A Republican congressman from Tennessee wants to amend the U.S. Constitution to allow Donald Trump to serve a third term. It’s a bad amendment as written; the language Andy Ogles proposes reads “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms” — ridiculously allowing the current president to serve again while disallowing Bill Clinton or George W. Bush or Barack Obama from doing so.
But if this were done fairly, it just might make sense, provided it was paired with a far bigger, far more important idea: abolishing the Electoral College.
One can argue with a straight face that failing to allow voters to elect the president of their choice is an infringement on representative democracy. In one defensible worldview, giving voters the freedom to keep the man or woman they prefer at the tiller honors the will of the people more than imposing arbitrary term limits.
But there’s no defensible worldview in which presidents should be chosen by a cockamamie system that gives small states disproportionate weight and throws all votes in almost every state to whoever wins their plurality.
The Electoral College is so distorting, so bizarre, nobody on earth would come up with it if asked to design a fair way to choose a national leader. The least populous state in the union, Wyoming with a little more than half a million people, has three votes (two for two senators, one for one member of Congress) — as do other tiny states like Vermont, Alaska and the Dakotas. California, with nearly 40 million residents, has 54 electoral votes.
So a state with 66 times more people than another has just 18 times its electoral votes, which means Wyomingites’ votes are nearly four times as powerful as Californians’ in the race to rack up the magic number of 270. We’d call it a funhouse mirror, but it’s not funny at all.
It gets even worse when you add in the fact that winning California or Texas or Florida by even a single vote sways all of that state’s 54, 40 or 30 votes into a candidate’s column, essentially throwing away millions of ballots.
The smartest nearish-term fix to this abomination is for a critical mass of states to sign onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. States with 209 electoral votes have already signed onto the pledge, which commits to sending all Electoral College votes to whoever wins the most votes nationwide if and when states adding up to the threshold of 270 join in.
Individual states could also start following Maine and Nebraska’s lead and split up their electoral votes rather than doing winner-take-all. The problem with that, however, is that as long as most states remain winner-take-all, those that make the theoretically “fair” decision to apportion their electoral votes proportionately would be punching the dominant party in their own state in the face. That’s what’s called a collective action problem.
A constitutional amendment is a terrific idea. It’s never going to happen because that would require the consent of many of the same states that get inordinate power from the lousy Electoral College. Maybe, just maybe, pairing it with permission for Trump to run again could do the trick. Call it a modest proposal.