Probably the best way to begin today would be to warn Donald Trump partisans that I will engage over the next several paragraphs in yet more of what they'll call "whining" about the preposterous second-place president's tragic if legitimate victory.
Perhaps they should avert their eyes or think about their blood pressure before proceeding. We don't want anyone hurt beyond the general pain that has been inflicted already by the application of the rules of the electoral college.
I also am obliged before proceeding to make clear what I am not intending to say in these ensuing paragraphs.
I am not saying we should change the structure of the U.S. Senate, which our founders created to place states above people in a republic, not a democracy--by giving all states, regardless of size, the same number of senators, that being two.
I'm not even saying we should do away with the electoral college, which takes that Senate equality into account and thus prioritizes unpopulated states over those containing much greater concentrations of, you know, people, Americans, voters.
That's mainly because I accept the practicality that we're not going to change the electoral college when Republicans are in control only because of it.
Republicans have lost the popular vote in every presidential election except one since 1992. Yet they have managed to get a second-place president into the Oval Office twice during that time--twice already in this young century. That's thanks to the electoral college's valuing of unpopulated expanses over high concentrations of, you know, people, Americans, voters.
There is no way Republicans would refer a constitutional amendment to let the people decide the presidential selection. That would amount to their suicide.
Even if they did, the greater number of sparsely populated states would prevail in the ratification process over the smaller number of states where there are, you know, lots and lots of people, Americans, voters.
Here, then, is what I am intending to say today.
It's that hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets Saturday to protest the preposterous second-place president because they deem themselves an ignored and stymied majority. They believe themselves forced by the rules to endure the prospect of seismic political, cultural and generational change they didn't choose and don't want and is made possible only by the following quirky parlay of runners-up:
• We have a new president who got nearly 3 million fewer votes than the woman the electoral college proclaimed him the conqueror of. Our executive branch thus is in the hands of the second-place finisher.
• We have the U.S. Senate, the more prominent of the two chambers of the legislative branch, which is controlled by 52 Republicans over 46 Democrats although the aggregate of the popular votes in the 98 state-by-state elections that produced its partisan ratio--in 2012, 2014 and 2016--shows that the Democrats got 17 million more votes nationwide than the Republicans. Our legislative branch--the upper chamber, anyway-- thus is also in the hands of second-place finishers.
• And now, in the exercise of that aforementioned parlay, the second-place executive branch will make nominations to the second-place legislative branch for confirmation of Republican judges to take over the third branch, the judicial. These courts will proceed to make case law for a generation that will restrict women's rights, gay rights and civil rights while making sure rich people maintain their right to spend as much money as they want as secretly as they want to say whatever they want to influence political races.
These second-place finishers will soon redirect the U.S. Supreme Court rightward only because they conspired for nearly all last year to deny the preceding president his constitutional authority to get his nominee considered for a vacancy.
In the face of all that, those of the ignored and stymied majority took to the public square to demonstrate the beauty and power of spontaneous and peaceful protest.
They rallied members of their ignored and stymied majority for the mass exercise of their most precious American freedoms, to assemble and express themselves.
Now they return home to steel themselves as the second-place executive branch and the second-place legislative branch proceed to install against them Scalia Law.
John Adams, James Madison, the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville--they all warned of a "tyranny of the majority" in the American democratic system. Indeed, majorities often have oppressed minorities during the history of this American experiment.
But the 21st century in America has offered irony. I'll not refer to that irony as the tyranny of the minority. Tyranny is a strong word. Language should be applied more cautiously than that, even if the preposterous second-place president doesn't abide by that principle.
I'll simply call this the heyday of the place horse.
And Republicans are about to win the place-horse triple crown.
Second place wins here, there and, soon, everywhere.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 01/24/2017