Writing in The Washington Post, Henry Olsen urges Republicans to support Electoral College reform:
That simply cannot stand over time. The majority of Americans will not consent to being ruled by a minority, nor should they. Whatever the republican theory of the founding generation, public opinion now conflates republican government with liberal democracy, and democracy cannot long endure the rule of the majority by a minority.
Here’s Jamelle Bouie’s take:
Beyond the numbers, it is a conceptual error to focus on states in a race for votes. Who wins Virginia has implications for down-ballot races for Congress, but it’s just a curiosity in the fight for the White House. What would count are voters and communities, and candidates would have multiple avenues for building majority coalitions across state lines.
This gets to a larger point. As James Madison observed during the Constitutional Convention, the political interests of the states aren’t actually tied to size. Instead, whether states share interests will depend on shared conditions and connections. Massachusetts and Tennessee have populations of similar size but little in common otherwise; Massachusetts and Connecticut, on the other hand, are linked by history and geography.
Switching topics, at USA Today, Congressman Adam Schiff calls for the public release of the Mueller report after its been analyzed:
The evidence uncovered during that investigation, whether or not it results in criminal charges, is of the utmost importance. It may reflect on a threat to the country’s security, and it cannot be withheld. Congress has a fundamental and overriding interest in obtaining this underlying evidence. The Justice Department and the intelligence community are obligated to share with the intelligence committees any counterintelligence findings and information related to the president or those in his orbit, including evidence collected by the special counsel’s office or ancillary investigations by the FBI. If the president or anyone around him has been compromised by a hostile foreign power — whether criminal or not — that compromise must be exposed to protect the country.
Adam Davidson at The New Yorker writes about what we can expect if the report is released:
Though this report has achieved something like mythological status as a deus ex machina of the Trump Presidency, its formal submission to the Department of Justice will only begin a process that could, if anything, be more confusing and chaotic than much of what has come before. […] Attorney General Barr is not required to release the report that he receives from Mueller or the Justice Department’s views of any potentially illegal actions that the Mueller documents reveal. Members of Congress are free to issue their own reports about what they have learned, and some may release whatever they receive soon after they receive it. It seems highly possible that, instead of one text that addresses all of our questions, there will be multiple secondhand reports, of varying levels of trustworthiness, that will interact with our overwhelmed and fractured media and political system to spread more, not less, confusion. The greatest test of our democracy may be what happens next.
And if you haven’t read it yet, here’s James Comey’s op-ed:
I am rooting for a demonstration to the world — and maybe most of all to our president and his enablers — that the United States has a justice system that works because there are people who believe in it and rise above personal interest and tribalism. That system may reach conclusions they like or it may not, but the apolitical administration of justice is the beating heart of this country. I hope we all get to see that.
On a final note, here’s John Cassidy on Trump’s McCain obsession:
It was Congress that allowed McCain’s body to lie in state at the Capitol, and the Episcopal Church runs the Washington National Cathedral, where the funeral service was held. For his part, Trump didn’t order the flag at the White House to be lowered to half staff until almost forty-eight hours after McCain’s death, and he “stubbornly refused repeated requests from officials as senior as Vice President Mike Pence and John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, to acknowledge Mr. McCain’s death with a formal and unifying statement,” the Times reported at the time.
It should never, ever be forgotten what a resentful, self-absorbed, petty, and insecure husk of a man is occupying the Oval Office, and it never, ever will be forgotten. As he demonstrated again on Wednesday, Donald Trump won’t allow it.