might be tampered with beforehand to prostitute their votes .”
Instead , the Electoral College would be made up of “ persons [ selected ] for the temporary and sole purpose of making the appointment ” of president .
The electors would be apolitical because it would be illegal for a senator or house member to become one , an injunction that is still in the Constitution .
Hamilton wrote :
“ And they have excluded from eligibility to this trust , all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the President in office . No senator , representative , or other person holding a place of trust or profit under the United States , can be of the numbers of the electors .”
This , Hamilton was certain , would eliminate “ any sinister bias .”
Rather than average but uninformed voters , and excluding members of Congress who may be subject to bribery or foreign influences , the electors would select a man for president who was brave of heart and pure of soul .
“ The process of election [ by the electoral college ] affords a moral certainty ,” Hamilton wrote , “ that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications .”
Indeed , while a knave or rogue or traitor may fool enough people to even ascend to the office of mayor of a major city or governor of a state , the Electoral College
88 x The Trial Lawyer would ferret out such a con man or traitor .
Hamilton wrote :
“ Talents for low intrigue , and the little arts of popularity , may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State ; but it will require other talents , and a different kind of merit , to establish him in the esteem and confidence ” of the men in the Electoral College who would select him as president “ of the whole Union . . .”
Hamilton ’ s pride in the system that he himself had helped create was hard for him to suppress . He wrote :
“ It will not be too strong to say , that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters preeminent for ability and virtue .”
Unfortunately , things haven ’ t worked out that way ( as we can see with Trump still clinging to his loyalty to Putin and refusing to condemn Russia ’ s attacking of Ukraine ).
By the time the telegraph was in widespread use in the late 19th century , the Electoral College had long outlived its usefulness . And now , in the past few decades , we have seen two terrible presidents — Bush and Trump — put into the White House over the objection of the majority of American voters .
The Senate is also profoundly unequal in its representation of the American people ; this is mostly because different states have different sizes and resource bases .
While this was a small problem at the nation ’ s founding , today , for example , California ’ s vast resources ( unknown in 1787 — Lewis and Clark were still children and thus hadn ’ t even hit the Pacific yet ) have turned it into a such an economic powerhouse that if it were independent , it would be the sixth richest nation in the world .
California alone contains 39 million people , almost nine percent of the entire population of the United States , larger than Canada ’ s 37 million people , with an economy larger than Russia ’ s .
And yet it is represented by only two senators , the same as Wyoming , which has only a half-million citizens ( the size of Micronesia ), a tiny economy , and few natural resources .
These inequalities have been exacerbated over the past 40 years both because of these 18th-century structural errors built into our Constitution and because , over the past 40 years , a campaign has been undertaken to exploit them by a small group of right-wing billionaires and religious fanatics , with the Powell Memo as their polestar .
They ’ ve used the wealth and power they ’ ve inherited or accumulated to manipulate and seize control of our lawmaking institutions at the federal level and in nearly every state .
And Americans have noticed that fair competition has died :
Neither of the last two Republican presidents , for example , was elected by the majority of Americans ; the Senate is massively out of balance ; and almost every House seat has been gerrymandered to the point where it is no longer in play . Which is creating a crisis for our nation .
Humans , like most animals , are wired for fairness . Give five toddlers a cookie each and everything is fine ; give one of them an extra five cookies and all hell will break loose .
Democracy is in our genes , as is the