Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s first Treasury Secretary, was shot to death by Vice President Aaron Burr in a duel in 1804, but he’s attracted fresh interest and popularity 212 years later. He’s the subject of Broadway’s most popular musical in recent memory, and he’s emerged as the new authority and guiding spirit of those seeking to block Donald Trump’s election to the presidency by the Electoral College on December 19.
The recount of votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin is going nowhere; Trump’s victory margin, arguably quite thin, is still great enough to withstand any challenge, so he will remain the winner of their electoral votes. Democratic efforts to persuade Republican electors to desert Trump for Clinton never had a chance—Republican activists in the Electoral College will not vote to elect a Democrat to the White House. But now a group of Democratic electors are attempting to create a bipartisan coalition in the Electoral College which will reject both Trump and Clinton in favor of a more conventional Republican—Mitt Romney or possibly John Kasich. These electors call themselves “Hamilton Electors.”
Hamilton described the Electoral College as “a small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, [who] will be most likely to possess the information and discernment” to pick the best person for the presidency. Using the Electoral College to elect the president, he added, “affords a moral certainty that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
Today’s Hamilton Electors say their plan would produce a better president than Trump while being consistent with Hamilton’s beliefs about how the President should be elected.
I personally think either Romney or Kasich or any of the others who sought the 2016 Republican presidential nomination would be a better president than either Trump or Clinton. And I also understand why the Hamilton Electors, Democrats themselves, are pushing to substitute another Republican for Trump: They cannot possibly entice the Republican electors to vote for Clinton; if they are to have any chance of enlisting Republican electors to help block Trump, they must offer the prospect of electing another Republican instead.
Yet to implement this plan would require electors, Republicans and Democrats alike, to not only break their pledges to vote for their respective parties’ nominees for president, but to reject democracy itself in 2016. Of course, the Democrats are already claiming that to elect Trump over Clinton is to reject democracy, given that Clinton won about 2.5 million more popular votes than Trump. But if electing Trump over Clinton is such an affront, how much more offensive is the rejection of Trump as well as Clinton? After all, Trump did win almost 63 million votes in the general election, not to mention most of the primaries as well. Romney was rejected by the voters in 2012, Kasich placed a poor and distant third in the Republican primaries in 2016, and neither Romney nor Kasich won a single vote in this year’s general election. By all the formal and informal rules shaping this year’s presidential election, Trump won his party’s nomination and a majority in the Electoral College, and it’s the electoral vote, not the popular vote, which counts under the Constitution.
Republicans and Democrats have every right to be concerned with the nature of a Trump presidency, but that doesn’t mean they should conspire to block him by means which, while possibly technically legal, nonetheless undermine today’s democratic values far more than the formal election of Trump by the Electoral College next week will do so. Rather, Trump’s skeptics and political opponents should work within the system, using our structure of separation of powers and checks and balances, to block his policy proposals when they disapprove of them, and offer constructive alternatives instead.
By the way, whatever Hamilton wrote about the Electoral College, the fact remains that he was the founder and first leader of the Federalist Party, and under his leadership it not only nominated Federalist presidential candidates, but Federalist candidates for the Electoral College pledged to vote for their party’s presidential nominees out of party loyalty. Alexander Hamilton did not use the Hamilton Gambit.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville and taught politics and government at Tarleton since 1987. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990 to the present). He was Mayor Pro Tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He is a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and the Stephenville Rotary Club, and does volunteer work for the Boy Scouts of America. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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