By Steve Hunley

The Knoxville News Sentinel came out last week with a milquetoast editorial noting the Democrats, still smarting over the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, want to debate the need for the Electoral College.  Eventually the Sentinel came to the point after traipsing around the edge of the issue.  Not surprisingly, they come down on the side of the Democrats.  The Sentinel cited a forum attended by Congressman Steve Cohen and Congressman John Conyers.  Conyers is an elderly, ultra liberal congressman who has been in Congress since 1965.  Conyers represents the City of Detroit in Congress, while Steve Cohen represents largely the City of Memphis.

The Sentinel cited Hillary Clinton having won more than 2.5 million more popular votes than Donald Trump; Clinton won better than 60% of the vote in California, while Trump won less than 32% in the Golden State.  Clinton’s majority in California was 4,269,978 votes.  Is there any rational person who believes California should pick the President of the United States?  If so, there’s no need to even have an election outside of California and the rest of us would just have to live with whatever choice those folks made, but in the present political climate, you can bet your boots it would be a Democrat, which is the point for these folks prattling about the Electoral College.  America is not a democracy, but rather is a representative Republic.  Hillary Clinton won on the East and West Coasts and in the big cities and was crushed pretty much everywhere else.

We would not even be having this conversation were it not for the fact the leftists and Democrats simply didn’t think Donald Trump could win under any circumstances, either the popular vote or in the Electoral College.  Filmmaker Michael Moore lumbered to Trump Tower and informed the President-Elect he had lost and demanded he step aside.  Moore published the rest of his “to-do list” on Twitter, which was to abolish the Electoral College, electronic voting and “restore the voting rights of former prisoners.”  By “prisoners”, he means convicts and ignores the fact felons have the right to petition a court to restore their rights.  Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, a Clinton ally, attempted to restore the voting rights of 200,000 convicted felons, few, if any, of whom had gone through the legal process to have their rights restored.  McAuliffe did manage to restore the voting rights of 67,000 convicts and some 21,000 of them registered to vote.

Clinton’s strength was almost entirely confined to the Northeast, the West Coast and major metropolitan areas.  She squeaked by in Minnesota, won Illinois, Colorado and New Mexico.  That was it.  If the Electoral College did not exist, cities like San Francisco, Boston, New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles would have outsized influence in determining the election of an American president.  The Democrats would like to confine the rest of us to the status of having the misfortune in living in a “fly-over” state.  Clinton and her campaign team made the crucial mistake of flying over Wisconsin and Michigan and now Democrats are bellowing we need to do away with the Electoral College.

Evidently, these people think everybody else ought to shut up, pay more taxes to pay the way of the Democrats’ favored constituencies and be content to allow them to reshape the country however they wish.

Folks need to read more history. Without the smaller states in this country, from a population and/or geographical standpoint, the American union would not be what it is today.

Things are becoming more and more polarized and if the states that backed Trump formed a new America, the blue states would be bankrupt in about ten minutes.  They ignore one big and pertinent fact: why would any state wish to remain in a Union where they have no say nor any voice?

They wouldn’t.  Think about that.