Greene County Democrat

Tag: Sen. Elizabeth Warren

  • Newswire: Black Votes Matter: what eliminating the Electoral College would mean for African Americans

    The electoral college has the effect of diluting the Black vote.
    By: Nigel Roberts, NewsOne


    Scrutiny of the Electoral College got was a top trending topic Tuesday morning after CNN’s Don Lemon called for “the entire system” to be overhauled. Lemon’s argument centered on the fact that the United States’ population is increasingly becoming non-white but the Electoral College has resulted in two of the past five presidents being elected without winning the popular vote.
    “We’re going to have to blow up the entire system,” Lemon said Monday night on his show before continuing later: “The minority in this country decides who the judges are and they decide who the president is. Is that fair?”
    Conservatives were mocking Lemon on Tuesday for what they described as his inability to understand the Constitution and the Electoral College body of state electors. But the CNN pundit is not alone in his belief that the Electoral College needs to be reckoned with — especially in the cultural and racial contexts in which Lemon stated his argument.
    To put it simply, Black voters have plenty to gain from replacing the electoral college — a system built originally to protect the interest of white, male slave owners — with selecting presidents through a popular vote.
    Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a 2020 presidential candidate, last year endorsed ending the electoral college during a town hall meeting at Jackson State University, a historically Black college in Mississippi.
    “You know, come a general election, presidential candidates don’t come to places like Mississippi. They also don’t come to places like California and Massachusetts, right? Because we’re not the ‘battleground states,’” Warren said at the time. “Well, my view is that 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, and everybody counts. Everybody. I think everybody ought to have to come and ask for your vote.”
    Looking to 2020, Democratic voters were working to avoid a repeat of 2016, in which Hillary Clinton won nearly 3 million more votes than Donald Trump but lost the electoral college vote.
    In our system, voters do not elect the president directly. Instead, they choose which candidate receives their state’s electors.
    The electoral college is made up of 538 electors who technically cast votes to decide the president and vice president. The candidate who receives a majority of electoral votes (270) wins the presidency.
    The number 538 is the sum of the nation’s 435 Representatives, 100 Senators, and 3 electors given to the District of Columbia. Electors are apportioned to states based on their population, meaning that larger states have more electoral votes than smaller states.
    It’s a winner takes all system. A candidate gets all the electoral votes of a state whether they win it by one vote or one million votes. In 2016, Clinton won huge majorities in racially diverse states like California and New York that ran up her popular vote count but meant relatively little in the electoral college count.
    “In addition to the problem of this winner take all logic, there is also the issue that people in large states are explicitly underrepresented in the electoral college,” according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
    The smallest states are guaranteed at least three electoral votes. Consequently, a small state like Wyoming has one elector for every 195,000 residents. By contrast, California has the most electoral votes (55), but each elector represents every 711,000 residents.
    “White people tend to live in states where their vote counts more, and minorities in places where it counts less,” CEPR noted.
    Wyoming is 84 percent white, compared to California’s 38 percent white population.
    That dynamic means that Black votes count less because they tend to live in large states. African Americans are also many times clustered in large urban communities that are in Republican-leaning states.
    “[The electoral college] dilutes our power,” Rep. Emilia Sykes, an Ohio state lawmaker who has been a leading voice against it, told PBS in 2018. “And we recognize that, and we get it, and we don’t want it. We want our power to be used to its fullest potential.”

  • Elizabeth Warren rebuked for quoting Coretta Scott King while debating Jeff Sessions’ nomination

    Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Coretta Scott King

    By: Paul KaneThe Washington Post

    Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., led a party-line rebuke Tuesday night of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for her speech opposing attorney general nominee Jeff Sessions, striking down her words for impugning the Alabama senator’s character.
    In an extraordinarily rare move, McConnell interrupted Warren’s speech, in a near-empty chamber as the nomination debate heads toward a Wednesday evening vote, and said that she had breached Senate rules by reading past statements against Sessions from figures such as the late senator Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and the late Coretta Scott King.
    “The senator has impugned the motives and conduct of our colleague from Alabama,” McConnell said, then setting up a series of roll-call votes on Warren’s conduct.
    It was the latest clash in the increasingly hostile debate over confirming President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, during which Democrats have accused Republicans of trying to force through nominees without proper vetting. Democrats, unable to stop the confirmations that require simple majorities, have countered by using extreme delay tactics that have dragged out the process longer than any in history for a new president’s Cabinet.
    The Democratic moves, including a round-the-clock debate Tuesday night before Wednesday’s confirmation of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, reached a boiling point during the debate over Sessions.
    McConnell specifically cited portions of a letter that King, the widow of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee in opposition to Sessions’ 1986 nomination to be a federal judge.
    “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens,” King wrote, referencing controversial prosecutions at the time that Sessions served as the U.S. attorney for Alabama. Earlier, Warren read from the 1986 statement of Kennedy, a senior member of the Judiciary Committee who led the opposition then against Sessions, including the Massachusetts Democrat’s concluding line: “He is, I believe, a disgrace to the Justice Department and he should withdraw his nomination and resign his position.”
    The Senate voted, 49 to 43, strictly on party lines, to uphold the ruling that Warren violated rules of debate. Warren is now forbidden from speaking during the remainder of the debate on the nomination of Sessions.
    “I am surprised that the words of Coretta Scott King are not suitable for debate in the United States Senate,” Warren said after McConnell’s motion.
    Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., a freshman, issued a warning to Warren at that point, singling out Kennedy’s “disgrace” comment, and 25 minutes later McConnell came to the floor and set in motion the battle, citing the comments in the King letter as crossing the line.
    Other Democrats later came to her defense, but the liberal firebrand’s speech ended with a simple admonition from Daines: “The senator will take her seat.”
    Warren, a liberal firebrand who some activists want to run for president, took to social media to attack McConnell and Republicans for shutting down her speech.