Writing in the Guardian today, feminist author Jill Filipovic attributes Roe v. Wade’s demise to the fact that “the Republican party proved itself willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get their way; and as a result, Americans are now living in an undemocratic nation of reactionary minority rule.” She continues:
There are a great many points where Democrats could have kept the country on the rails. Chief among them is in the aftermath of the 2000 election, when Al Gore won the popular vote, but the Supreme Court, along partisan lines, installed George W. Bush as president. If the reverse had happened — if our arcane Electoral College system had put a Democratic loser in office over a Republican who won more votes — rest assured that the Republican Party would have gotten rid of that undemocratic institution as soon as it had the chance.
What Filipovic doesn’t note — either because of historical ignorance or strategic omission — is that Republicans did try to abolish the Electoral College, despite having just ridden the system to narrow victory, in the 1968 presidential election. Richard Nixon carried the day with an easy 301 of the 538 electoral votes, but his showing in the popular vote was much narrower — just a 43.4 percent plurality, in contrast to Hubert Humphrey’s 42.7 percent and George Wallace’s 13.5 percent. As Christopher DeMuth writes in National Affairs:
One might have said that the Electoral College proved its worth in 1968 by delivering a clear, incontrovertible national decision from a messy and angry (and violent) campaign year. Instead, two leading proponents of direct national election — Representative Emanuel Celler of New York, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, a member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary — used the occasion to advance a constitutional amendment for direct election. (Their amendment included a run-off election if no candidate received 40% of the vote, so it would not have changed the outcome of the 1968 election — but would have left the victor with a razor-thin plurality rather than a solid majority of the determining vote.) Many prestigious organizations supported the amendment, including the American Bar Association, NAACP, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, League of Women Voters, and AFL-CIO. In the fall of 1969, the amendment passed the House on a vote of 338–70, with stronger support from Republicans than Democrats. Soon afterwards, President Nixon endorsed the amendment and called on the Senate to follow the House’s lead, and the New York Times reported that 30 of the necessary 38 state legislatures had already indicated they would ratify it.
The Senate Judiciary Committee released a majority report, signed by six Democrats and five Republicans, advocating a direct-election constitutional amendment. But a minority report, penned by the legendary conservative intellectual Michael Uhlmann — then just a 30-year-old staffer for Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska — was submitted “in the heat of battle” and helped “to turn a seemingly inexorable political tide,” DeMuth writes:
Shortly after the Senate Judiciary Report appeared in mid-August, Democratic senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota summoned Mike [Uhlmann] to his office. In their meeting, Senator McCarthy told Mike that he had always been a supporter of direct popular election of the president — until reading Mike’s “minority views,” which had altogether changed his mind and convinced him of the wisdom of the Electoral College. Shortly afterwards, Senator McCarthy joined with Senator Ervin in sending an extraordinary letter to their colleagues. It was not a conventional “Dear Colleague” mass mailing, but rather individual letters addressed to each of the other 98 senators. In it, McCarthy and Ervin announced their strong opposition to direct election, urged their colleagues to study the enclosed Judiciary Committee Report (and pointed exclusively to the minority-views section), and embraced Professor [Charles] Black’s position that direct election could be “the most deeply radical amendment which has ever entered the Constitution of the United States.” The letters were delivered on September 15, two days before the first cloture vote, occasioning great surprise and corridor buzz over Senator McCarthy’s sudden epiphany.
Progressives like Filipovic may have forgotten our history, but Uhlmann’s words are as relevant now as they were when they were written. The young staffer defended “the genius of our present method of election” as lying “precisely in its ability to reveal what men have in common and to conceal what they do not.” He noted the shallow partisan nature of many of its criticisms: “For nearly a century-and-a-half the Electoral College has been condemned as the ‘tool’ of every imaginable interest. Conservatives have attacked it for producing liberal Presidents; liberals have attacked it for producing conservative Presidents. Republicans have said that it favors Democrats; Democrats have said that it favors Republicans.” Northerners and southerners; easterners and westerners; “city dwellers” and “rural folk”; small states and large states: “Its list might be expanded to encompass almost every political, sectional, economic, and social interest in the Nation,” Uhlmann wrote. But “the contradictory character of the criticisms is the most potent proof one might adduce to demonstrate that the Electoral College is not now, and never has been, the ‘tool’ of any narrow political, sectional, economic, or social interest.” His closing paragraph speaks to our bitterly divided moment:
Thus, it will not do to say that the Electoral College is antiquated or outmoded; no more viable institution, no more salutary one, will be found today. Let us, if need be, repair it; but let us not abandon it for the sake of a mathematical abstraction, or because we are angry that the world is not perfect.