When you ask the average American to name a founding father, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, James Madison, and a few others come to mind. Those who have grown up in the United States and who have not taken a US history class at the college level (and sadly, even a great many who have taken college-level history classes) are taught implicitly to worship the founding fathers as infallible deities. I have often referred to this in previous blogs as the GI Joe or Disney version of history; one that is sanitized, romanticized, glorified, and stripped of critical analysis and replaced with blind, pseudo-patriotic fealty in its stead. It is for this reason that I would argue, in light of the disastrous election results a few weeks ago, that Pierce Butler, a South Carolina delegate who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, should now be included in the discussion of typical pantheon of founders. A Google search reveals very few images of this enigmatic founding father. Perhaps he wanted it that way for all the nefarious powers he gave to people who 1) would not sign onto the new government unless it protected slavery; and 2) whose descendants would one day dissolve what they called the "compact" theory of the Constitution in order to protect their $3 billion investment in human property. This was a dollar figure worth more than all of the South's land, banks, and railroads combined. An eighteenth-century give-away to southern slaveholders like Pierce Butler has now given us the catastrophic Bush presidency and the unimaginable, horrifying, and nausea-inducing Trump presidency. Hillary Clinton won 2.5 million more votes than Donald Trump. This is four times the total of Al Gore's popular vote victory in 2000 and significantly larger than the amount of people that live in states such as Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming and Alaska--states that get the same number of senators as California despite the fact that the Golden State has almost eighty times the population as these uninhabitable iceboxes. Butler and his enablers gave us the fugitive slave clause, the clause in the Constitution keeping the international slave trade open until 1808, the three-fifths clause, and by consequence, the electoral college. To say that Trump's victory because of the electoral college is an unfair and undemocratic scam does not even begin to describe the severity of this colossal catastrophe. We have not had a progressive Supreme Court since the early-1970s and thanks to the Faustian Bargain that Butler and his accomplices left to posterity, we will not have another at least for another 20-30 years. And will we ever get rid of this archaic, outmoded vestige of eighteenth-century thinking? Fat chance. The smaller states will never give up their disproportionate power that the Constitution gives to them. And why would they? A constitutional amendment would require the approval of 38 states, a virtual impossibility. Even less likely would be an entirely new constitutional convention, however necessary that may be. There is some talk of getting enough states amounting to over 270 electoral votes--and hence a majority of the electoral college--to pass laws requiring their electors to cast votes in their state legislatures for the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote. Apparently they're already halfway there, but I doubt they would ever get Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to sign on. We have already seen how many terribly racist, factually challenged, and morally irresponsible people inhabit those paradises. Barring some unforeseen disaster on the scale of the American Civil War or Great Depression, it is hard to imagine that we will ever abolish the electoral college. Republicans, mobilizing white male resentment, hostage-taking, and obstruction to the fullest extent imaginable, have swindled us once again. We shouldn't wonder why all of our public institutions have gone downhill. It is not at all difficult to find the culprits. They call themselves the "Party of Lincoln" or the "Party of Teddy Roosevelt" but they represent everything that Lincoln and Roosevelt would abhor.
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