By Hal Brown
I was thinking of writing about this last night but thought it was too simplistic an idea to write more than a few sentences. Then first thing this morning I was watching "Morning Joe" and they were discussing how President Biden talked about this story:
and Joe referred to this story because it was about Alabama:
The United States Supreme Court for the present saved Democracy in rejecting the Independent State Legislature theory, but as this NPR story says, at least for the present time:
This is also being discussed on MSNBC as I write this:
What could happen if the Supreme Court ruled the other way?
The panicked progressive pundits presume that this would result in it being almost impossible for a Democrat to win another presidential election in the foreseeable future.
This might be the case if it was based on assuming that all states where Democrats controlled the legislature didn't reverse the results in elections where the Republican candidate for president won.
Call it playing hardball or dirty, this could only happen if the Democrats played the game of politics by bending or outright suspending the rules of democracy.
What if Democrats played ruthlessly and often without regards to ethics and truth, let alone simple decency and decorum, the way the Republicans (with rare exceptions) do?
A recent example of playing hardball comes from Massachusetts where their lesbian governor, Maura Healey, used state tourism dollars to put up pro-LGBTQ billboards in Florida and Texas (
read article here):
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Here in my home state of Oregon, where by coincidence Tina Kotek became the second openly lesbian governor (Maura Healey was the first) our state now allows terminally ill people to come here to take advantage of our death with dignity law (
read article).
States where abortions are legal and which are adjacent to states where it isn't or is highly restricted are also moving family planning clinics close to their borders. See
Back to the Ballot Box
How would election night look if state legislators could change the outcome?
For those of you who watch MSNBC on election nights and marvel at how Steve Kornacki (above) explains the voting patterns with his famous "big board" imagine how he'd have to explain what the vote count meant adding in whether the state legislator might overturn the outcome.
If every state legislature was to engage in the practice of making sure that their state cast their Electoral College votes for one party or the other the results of all presidential election would be determined in advance.
The only more-or-less fair elections in the country would end up being those for candidates running for local office with the most important for how the country is run aside from who represents the state in Congress would be for the state legislature. The states which controlled the most Electoral College votes would determine the outcome of every presidential election.
