Election and Secession

We sort of deserve this, do we not?

A tie.

Before you Democrats out there get all a tither because you heard on CNN that a tie means this election gets tossed to the House of Representatives, read your Constitution again. In such a scenario, each STATE’s representation in the House gets one vote. And get this, in such a scenario, the OrangeMan would triumph because 26 (yes 26) of the 50 state delegations are majority GOP. Added to that, Mike Pence would also win because per the 12th Amendment, the VP is chosen by the Senate, again held by Republicans.

Of course, should the above scenarios play out, pandemonium would ensue because if you think for a moment those same leftists who howled at the moon in November 2016 are going to sit idly by and take this one, well, you’ve got another thing coming.

The solution is so obvious though, and it is one for which we libertarians have been arguing for years; namely, secession.

What do career bureaucrats in D.C. know about the resources of Idaho?

What does New York have in common with Mississippi?

Why does a dumb majority of voters get to empower plutocrats to wield coercive power over a dumb minority of voters?

You see, if 2020 has taught us anything and if we indeed are anything just above the worst students of all time, it is that this political and social arrangement just is not working–this national, hyper-centralized union that is. In fact, it has not been working for a very long time as it was destined to fail from nearly its inception.

First, erase everything your high school history teacher (unless it was me) and your college American Government prof (again, unless it was me) taught you about the Constitution and American political order. Screw “checks and balances”, and definitely eradicate from your mind the idea that the Constitution established a “democracy”.

Indeed, the most important ingredient of the Constitution was abandoned so early on that it is something of a miracle that the political order it created (somewhat) remains 232 years later. It was the antifederalists–Patrick Henry, George Mason, George Clinton, John Randolph and others–who got it right. The only way this conspiracy-coup of a Constitution would work would be if all recognized that A) the general welfare clause in the document meant non-specific aid (the new national government could not privilege one state, group, constituency, etc. over others) and, B) a concurrent majority, ala. John Calhoun’s brilliant defense of it, would need to be constantly operative in order to ensure that point A would never took place.

That salvific and essential check on the otherwise arbitrary and unlimited power of the federal government, that check that only powerful, sovereign states could offer, is dead. It was wounded in the Whiskey Rebellion; crippled in the Civil War; bled white in the warfare-welfare state; and buried without a memorial today. Sad, because it was the power sharing dynamism of the truly federal nature of the Union that represented the political order’s greatest strength. Now, we have dunces like Patrick Leahy and Amy Klobuchar embarrassing themselves in front of Amy Coney Barrett (a real genius) because they have to, because ACB (they have to sell their Planned Parenthood contributors) might limit the right of Californians to say what Georgians do with their abortion mills. We have two men in their seventies duking it out like in the Disney movie UP! so as to see who can force the respective other half of the electorate to stay on board this sinking ship. Wow.

All that being the case, I really don’t think it will be a tie.

Here’s my electoral college prediction:

Batten down the hatches.