Dear Group,
I borrow from a New York Times opinion piece from Friday, October 5, “The Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Crisis” by Michael Tomasky:
In the entire history of the court, exactly one justice has been
a) nominated by a president who didn’t win the popular vote and
b) confirmed by a majority of senators who collectively won fewer votes in their last election than did the senators who voted against that justice’s confirmation.
Who was it?
Tomansky goes on:
…it turns out you don’t have to go back very far at all. The answer is Neil Gorsuch.
Donald Trump won just under 46 percent of the popular vote and 2.8 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. And Judge Gorsuch was confirmed by a vote of 54-45. According to Kevin McMahon of Trinity College, who wrote all this up this year in his paper “Will the Supreme Court Still ‘Seldom Stray Very Far’?: Regime Politics in a Polarized America,” the 54 senators who voted to elevate Judge Gorsuch had received around 54 million votes, and the 45 senators who opposed him got more than 73 million. That’s 58 percent to 42 percent.
Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed the next day, October 6, by a vote of 50 to 48, surely making Kavanaugh even more of a minority justice than Gorsuch.
With this Republican/Libertarian minority takeover of the judicial branch of government we should not be surprised to find the Electoral College has become an article of faith for the Republican Party, even an article of religious faith among a extreme segment of “evangelical” Christianity. It should also come as no surprise this same segment wants to present itself as representative of all Christians.
WeBeleiveWeVote.com is the glaring, Stevens/Spokane County local example. Their voter guide advertisement appeared this year on yard signs at homes and churches, complete with their cross and flag logo. Any hurried Christian who feels a lack of time to research actual candidates is invited to vote the WeBelieveWeVote slate of candidates as exclusively representative of Christian values. From their website: “The vision of We Believe We Vote is to see our Cities, States and Nation receive more of God’s blessing because we are honoring His laws and Biblical principles in government.” [For more background and funding information for WeBelieveWeVote, click here.]
Ah, so easy! If you consider yourself Christian…vote with us! Only the curious and the diligent will dig deeper on the website to find the Evaluation Criteria under the menu item “About Us,” the last option in the menu bar. I invite you to visit the Criteria to see if they represent your Christian values.
You will look in vain for the Christian values with which I grew up in the United Methodist Church. There is no mention of “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” no empathy, no mention of rich men and needles’ eyes, only pronouncements concerning the regulation of other people’s lives according to a particular literal interpretation of the Bible.
Way down the page of “Evaluation Criteria” as the eleventh point of evaluation we find: “Our Position: The Electoral College System was written into the US Constitution to assure proportionate representation for rural citizens and smaller states. We agree in [sic] the Electoral College system.”
Since when is the Electoral College System considered a tenet of Christian faith? Check out the complete list of “values” on the Evaluation Criteria webpage of WeBelieveWeVote. As a Christian or as one brought up as a Christian, do you recognize any of the evaluation criteria as your Christian values? At the top of the page they leave no doubt: “Below are the issues and position statements used to determine candidate alignment with We Believe We Vote values.”
The We Believe We Vote criteria are about political power, not Christian values. Fealty to the Electoral College System is simply code for the maintenance of minority-control government, the minority government that just stole two Supreme Court seats from the majority of voters.
It is no coincidence McMorris Rodgers hails from Stevens County, the likely origin of We Believe We Vote, a place where auctioning off an AR-15 at a Republican fundraiser seems completely natural, a place where far right fundamentalist Christianity and Republican/Libertarian politics have melded into a seamless whole. WeBelieveWeVote rates McMorris Rodgers as “Highly aligned with WBWV.”
Both McMorris Rodgers and the folks behind We Believe We Vote would like you to believe your Christian values and theirs are the same, avoiding any need to consider what their values really are. Encourage your friends to take a closer look. These “values” are not my parent’s, my grandparent’s, or my Christian values.
The Electoral College System is not neither a Christian value nor is it sacred.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry
P.S. As a friend observed, a visit to WeBelieveWeVote.com can serve a useful purpose: clearly identifying those for whom NOT to vote, once you understand the criteria.
P.P.S. On the positive side of the equation check out the ProgressiveVotersGuide.com.