Paul LePage Gives Away The Motive In The Republican Routine To Thwart The Popular Vote

If anyone who reads my at least weekly condemnation of the putrid, anti-democratic, slave-holder promoted Electoral College and had any doubt as to how vilely evil it is should now understand that I haven't been exaggerating all of that because the enthusiastic volunteer of all that is putrid, anti-democratic and racist in the United States confirmed that from the satanic regions he comes from and flourishes in.  I'll give you Ron Blitzer's full account of the racist, dictatorial, sleazy LePage's appearance on a right-wing radio station. 

There has been a trend of sorts lately for states to try and circumvent the electoral college by passing bills that would require a state’s electors to vote for the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. Maine is currently considering a move like this, and the state’s former Republican Governor Paul LePage is not happy about it.

The bill currently being looked at by Maine’s lawmakers would have the state enter into an agreement with other states, whereby they would all agree to have their electors vote for the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide, setting aside the current system of voting according to how their individual states vote.

LePage discussed this on WVOM radio station’s “George Hale Ric Tyler Show” on Tuesday. It started off normally enough, with LePage defending the electoral college for allowing states like his to remain relevant in presidential politics.

“All the small states, like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Wyoming, Montana, Rhode Island, will all be–you’ll never see a presidential candidate again, you’ll never see anybody at the national stage come to our state. We’re gonna be forgotten people,” he said.

In addition to fearing that candidates not caring to campaign in small states, LePage feared that in a national popular vote, these states would be rendered irrelevant.

“Why would we give the authority to Ohio, New York, Florida, Texas, and California, and Illinois? Those five states will elect the president of the United States and we will never see another president or another candidate to Maine.”

This has been the common criticism of efforts to eliminate the electoral college, as it would give disproportionate influence to a small number of states, at the expense of many others.

Then things started to take a turn for the extreme.

“Why don’t we just adopt the constitution of Venezuela and be done with it?” LePage said. “Let’s have a dictator because that’s really what you’re gonna boil down to.”

“What would happen if they do what they say they’re gonna do, white people will not have anything to say. It’s only going to be the minorities who would elect. It would be California, Texas, Florida,” he added.

One of the hosts cut him off there, noting that minorities currently believe that electoral college limits their impact. White, non-Hispanic people make up more than 93 percent of Maine’s population, according to a 2018 census estimate, compared to 60.7 percent for the United States as a whole.

LePage has garnered a reputation for making racially charged comments, notably this rant about drug traffickers from 2016:

These are guys with the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty. These type of guys. They come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, then they go back home. Incidentally, half the time they impregnate a young, white girl before they leave.

He later apologized for that one, saying he meant to say “Maine women.”

The catalog of Paul LePage's racism is a lot longer than that.  And, lest anyone think that he's an aberration in Maine Politics,  the renowned pseudo-moderate Republican Olympia Snowe was one of his champions, her first husband having been a sort of patron to the young Paul LePage.  Susan Collins has also supported him as did, in fact, Maine Republicans with few exceptions.  You can include virtually all of the Maine media in that, including "public radio". 

Paul LePage's election was a result of the idiocy of past Maine liberals in the legislature making ballot access in this state ridiculousness easy to achieve.  He was never elected with a majority of the vote.  If, as I hope, we change the Constitution to make all of the elections in Maine be conducted under the ranked-choice system, which is designed to make sure that the last choice of a majority of voters can never win an election, he will be the last such 38% Governor of our state.

Nationally, the Electoral College was explicitly designed to boost the power of the slave-owning minority at the time of the adoption of the Constitution, the debates over it make that obvious, the modern day version of that is that it empowers racists and those who will use racism to win elections,  Republicans, in short.  James Madison, the false-god of so many a liberal was also explicit that the Electoral College and other means of thwarting government of The People, by The People and for The People was a means of rich guys like him keeping and concentrating wealth over and against the common good.  In short, it is a means by which a minority can lord it over a majority.

National Popular Vote isn't my preferred means of getting rid of the goddamned Electoral College but it's probably the best we can do to get rid of it, state legislatures in the tiny population one-party Republican-fascist states will certainly be able to block the Constitutional repeal of the filthy thing and, even more so, the anti-democratically apportioned Senate.

If there is one thing that the past fifty years has proved, it is the capacity of those who want to corrupt the Constitutional system in the United States were given ample means of doing that by the slave-holders among the Founders and their Northern aristocratic colleagues.  The use of computers and statistical-geographic targeting was bad enough, now, as the likes of billionaires foreign and domestic, the Kochs, the Mercers, the Putin oligarchs prove, the collection of that information that fools give out about themselves online and which is collected for shopping by the likes of Facebook means that all of those old Constitutional beliefs and the former fixes to turn the thing into something like a democracy will not hold.  Radical changes are required.  I doubt that we are really up to those, it will take a total disaster to overcome the idiocy that lets even smart people affectionately talk about the benevolent wisdom of "Jimmy Madison" the civic genius of "Tommy Jefferson" (I almost puked when I read someone write that) and don't get me started on the hagiographic musical bull shit on Broadway.  Those guys were not all THAT much less shifty than Donald Trump, they made their wealth off of slavery, how good do you figure someone who did that can be?