. It's not some weird end run around our country's values.

That clause in the Constitution was put in for exactly this situation.

The founders were terrified that someone like Trump would get the popular vote someday so they set up the system so that if that happened the Electoral College could say "fuck this guy" and then kick it up to the House thinking they would pick a different, more sane person.

Which is exactly what would happen. Sure I'm not a Romney fan, but he is a sane person and not a tyrant and a member of the party that has the most elected representatives.

That seems relatively fair - and I'm sort of happy we have a system in place that can knock out obvious lunatics during periods of time - which happen to every country from time to time - when freaked out voters try to elect someone demonstrably awful.

a_pawson March 18 2016, 12:28:55 UTC

So let me see if I understand this correctly.

You need 270 electoral college votes to become President. So Hilary could get 269, Trump 200 and A.N. Other 69 votes. But rather than declaring Hilary the winner, instead Congress gets to decide? It may be in the constitution, but I can forsee riots if that happens.

andrewducker March 18 2016, 12:35:34 UTC

The current British PM only has 36.9% of the vote...

a_pawson March 18 2016, 12:38:47 UTC

Yes and as the leader of the party that got the most votes, it is to be expected that he become Prime Minister (subject to the vagaries of our electoral system). The US equivalent seems to be that Mr Cameron didn't get 50% of the votes, we forget the whole contest, and the House of Lords gets to choose someone instead.

bart_calendar March 18 2016, 12:43:42 UTC

No.

The Senate is our house of lords

The House of Representatives is our House Of Commons.

So we would be doing exactly what you do in the UK - the party with the most representatives in our House Of Commons picks the leader.

bart_calendar March 18 2016, 12:55:23 UTC

The other thing to consider is that it's meant to be a cautionary thing.

The reason that up until now nobody running for president has been an obvious dangerous nut is that they were all aware that the Electoral College voters could fuck them so they always tried to be civil and not scary even if they had bad ideas so as not to terrify the Electoral College voters (who are under no legal obligation to vote the way their state voted.)

bart_calendar March 18 2016, 12:46:12 UTC

Yeah, the thing is it's actually two separate checks on evil coming to power.

Step One: The Electoral College gets the chance to say "fuck this guy!"

Step Two: The House of Representatives then get to decide if the Electoral College was right in saying "fuck this guy!"

bart_calendar March 18 2016, 12:42:00 UTC

Yeah.

If nobody gets 270 the House of Representatives gets to pick it.

It's not unreasonable. In other countries whatever party has the most representatives gets to pick Prime Minister.

skington March 18 2016, 16:29:41 UTC

But that's not what's happening, though. If Trump wins a majority of votes in the electoral college the electoral college can't say "fuck this guy" - at least not in most states, and not without causing a huge scandal. The only way it can reject the winner of the popular vote is if there are more than two significant candidates and it doesn't find anyone with a majority.

If the Republican establishment tried to run a third-party candidate to stop Trump winning, I think you'd find a few things happening:

(1) There would be a tremendous outcry at such a blatant attempt to game the democratic process;
(2) Republican members of Congress running for re-election would be under great pressure to commit to voting for Trump if he won and the decision got kicked up to the House, or face a primary from the right (which is what they're all afraid of anyway); and
(3) If not in time for the 2016 election, you'd see the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact pass the remainder of the state legislatures it needs pretty sharpish ( ... )

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