Safeguard: An Electoral College Story

Subtitles by explosiveskull

America in and of itself was a perfect dream implemented by imperfect men.

But the foresight of the founding fathers

was to understand their innate imperfection

and to create a system that was empowered

with the mechanics for change.

I have a dream

that one day on the red hills of Georgia

sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners,

will they be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream.

The Electoral College is one of the things

that it gives the framework for you to have the power

to stand up for your rights and your liberties.

You’ve had it for so long people don’t know what it truly means.

The actual structure that we have that has allowed us to get here

is not the thing that we should want to take down.

A lots happened over the years.

And while this nation has been tested by war

and it’s been tested by recession

and all matter of challenges I stand before you again tonight

after almost two terms as your president to tell you

I am more optimistic about the future of America

than eve before.

America was designed to protect individual rights

and getting rid of the Electoral College

is the simplest way to make sure that we fall short of our potential.

People have gotten stuck on the word democracy but we are a democratic republic

designed to cool the passions of society.

That is what the constitution was designed to do and by extension,

that is what the Electoral College is designed to safeguard.

That’s also why this experiment we call America has been so effective for so long.

I remember when I first studied American politics

and constitutionalism the idea of Electoral College

is always kind of an outlier

if for no other reason it’s not a college.

I mean you don’t actually go there to study.

It doesn’t actually exist in the same way.

Well what is this thing?

It’s an odd bird in the sense of it’s not an obvious thing.

Having said that it’s a quite brilliant creation

on the part of the founders.

After the American Revolution

and before the constitution you have this period of time

where we had a different constitution called the Articles of Confederation

and this was a really, really simple government.

It’s basically just a congress with nothing else.

And that meant that the states really just did their own thing.

The revolution was fought on behalf of self-government in colonial capitals.

So if you were from Connecticut you were fighting the revolution

in order to be taxed not from Westminster but from Hartford.

And why was Hartford preferable?

Well because that’s the people that you were electing.

And does that mean that you wanted a government

that had input from people who lived in Georgia?

No. It did not mean that.

In fact you probably had no conception of people who lived in Georgia.

You almost certainly had no contact with people

from outside your own region, probably your own state.

You likely never met anybody who had been there.

You’d never talked to anyone from there.

You didn’t even know what they sounded like.

We often think that the United States

started as a powerful nation. It didn’t.

It started as 13 feeble states barely knit together by a continental agreement.

And all around these states was the British Empire.

And then to the west across the Mississippi River the Spanish Empire.

The European states had not gone away.

They were fully as threatening and present

as they had been at any other time.

And here were these 13 states

making themselves weaker and weaker day by day

with the way they argued with each other.

And then people realized there’s essentially no way

that those states can vindicate the rights of people

who live there unless their leagued together.

So this doesn’t mean that you think

that if you’re in New Jersey that you want New Yorkers

to be involved in anything to do with the government you have.

But you need to league with them in fighting this war.

But that poses a problem

because a lot of the rhetoric of the revolution

is about home rule and not having excessive government,

not having government that’s not accountable to you

and your neighbors.

Why would you be fighting a revolution

against distant unaccountable authority

and then trying to create a new distant unaccountable authority.

The founders saw that the democracy that was going on

within the states was not doing a good job

in some cases of protecting individual rights.

So when they got together to create the constitution

this was one of the things they knew they had to do

although at the beginning they didn’t know quite

how they were going to do it.

But they knew they had to create a government

that the power comes from the people

but also a government they couldn’t oppress the people.

And that was what set them down this road

of writing the American constitution.

In order to create a government that would work, the founders

of the constitutional convention realized

that you had to create a federal government

that was going to be able to exercise

in an effective way, three basic functions of government.

One is legislating.

One is putting that legislation into effect.

And the other is judging the laws that are passed by the legislative branch

and carried out by the executive branch and that’s the judiciary.

The concerns of the founders were premised upon a certain view of human nature.

They thought that people were ultimately corrupt or corruptible

and therefore the incentives that operated

within a given system would shape their behavior.

And so we have this Rube Goldberg device essentially

that is set up to make it difficult for laws to be enacted willy nilly.

The founders knew based on human history

that the same government that has the power to imprison you

or even take your life or take someone else’s life

should not be able to make decisions quickly.

Because through history often minorities

were disadvantaged at the hands of government.

At the time the founding fathers were drafting the constitution

they had one principle thought in mind. And that is

preserving the liberties of the American people.

They were living at a time when there was a lot of tyranny

and to their observation it came from the fact

that the same person or group

could both make a law and enforce the law.

So the ability to make and enforce the law allows for self-dealing.

There’s a concern with one’s own interests.

This goes back to human nature as the founder’s understood it.

If people have the opportunity to exercise power in their favor

it will be a temptation to do so,

one that may be too difficult to resist.

So you create an institution that will prevent this

or at least reduce the ability to self deal.

So in order to make sure in the new constitution

that no person or group could do both of those things,

make the law and enforce the law,

they decided to place the lawmaking in one category

and the enforcement of the law in another category.

Separation of powers had not been the norm in history.

So it was a doctrine that was made popular by Montesquieu

and others about the time of the revolution, a bit before.

And it was the recognition that if you wanted to control power

you couldn’t let one person sit in every capacity

and as they always say absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So we divide the power up.

But there is a misperception out there

that the founders were elitists who didn’t trust the people

and the reality is they didn’t trust anybody.

They knew that left to his own devices the president

sometimes will abuse his power. Left to their own devices

the congress sometimes will abuse its power.

Same with the judiciary.

The national government versus the state government,

the elected officials versus the people who are voting for them,

everybody is subject to this problem of human nature.

And the founders set up a system of absolutely nobody is trusted.

Everybody is given a little bit of power

to check the others to create accountability.

And the founders hoped that in this way

they would protect liberty

from the imperfections of human nature.

Liberty when you examine what the founders thought about it

meant fundamentally that the citizens of a republic

could conduct their business,

go their way and live their lives

for the most part unmolested by the power

and the intervention of the federal government.

So what do you do?

You take liberty and you protect it from its chief enemy.

Because the chief threat to liberty is power.

Well, what do you do then? You take power and you divide it.

You make the different parts and aspects of political power

in effect quarrel with each other

and expend their energy balancing each other.

Because when they do that

then they’re not going to be a threat to the liberties of the people.

So this was the central problem of the constitutional convention.

How do we empower government and yet curb its excesses of power?

What was finally arrived at after long months of debate

was the idea of the single president

who would have all the responsibility

of the executive authority in his hands

but would also be limited in certain important ways

by powers that were distributed to the legislative branch

and to the judicial branch.

Yesterday, December 7, 1941

a date which will live in infamy

United States of America

was suddenly and deliberately attacked

by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.

What does the president do?

The president is there to act now.

He doesn’t make the law.

In the congress a slow process is very good.

With an executive a slow process can often be very bad.

In a crisis you may not have time.

We need executives who can execute