i just read this but ive heard alot of bad things about the founding fathers. we should be skeptical of them not worship.
"HOWARD ZINN: Well, you know, the Electoral College came into being, of course, with the Constitution. The Constitution was adopted in Philadelphia, you know, our founding fathers — a lot of paternalism there — and they met in through the summer and early fall of 1787 and adopted the Constitution and debated all of the provisions of the Constitution.
And when they came to the question of how to elect a president, there was a rather lively debate over how the president should be elected and how many years should a president serve and should there be a vice president, and so on. And there were several proposals made that the president should be simply elected by popular vote. And those proposals were immediately knocked down, which was not surprising because the founding fathers were really not inclined to have real popular choice of the people who would run our government. And they decided that they would — in fear, really, of having a popular vote for president — you know, they kept talking about, no, we must have, you know, people who are intelligent, people who are educated, people who — which usually is a shorthand for people of means and people of power and people who are, you know, important people in the community — they’re the ones who should make the decision.
So they finally decided that — actually they gave the job to a committee, and the committee came back and made the suggestion, and they immediately adopted the committee’s report. And the report was that, well, we should let each state legislature choose a group of electors and that these electors will then decide who is the president. There was no thought of popular selection of the president. The idea was that a select group of men — now, you might say doubly select, since the state legislatures themselves, which would select the electors, were at that time not elected by popular vote. There was only one state, Pennsylvania, where the state legislature was elected by popular vote, that is by, you know, universal — well, even male suffrage. In all the other states, the popular vote was, well, severely circumscribed by the fact that you — well, you had to be a white male and you had to own property. That was the case in twelve of the thirteen states.
So you had, right from the start, with the election of the state legislators, you had an undemocratic process, no popular election, and then the state legislators themselves would, without referring to any popular vote, choose the electors. So keep in mind that the same Constitutional Convention decided that the United States Senate would not be elected by popular vote, that the Senate also would be selected by — two senators would be selected by state legislatures.
So if you look at the three branches of government as a whole, here’s what you find. You find that the president is not going to be elected by popular vote. You find the Senate is not going to be elected by popular vote. The House of Representatives will be elected by, well, whatever means the state legislatures decide they will be elected, because voting requirements were left up to the states. And the Supreme Court, of course, will be selected by the president. So you did not have coming from the founding fathers the idea that the people who would run the country would be elected by popular vote.
I mean, what’s astonishing, or maybe not so astonishing, is here over 200 years later, we are still operating with an undemocratic system of electing the president of the United States, a system which not only was flawed from the beginning by the requirements of the founding fathers, but had become more and more flawed as the election process has become dominated by two major parties, which monopolize the political arena, and dominated more and more by the fact that money decides who can reach the American people.
"Trump needs to ask Congress before launching a war but I have no opposition to the airstrikes" routine.
