The real American deep state, after all, which thwarts the ability of Americans to govern themselves by the principle of majority rule, is the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate.
This nugget comes from a brief but excellent piece by Harold Meyerson in
The American Prospect dated yesterday:
Majority Rule? Not Yet, Fellow Americans.
The subject is the tyranny of the minority imposed by the arcane system that empowers low-population states with disproportionately large numbers of electoral college votes and U.S. Senators.
Is there a way around the Electoral College, a piece of 18th-century handiwork put into the Constitution at a time when that document’s authors thought that only a relative handful of elite Americans would actually know anything about the presidential candidates, and when the Constitution’s Southern authors feared straight-out popular presidential elections could favor Northern candidates not necessarily predisposed to slavery?
As the Electoral College favors small states (since each state gets two extra votes reflecting its Senate representation), repealing the Constitution’s Article II provision that requires its use would prove difficult. As three-quarters of the states must ratify any constitutional change, it would take just 13 smaller states to block the College’s abolition.
In 2018, though, writing in these pages, Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law scholar and dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, argued the Court’s one-person-one-vote ruling enforcing the Fifth Amendment’s establishment of equal justice under the law renders the Electoral College unconstitutional. No such case has yet come before the Court and it’s by no means clear that Chemerinsky’s argument would prevail. But it certainly should be tried.
Meyerson applies a famous Voltaire quote to the Electoral College:
écrasez l’infâme, which translates as "crush the infamous (or loathesome) thing."
More at link:
https://prospect.org/blogs/tap/majority-rule-not-yet-fellow-americans-electoral-college/