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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – Today is Constitution Day, and we should celebrate the document that brilliantly lays out how our country is to be governed.
Yet the Constitution is not so popular with some on the far left. They’d like to do away with some of the pillars of our nation. Today I’d like to look at two parts of the Constitution that are often criticized, and explain why those critics are so wrong.
First, the Electoral College. Why is the Electoral College better for choosing a president than the popular vote? Because the President is the only person in the federal government who represents the entire country. To win the presidency a candidate has to cobble together enough support from diverse parts of the county. California has different interests than Nebraska. Florida and Montana are different. Under a popular vote, a candidate who wins by a landslide in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago could be president. The interests of other parts of the country would no longer factor into presidential politics.
Second, the United States Senate. Some argue it is anti-democratic since a small state like Wyoming has exactly as much weight is a large state like California. There people don’t understand the concept of federalism. That we are a nation of states, and those states have different interests. The farm interests of Kansas and Nebraska are part of the national agenda because they have as much representation as the financial states like New York and Delaware, and the oil states like Alaska and Texas.
And for those of you who absolutely can’t stand the Constitution as written, take heart, it can be changed. Constitutional amendments are rare and difficult to pass, but it has happened 27 times.
And without the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, we would not be a nation. In the days when the Constitution was sent to the states to be ratified, smaller states had no interest in being dominated by the larger states like New York, Massachusetts and Virginia. We would have the independent nation of Vermont, which would probably have become part of Canada, or the Republic of Rhode Island. Our founders, in their brilliance, crafted a governing document that was acceptable to all the states. Those compromises were necessary for us to become The United States of America.
Chris Conley
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