One of the more ridiculous arguments put forward by the genius’s defenders is that the Democrats are trying to overturn the will of the people and the election of 2016. Let’s set aside the fact that if that argument held water, any impeachment would be off the table, rendering the impeachment clause a dead letter.
This argument comes from the same people who worship at the altar of original intent. So it’s only fair they be reminded that the Founders never intended for there to be presidential elections in the first place. Article 2, Clause 2, which has never been repealed, states as follows:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may 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.
The Founders assumed, in yet another example of their extremely finite wisdom, that the legislature itself would choose the electors, or some other wise men (choice of pronoun definitely intentional), that choice being infinitely wiser than any choice of the majority of the unwashed, as the recent history of electoral college winners/popular vote losers has proven. It is a fact that any legislature so minded could exercise that prerogative today. Presumably, except perhaps in the reddest of states, the voters would have something to say about that the next time those legislators sought re-election, but it remains a fact that it would be perfectly constitutional. Of late, there have been attempts to apportion electors by gerrymandered congressional districts in order to give the bulk of a state’s electoral votes to a Republican instead of all of them to the Democrat that won the popular vote. They tried that in Pennsylvania, but it didn’t pass. The above quoted constitutional provision is also the basis for the ongoing attempt for states representing a majority of electoral votes to form a compact to cast those votes for the nationwide popular vote winner, regardless of the outcome in any of the individual states in the compact. The latter, being a good idea, will never pass, and if it does, the Supreme Court, as presently constituted, will likely find a way to render it unconstitutional in those instances where it results in a Democratic victory.
If you want to get small d democratic about it, convicting Trump would vindicate the real results of the 2016 election.
A little off the main point, but imagine an alternate American history in which the electoral college had functioned as the Founders envisioned. It is extremely unlikely that a system dominated by what would probably have been an increasingly corrupt selection process, manipulated to serve the interests of the moneyed interests, both South and North, would have produced an Abraham Lincoln, or that a Republican Party (as it then was), could have taken power. On the plus side, there would have been no Civil War. On the minus side, black people would still be in some form of slavery, even if it was no longer so denominated, and it is quite likely that by now there would be no representative democracy for the present day Republican Party to destroy. Here’s something that slaveholder Thomas Jefferson said that we should always keep in mind when the sainted Founders are discussed:
Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. …They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human.
He got that right, anyway. The flaws in the constitution are responsible for the decay of our Republic, and the inability of the majority to change that constitution, an inability built into the document, will frustrate any attempt to stave off that decay.
