Explaining and Defending American Government

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Chapter One

There have been presidents elected with fewer popular votes than their opponents. Several presidents have been elected with less than a majority of the votes cast.

When I told my compartment companions that George Bush had received fewer popular votes than Al Gore yet won the election, they were shocked. "How did that happen?" they asked. "Are you glad that it just happened once? How could the military stand for that?"

I explained that it happened twice before Bush versus Gore. Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison also were elected with fewer popular votes than their main opponent.

I ordered a stiff drink before having to explain the Electoral College and why the military's feelings about the election were irrelevant.

Before I explained the Electoral College, I made them promise to explain why people in my country "run" for office and people in their countries "stand" for office. Though they promised to do so, the promise was not kept.

The Electoral College

The president and vice president are not elected directly by the popular vote of the people. The Electoral College elects the president and vice president. The Electoral College has no football team, no professors, no tuition, and no campus. It does not even grant degrees.

My foreign friends were shocked by this (as are some Americans). Who are these people in this Electoral College? Can they be corrupted? The answers are it depends, and it depends.

Each state has a number of electoral votes equal to its number of senators (always two from each state) plus its number of representatives in the House of Representatives, which is determined by the state's population. We have a census every ten years, which among other things determines how many representatives in the House of Representatives each state gets. There are always 435 members in the House of Representatives. How many each state gets of those 435 is determined by its population recorded during the last census.

I explained to them that my home state of Illinois has two senators (as does every state) and nineteen representatives; therefore, it has twenty-one electoral votes.

No federal regulations require an elector (what you call a member of the Electoral College) to vote for the individual that received the most votes from the people in that state. Some state laws require that they do, and other states have no such requirement. It is possible that electors could "vote their conscience" and cast their vote for someone other than the person who won the popular vote in that state.

How electors are chosen varies from state to state. Sometimes political parties choose them, and sometimes they are elected by the people.

Historically, these electors have not always voted in accordance with the popular vote of their state.

Is it possible that the electors could vote for a person who received significantly fewer votes than their opponent, therefore handing the election to someone who did not win the popular vote in any state? Possible but not likely.

The District of Columbia (Washington, DC, the nation's capital) has three electoral votes. They do not, however, have senators or representatives who can vote on the laws of the country. The people there pay taxes. So much for "No taxation without representation."

Why do we have the Electoral College? Because the founding fathers did not trust the wisdom of the masses. It was put in place as a safeguard from the whims of the people (the voters).

"Will you always have this Electoral College?" my fellow passengers asked. Yes, we probably will. You see, the Electoral College is in the Constitution, and changing the Constitution is as likely as the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series (this analogy was lost on my European friends).

To further complicate factors, the Electoral College also decides on the vice president. What if the Electoral College is gridlocked or cannot reach a decision on who should be the president and vice president? The House of Representatives decides on who the president will be, and the Senate decides the vice presidency.

The foreigners were surprised about this whole democracy thing. I was able to point out, though, that the military or the church has never intervened, and the process has always been peaceful (but not always civil).

The whole Electoral College thing came as a real surprise to these folks. "Isn't it a bit antiquated?" they asked.

"Yes," I replied, "but we hold our Constitution to be sacred."

"Are you insulted that the founding fathers did not trust you to elect a president directly?"

"No," I replied, "in my home state we elected Rod Blagojevich for governor twice, demonstrating we could not be trusted with the vote."

"Who was he?" they asked.

"You do not want to know" was my firm reply, which ended their questions on that matter. He went to prison on 3/15, becoming inmate 40892-424, at Federal Correctional Institution Englewood in suburban Denver, Colorado.

How Do You Get on the Ballot to Run for the Presidency as a Candidate of One of the Major Parties?

Get Ahold of a Lot of Money

If you are not wealthy yourself, you need to have a lot of people who are to donate money to your campaign. Running for president is an extraordinarily expensive proposition. And you are running for a long time. So long, in fact, that many candidates run out of money, and then they are out of the race.

As a general rule, many Republicans running for the office obtain financial backing from the business world, including corporations and other interest groups often associated with business and industry.

Democrat hopefuls often receive financial support from unions and labor organizations of many kinds.

The Republican party (also referred to as the Grand Old Party, or GOP) is often considered a probusiness party. The Democratic party is often considered to be proworker (labor).

Both parties receive a great deal of financial support from various celebrities ranging from Oprah (Barrack Obama) to Chuck Norris (Mike Huckabee). Candidates do not invite support from some celebrities (Paris Hilton) that might embarrass their campaign.

It All Begins in Iowa

Candidates from the major parties (the Republican and Democratic parties) eventually earn the right to become their party's nominee because they have secured the votes of delegates to the convention that is held every four years. These delegates are determined by a state-by-state series of primary elections and caucuses that occur before the convention. In a caucus, people get together and meet and decide which candidate they want to support. The delegates are determined as a result of the votes that occur in these caucuses.

When you vote in a primary election or a caucus, generally, you declare yourself a Republican or Democrat and indicate the person in your party whom you would like to see as your presidential candidate. By indicating the candidate you prefer, you are really electing people who will go to the Republican Convention or Democratic Convention and cast their vote for that candidate. Since these are party affairs, the party rules—not federal rules—are important. People sent to the convention, in some cases, can vote for whomever they want; they may not be bound to vote as the primary election results indicated.

The primary/caucus season begins in the small rural state of Iowa. Iowa is home to about three million people, 91 percent of whom are white—not exactly representative of the US population. As the first state in this primary/caucus selection process, it is of great symbolic importance. Because it is so expensive to campaign in primaries and caucuses, sometimes candidates with a poor showing in Iowa, just the first stop in the selection process, will drop out of the race, usually because their funding (donations) dry up.

The next stop in the selection process is New Hampshire, then South Carolina, followed by Florida and Nevada. Some are caucuses, and some are primary elections. All are for the purpose of electing delegates to either the Republican or Democratic Convention, where the party's nominee is technically selected.

Momentum, a good start, is very important. Sometimes the candidate for the party is pretty much determined by the results of just the first two, three, or four contests.

In effect, then, huge states (such as California) are disenfranchised, because their primary is held quite late in the primary season. This was very surprising to my fellow travelers, who perceived California as being more influential.

Candidates generally require a lot of financial support in the beginning, and a good start. If they have these two things, they can often be successful.

The Hard-Core Party Faithful

The hard-core party faithful are generally the ones who vote in these primaries. Often, their views are pretty extreme. The Republicans who participate in voting in these primaries tend to be quite conservative (right wing). The Democrats who vote in these primaries tend to be pretty liberal (left wing). Therefore, it is the extremes in both parties who have a lot of influence in determining who will be the nominee of their party. (In essence, then, extremists often determine a party's nominee, with special weight given to the states that vote early in the primary/caucus process.)

Dirty Tricks

Even though primaries are contested by candidates from the same party, they can be nasty affairs. A candidate's organization will often do "opposition research" on their opponents, bringing any of their personal failings to light and making them public (often by their surrogates so they can deny running a dirty campaign).

Another interesting twist: Let us say that the current president is a Republican, and he is running for reelection for a second four- year term. He will probably not have an opponent in this primary process. This allows Republican voters to declare themselves to be Democrats for this presidential election and support a Democratic candidate they think will be weak in the general election.

The Conventions

The Republican party and the Democratic party have their conventions. These conventions have different rules, rules that change from convention to convention. It is at these conventions where the delegates actually determine who the party's nominee will be. In recent times, there was no suspense. It was already known who the nominee would be. Also decided at the convention is who the vice presidential candidate will be. Traditionally, the presidential candidate makes this decision at or close to the time of the convention.

The conventions are entertaining. The delegates often wear silly hats; the Republicans wear elephant hats, and the Democrats wear ass hats, as the mascots of the parties are elephants and donkeys (or asses).

This begs the following question: Did the Democrats really think this whole mascot thing through?

At the convention, the parties develop "platforms," their philosophy of what their party should be doing. As a general rule, once a candidate obtains the nomination, he typically ignores this platform (because the platforms are typically the handiwork of the extreme party faithful and tend to be too extreme for the general election, where a lot more people vote). Therefore, in the primaries, candidates try to appeal to the extremes. In the general election, they try to appeal to the middle. The platform is simply a way of rewarding party supporters by recognizing their ideas.

On to the General Election

After the conventions, the Republican candidate and the Democratic candidate have at it with each other. Things can now really get nasty. Opposition research really kicks in now. If there is something in a candidate's closet, their opponent brings it up continually. If there are no real facts to use against a candidate, their opponent will make negative things up out of whole cloth (e.g., claiming he is really not a US citizen).

Push polls occur just before Election Day. A pollster calls up potential voters, asking realistic questions one would expect an important poll to ask. Then they add a question such as "If the Democratic nominee admitted to having an illegitimate child with a Dominican prostitute, would that change your level of support?" Asking this question sows doubts in the voter's mind. These "polls" tend to occur just before the election, giving the slandered opponent little or no time to respond. Since many voters make up their minds at the last minute, these polls can be devastating to a candidate. These polls are obviously not real but an attempt to impact voter opinion by spreading doubt.

The primary process is easy to defend. I enjoy watching a candidate that is a wealthy urban dweller eating corn dogs at the Iowa State Fair, attempting to court the favor of poor farmers so that they will vote for him in the Iowa caucus. I also enjoy watching convention delegates running around on national television wearing ass hats.

This certainly beats having a king or queen or legislators that wear wigs.

How Do You Get Rid of a President You Do Not Want to Continue in Office?

Answer: Impeachment.

Presidents are elected every four years. In the last 170 years, over one-third of American presidents have become disabled, died in office, or resigned.

Impeachment can lead to a president being kicked out of office. How is this accomplished?

The House of Representatives has a Judiciary Committee that can recommend impeachment.

The committee then studies this recommendation.

If they feel that impeachment is warranted, they send Articles of Impeachment (kind of like an indictment) to the full House of Representatives.

If they send Articles of Impeachment to the House for a vote, the full House of Representatives will write some special rules for taking a vote on the Articles of Impeachment.

The House then votes on the Articles of Impeachment. There may be several of them.

If any one of the Articles of Impeachment is approved by a majority vote of the House of Representatives, the president is then impeached.

This does not mean he is out of office. Not yet.

The president then has a trial, which is held in the Senate. The senators (there are a hundred of them, two from each of the fifty states in the country) are the jury, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court acts as the judge. If two thirds of the senators say the president is guilty, out he goes.

Two presidents have been impeached: Andrew Johnson, just after the Civil War, because many senators were not pleased with how he was handling some complicated postwar matters, and Bill Clinton, because he was alleged to have had oral sex with an intern at the White House.

Neither Clinton nor Johnson was ousted from the presidency, because two thirds of the senators did not vote to convict them. Therefore, though both were impeached, neither one was convicted or removed from office, though Clinton was pretty embarrassed (we assume).

There are three interesting things about possible removal from office under these procedures:

1. The process is made possible because it is written into the Constitution. It is one of those "checks and balances" the founders wrote into the Constitution to protect the populace from a corrupt or dangerous person in high office.

2. During the trial in the Senate, the senators who are hearing the case being made must sit silent "under the pain of imprisonment" (if they talk, they could be imprisoned).

3. The Constitution states that a president can be considered3. for impeachment for treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.

The whole impeachment process compares pretty favorably to coup d'états. One of my fellow train travelers pointed out that former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi would certainly have been convicted by the Senate had he been up for an impeachment trial in the United States (out of pure jealousy).

Who Makes the Laws of the Country?

The chambers of the Congress, the House of Representatives (435 members) and the Senate (100 members), agree as to what the country's laws are. Many members of the House and Senate are trained lawyers, and they write "bills" on an issue; if these bills are passed by both chambers of Congress, they go to the president, who can sign the bill and make it the law of the land. If the president does not sign the bill, that is called a veto and the bill does not become law. The Congress can supersede the president if they pass this bill with a two-thirds majority. Then it is said that Congress "overrode" the veto, and the bill becomes law anyway.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Explaining and Defending American Governmentby Bradley W. Rasch Copyright © 2012 by Bradley W. Rasch. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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