If you thought the goal of fundamentally transforming the United States of America began and ended with Barack Obama, think again. The leading Democratic contenders for the White House in 2020 have all outlined plans that would help the liberal wing of their party realize Obama’s dream of converting the nation into a European-style socialist democracy replete with universal health care, endless entitlements, free college, and jobs for everyone.
In order to achieve this utopia, the party first sees a need to dismantle the Electoral College, reconfigure the makeup of the Supreme Court, and beef up their voter enrollment efforts.
Eliminating the Electoral College
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On Monday, presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren voiced her support for eliminating the Electoral College during a town hall broadcast on Monday night, saying, “Every vote matters and the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting, and that means get rid of the Electoral College.”
But eliminating the Electoral College would do precisely the opposite of what Warren is advocating. Far from making every vote count, doing away with the Electoral College would strip sparsely populated states like Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming of their voice in government. Candidates for high office would stop campaigning in such locales, focusing their attention exclusively on massive states like California and New York (which just happen to be Democratic strongholds!).
But there’s another, more calculating reason that Democrats dislike the Electoral College. Namely, so far it has uniquely benefited Republicans whenever one presidential major party candidate has won the popular vote and his opponent has won the electoral vote. It’s only happened four times, the first in 1888, and there is no guarantee that the system will never work in Democrats’ favor, but they would rather hedge their bets.
Packing the Supreme Court
Each of the Democratic candidates has spoken of “reforming” the Supreme Court, which currently has more Republican justices than Democrat and may tilt even more heavily toward the right before Donald Trump leaves office. Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker have all said they want to increase the number of justices so that when they become president, they can offset the Republican majority. Booker has also said he is open to imposing term limits on court members.
Beto O’Rourke is also in favor of retooling the court, although his plan is to start with five judges from each party and let the ten judges appoint five more.
It’s hard to see how this last plan would ever lead to an equitable solution — which “power bloc” would be willing to concede the last vote? — but that presupposes that all justices vote strictly along party lines. Indeed some of them (think Ruth Bader Ginsburg) do, though since his stormy confirmation, the court’s most recently appointed judge, Brett Kavanaugh, has reiterated his intention to preserve Roe v. Wade as law.
Maybe, as with the Electoral College, the Democrats should put a little more faith in the founders and let the system run its course. It may work out in their favor sooner than they think.
Beefing Up the Party’s Voter Enrollment Efforts
The Democrats are eager not only to regain control of all three branches of government but to hold onto it permanently. This has led them to the diabolical scheme I alluded to earlier this month, when I wrote that the party is willing to sell its birthright by opening the southern border to a virtual sea of prospective Democratic voters. If you think I’m exaggerating, look at the language party veterans have begun using when it comes to the question of border security. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on several occasions has referred to border walls as “immoral” and more recently spoke of extending the vote to “newcomers to America,” by which she meant “illegal aliens.”
Two of the candidates for the Democratic nomination, O’Rourke and more recently Gillibrand, are so heavily invested in the “browning of America” that they have come out in favor of tearing down existing border walls.
Opening the borders is an idea the last two Democratic presidents rejected and one that today’s Democrats will come to regret should it ever happen. As I wrote previously, Democrats have no more love for those who illegally enter the U.S. than Republicans do except for their capacity to serve as warm bodies who will vote to keep the Democrats in power. Once Hispanics are here in sufficiently large numbers, there is no reason to suppose that they will not form their own Spanish-speaking party that will seek to oust the Democrats and seize the reins of power.
