Good As Far As It Goes But Here's The Position To The Left Of This

 

Once again, John Oliver's show puts it together in a short form that is easy to see with very welcomed additional content.

I think one of the things that is missing from the struggle to reform the system, getting rid of the Electoral College, making the Senate stop empowering the right-wing minority against the will of the majority, reforming the Supreme Court with term limits and an expanded number of "justices" (and some of those seats should be required to go to those with enough math and science so at least some of them can understand the issues that come before them) . . . one of the things that is missing is an even more radical position and that's for states with majorities unwilling to continue under the oppression of the minority of right-wing voters to talk secession.  

The original blackmail of the slave-power, concentrated in the southern states, the original and effective means of imposing the Electoral College, the anti-democratic Senate, the thing that as they were unable to prevent the election of Abraham Lincoln they actually did, pitching us into a terrible civil war.  As (spoiler alert) John Oliver said, riffing off the vulgarian scumbag Mitch McConnell, you have to fight "mule piss with mule piss."   

If the Dakotas, Wyoming, other states with tiny populations who should never have been allowed in the country as single states, entirely over-represented in the Senate and, so, in the Electoral College, block democratic reform of the Constitution, if even the states who have large populations and wretchedly anti-democratic politics do, there is no reason those of us who live on the Pacific coast, in the North East should tolerate rule by the kind of Republicans chosen by the Electoral College, by a Congress swayed by the absurd granting of enormously more power to voters in low population states and the Republican-fascist dominated Supreme and federal courts.  

There is every reason not to sentence our children, our grandchildren in perpetuity to the 18th century atrocity wrought when the slave-owners and crooked aristocrats of the northern states made their original corrupt bargain, thwarting democracy, something that the selection of Bush II by the corrupt Rehnquist Court on the basis of the Electoral College and, within two decades Trump make entirely relevant today.  

If the right-wing states with more representation than their numbers merit block the abolition of the Electoral College and these other reforms, it's time for the majority of us to pull out of that original corrupt deal altogether.  

It's clearly not working for us even in the often awful way that it kind of did sometimes in the past.  And that's not counting what the Republican-fascist dominated Supreme Court will do to us for as long as they can rig it.  

That should increasingly be the position of people in the North East, on the Pacific Coast, of others  in other states who favor democracy who have been continually deprived of the rational, egalitarian democracy they want.  And, lest it be forgotten, many of them live in states which tend to give more to the Federal government than they get back.  One of the things those low population states have done with their advantage in anti-democratic power since the start is to rob the other states.  

I'm  sure there are states among them that would welcome being able to have the most degenerate politics - though I think even the Republican voters there would soon miss the moderating effect that the states they love to hate have on things now.  But that's definitely not working for those of us in regions of the country that have been under their thumb for long enough.  A real threat to blow it up is needed.  I think it's time we started talking about that option.  I don't want my nieces and nephews to continue under the rule of the gangsters who govern under our current corrupt system. I don't want them to be ruled by the fiat of the fascist dominated Court who steal elections for Republican-fascists.  

 

Update:  The linking of the Senate, AND SO THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE, with its unequal advantage given to states with small populations - SUCH AS MAINE WHICH I LIVE IN - is intrinsically linked to the accommodation to the slave-owners among the "founders" Madison and many of the other deified gangsters explicit in their bargaining as to what their motives were.   That has been known since the 1840s since the publication of Madison's papers as the abolitionists already knew.  In this quotation from Senator Charles Sumner given in Wendell Phillips landmark book, The Constitution A Pro-Slavery Compact, he laid it out as part of that corrupt bargain that still works in much the same way the original slave-owners and corrupt northern business interests intended, to thwart the danger that rule of, by and for The People was to their privilege.

It is true that there were compromises at the formation of the Constitution, which were subject of anxious debate.

There was a compromise between the small and large States, by which equality was secured to all the States in the Senate.  There was another compromise finally carried under threats from the south, on the motion of a New England member, by which the slave states were allowed representatives according to the whole number of free persons, and the "three fifths of all other persons,' thus securing political power on account of their slaves, in consideration that direct taxes should be apportioned in the same way.  Direct taxes have been imposed only four brief intervals.  The political power has been constant, and at this moment, sends twenty-one members to the other House.

There is a third compromise which cannot be mentioned without shame.   It is the hateful bargain by which Congress was restrained until 1801 from the prohibition of the foreign slave trade, thus securing down to that period, toleration for crime.  This was pertinaciously pressed by the South even to the extent of an absolute restraint on Congress.  . . the effrontery of the slave masters was matched by the sordidness of the Eastern members [from the the Northern states] who yielded again.  Luther Martin, the eminent member of the Convention, in his contemporary address to the Legislature of Maryland, has describe the compromise "I found," he says, "that the Eastern members, notwithstanding their aversion to slavery, were very willing to indulge the Southern States at least with a temporary liberty to prosecute the slave trade,provided the Southern States would in turn gratify them by laying no restriction on navigation acts."  The bargain was struck, and at this price the Southern States gained the detestable indulgence. At a subsequent day,  by solemn legislative act, adjudged this compromise to be felonious and wicked.  

Such are the three chief original compromises of the Constitution and the essential condition of the union. 

Read that and listen to the part of John Oliver's piece that points out under the apportionment of power in the Senate, TODAY, Black citizens are represented at about three-fifths and Latino citizens at about one half in the Senate AND THEREFORE ARE ONLY PROPORTIONALLY REPRESENTED IN THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE.