Dissing the electoral college

Captain Ed blogs about attacks on the electoral college today.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Wednesday that when Congress returns in January, she will propose a constitutional amendment to abolish the Electoral College and replace it with a one-person, one-vote system for electing the nation's president and vice president.

In introducing the amendment, the Democrat from San Francisco is joining Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, who last month introduced a similar proposal in the House, which she said she would reintroduce in the 109th Congress that convenes on Jan. 3.

The two California lawmakers say the current system makes most Americans election bystanders, pointing toward the recent campaign in which President Bush and his Democratic rival, Sen. John Kerry, focused almost all their time, energy and campaign funds on a handful of undecided states in search of their electoral votes.

Californians should be appalled at the ignorance of their representatives.

They're upset because the Presidential candidates didn't campaign in California. So they want to change the system so that the candidates have to campaign in California. The hell with the rest of the nation. I have three daughters. All three of them stopped using this kind of "logic" when they first entered their teens.

Furthermore, their proposed change wouldn't do anything to solve the problem they complain about. All it would do is shift the states that the candidates focus on, but many states would still be ignored. Of course, California would not, and that's fine with these two. Senator Feinstein and Zoe Lofgren would be perfectly happy for the small states to be ignored completely and for the large states of California, Texas, Florida, New York and perhaps a handful of others to shove legislation and politicians of their bent down the throats of middle America.

Fortunately, our founding fathers, who were demonstrably more mature than these two bozos anticipated this kind of stupidity and made it extremely hard to amend the Constitution. This amendment is even more of a non-starter than the gay marriage amendment. The two thirds of the states these Californians want to disenfranchise will never pass the amendment, and it will die a quick death - if it can even make it out of Congress (which I seriously doubt.)