Shownotes Transcript
In this episode of Life Matters Brian Johnston explains how the Constitution outlines the method for electing presidents (Article II; and the 12th Amendment).
The media culture, and even many Republicans that have not read the 12th amendment, are pressuring the public and the Trump administration into believing that popular acclaim, particularly when enforced by a media society, is our method of election.
Brian takes a deep dive into the methods that are being pursued at this moment by the Trump administration, and the guidance of the 12th amendment.
In particular Brian explains the historical thinking of America’s founders, who in fact, were British patriots. The British Patriot Movement was a political movement of the British Parliament that fought for the voice of every nation within the United Kingdom. It was a movement that began in 1725, fifty years before America’s revolution.
In essence, it was a reaction against the bureaucratic manipulations of Sir Robert Walpole, who surreptitiously created a form of deep state within the parliament and engineered vast personal power by arrogating to himself vast powers under his newly created office of Prime Minister. In so doing, he cornered the power of the London newspapers and shared power only with English friends, graduates of Oxford in Cambridge, “the insiders”.
Patriot members of parliament were comprised of representatives of the Midlands, Wales, Scotland and Ireland who saw the need for the British Empire to be representative. The patriot movement was very popular in British colonies as well, particularly in North America.
Members of parliament such as Jonathan Swift, Edmund Burke, joined with William Pitt the elder to fight and suppress the deep state which Walpole was creating in the heart of London.
Pitt, in 1850, actually gained control briefly and true to his movement lifted the Intolerable Acts, and the Stamp Act which had oppressed the colonies, whom he felt had every right to elect their own representatives and have their own courts. Had Pitt remained Prime Minister most historians agree there would never have been an American Revolution.
But the British patriots were removed from power in 1856, and their respect for local authority and representative government was quickly dismissed by the new Tory government and the odious taxes were again resumed. The patriot movement in the colonies however continued to blossom, creating the Constitution and revolution we now know.
Because of this parliamentary concern of the British patriots that local authority be recognized, the American Constitution insured the power of the states, not only in electing the U.S. Senate by legislatures, and also electing the U.S. president by state legislatures, via the electoral college.
The election of 2020 should have followed the model outlined in the Constitution which cedes any failure of the electoral college to reach a consensus, directly to the House in Congress, specifically to vote by state delegation. Again the states, not the easily manipulated populous, elect our President under the Constitution.