Seth✞🇺🇸

We need to bury the Electoral College. States' rights don't matter. America needs to move on and modernize. The Electoral College is already dead: The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Chiafalo v. Washington (2020) that "electors are not free agents." So the wise, independent electors that our Founders envisioned simply do not exist, and have not for 200 years. All that is left is a stupid rule that gave the presidency to the loser of the national vote in 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016, and in 2000 turned on merely 537 votes in one state. Nobody would design that system today if given the chance, and nobody designed it for today either. States' rights do not matter. Many of these state borders come from colonial charters, land grants and surveyors, and today they exist mostly to give state party machines something to gerrymander. Americans in Pennsylvania and Americans in Ohio live under the same trade policy and the same federal labor law, and these arbitrary surveyor's lines are supposed to make them feel like strangers. America needs to modernize. We run a continental industrial republic on a political map drawn for 13 states. Nearly everything else about American life has been rebuilt since 1787: the economy, the army, the money. The way we choose the people who govern us is the thing we have modernized least, and we are paying for it horribly today. Could someone point out where the Constitution says "We the States"? You won't find it. The Constitution opens with three words, and none of them is the name of a state: "We the People." The people ordained it. Let's be honest about what "states' rights" has done with its time. It protected slavery and sheltered Jim Crow. Calhoun, the philosopher of slavery, built the doctrine of nullification from it. Again and again, it has meant the right of one region to do something the American people have stopped tolerating. The framers had already tried a "states' rights" system. The Articles of Confederation called the union "a firm league of friendship," and the league could not feed an army or pay its own debts, so they threw it out and wrote a government. Several of the men who wrote the Constitution wanted the states kept on a short leash. Madison, the Constitution's principal architect, asked for "a negative in all cases whatsoever on the legislative acts of the states." Hamilton (though an elitist who should be critiqued as one) proposed that every state law contrary to the national constitution be "utterly void." Wilson, who signed both the Declaration and the Constitution, wrote that "to the Constitution of the United States the term sovereign is totally unknown." In 1832, President Jackson told South Carolina that "the Constitution of the United States, then, forms a government, not a league," and that "we are one people in the choice of president and vice president." Yet, as Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10, "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property," and "the regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation." The real divisions in American life are the divisions in how people make their living. Should we not build a system that addresses the American producer? The American economy has outgrown the states since 1787. Our railroads do not stop at a state border. Nor do wages, loans, tariffs or supply chains. By 1912, Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party had understood that America demanded "strong National regulation of inter-State corporations," because no state can regulate something that it cannot contain within its own borders. In 2024, federal lobbying hit a record $4.4 billion, according to OpenSecrets. Every private industry, trade association, bank and drug company already has a seat at the table of politics. Yet the American nurse, farmer, line worker and small manufacturer who actually run this country have none. Our economic parliament is bought, unelected, and closed to productive Americans. That is why it is fate that America leaves behind this regressive ideology of appealing to states' rights. A continental economy must be represented by its interests. We face two choices ahead. Will our true economic rulers continue to operate in the shadows, or will we build a system in which representation is open, equal and democratic? If we refuse to modernize, we will find our choices made for us by whoever can pay the most. The Articles of Confederation gave way to the US Constitution because the country had outgrown them. The Constitution's electoral map faces the same problem today. America must finish the job. We must build a representative body in which the working and producing orders of American life speak for themselves: Farmers, wage workers, small business owners, manufacturers, engineers and professionals, teachers, nurses, veterans, savers and builders. Let them be chosen by the people who do the work, on one national ballot, answerable to them and to no state party machine. This change will take an amendment. So did every change in American history that mattered. Reformers fought for the democratic election of senators for decades, from the Populists in the 1890s to Teddy Roosevelt's Progressives in 1912, and the 17th Amendment made it law in 1913. The Reconstruction Amendments turned a union of states into one unified people. This is the next step in that political tradition. This does not mean giving up your hometown, your county fair, or your state's good ideas. It means remembering that we are all Americans, we belong to something greater, and it belongs to us as well. We are not a rounding error in some state's delegation. The government should answer to We the People. So we beg that same American people: Come help us build the America of tomorrow.