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Originally Posted by djmilf
That's not a point that Whittle was making, he was just stating a demostratable fact and therefore it's not open to discussion.
You did watch and understand the entire video that you linked, didn't you? Why can't you recite any of the points Whittle was making?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by swagger
Why do you have to play games? If you disagree with something he said in the interview, then you should be able to elaborate on that, without help from anyone else.
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So you posted a video but can't even discuss the main points of it? Doesn't that mean that you don't understand it?
Here's
some of my disagreements with Mr Whittle:
(1) He claims that the states elect the president. They don't. Article Two, Section One, Clause Two:
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Each State shall appoint, in such a Manner as the Legislature thereof shall direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
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The various state legislatures only choose the electors for the Electoral College. These electors are prohibited from being current political office holders. And when the election results in no clear majority for the President goes to the House of Representatives for a one-state/one-vote election run-off.
And there's a lot of reasons why the Founding Fathers chose to create the Electoral College and why neither the various states nor the US Congress directly pick the President and Vice President. And Whittle doesn't
even begin to cover these facts.
(2) Whittle claims that the Electoral college is designed so that the President has to be elected by the entire country. He's wrong and there are many instances to prove it. Heck, just review the Presidential Election maps for the entire history of the United States.
(3) Whittle states that in a national popular presidential election then a candidate would only have to campaign in the cities of New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Miami and San Francisco to win the popular vote. The metropolitan statistical areas for these cities only amount to 20% of the population of the nation. Even if Whittle's strawman candidate did manage to win every single vote in those cities he'd still need to drum up another 30% of the population outside of those cities to win election.
(4) Whittle's a little loose with his arithmetic, claiming that California's 54 electoral votes are fully a quarter of the votes needed to win the presidential election "if not more". Actually, the 55 California electoral votes are only about 20% of the 270 needed; Whittle seems to get lost in his own fear and doom rhetoric.
But Whittle's point about those 55 California electoral votes is that the California Legislature doesn't have the constitutional authority to (in the actual words of the Constitution) "Each State shall appoint, in such a Manner as the Legislature thereof shall direct, a Number of Electors". In the early days of the American Republic some states simply did appoint electors without recourse to a local popular vote. In the 2000 presidential Florida's state legislature was moving towards resolving the Bush-Gore election problem by simply choosing the Electoral College delegates without reguard to the popular election.
(5) Whittle says that the people in San Francisco are different than the people on the Louisiana Bayou. Well duh! Whittle ticks off a whole list of locations designed to showcase liberal cities versus conservative areas. He starts talking about the different "cultures" during this diatribe and at the end makes the fantastical statement that these are actually "vastly different countries". Last I looked, we were still one country.
(6) Towards the end, Whittle makes a speech:
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The whole purpose of America as a republic was to take power, take it into the federal government, diverse it into the states and then drop the rest of the power down to the people. Spread it out so that no one person can grab all of it and do the god-awful things that happen throughout history when one person has all of the power.
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Whittle totally misses the mark on this one. The Articles of Confederation predate the Constitution; it was the Constitution that made the republic. And the purpose of the Constitution was to take some sovereign power from the states and concentrate into a national government and NOT to spread the power out further.
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Now that's just some of points made by Whittle that I find to be either questionable or just flat-out wrong.
Are there any other points you'd like me to discuss, or are you still unable to discuss the video that you posted?
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