Process Matters

Mo

The Constitution is a mix of both substance and process. The substance—for instance, free speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms—is, without a doubt, critical to the functioning of our Republic. Equally critical, however, is the process—for instance, the Fifth and Sixth Amendments grant procedural rights to criminal defendants to ensure that they get a fair trial. The procedures in the Constitution are there to ensure that we are governed by the Rule of Law, not by the rule of any one person.   

Progressives do not care one bit about process or the Rule of Law. They care only about outcomes, in particular, their desired outcomes. In fact, Obama’s stated criteria in selecting judges was not faithful adherence to the Constitution but with whom that judge would side:

We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old – and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

Picking winners and losers, and obtaining the power to do it, is the entire progressive project over the past several decades.  

In the latest installment of “We win/you lose,” the Left side of the aisle is making noises about the Electoral College, because Trump won it and the Presidency, while Clinton won the popular vote.  Never mind that we had this same argument 16 years ago when Bush won the EC and Gore the popular vote.  Never mind that the Left spent the ensuing 16 years doing nothing to go through the Constitutional process to change the electoral college rules.

As usual, the Left wants to bypass the hard work to change the process and go straight to rigging the desired outcome. And they’re doing it in the most blatant way imaginable. They’re calling for electors who are pledged to Trump, to vote against him. Being the sophists they are, they’re arguing that we are a Republic and that Hamilton specifically authorized the faithless elector in Federalist Paper 68.

In theory, there can be faithless electors and one can imagine a scenario in which they would have a duty to vote against their pledged candidate. But this is not one of those scenarios, notwithstanding the Left’s hysteria. Trump is a buffoon. He is not some sort of dangerous demagogue who is going to take down the country and turn it into a dictatorship.

We have settled rules and expectations for how the Electoral College operates. Some of those rules are based on state laws and some are based on simple tradition and expectations. We shouldn’t cast all of this aside simply because some people didn’t like the outcome of the election.  That is far, far more dangerous to our Republic than a Trump presidency will be. Once again, the Left has absolutely no respect for process and no respect for Constitutional order.  They have no standing whatsoever to invoke the Federalist Papers to get their desired outcome.