Finished Another Book Today

It's amazing how much you actually use the tip of your right thumb! I cut it bad yesterday trying to open a latch at Tom's baseball game yesterday. Score keeping can be dangerous! Well...for me anyway.

I finished reading "Easy Lessons on the Constitution" this morning. It's a great little book, but it was written in 1891, so some of the questions are a little dated. It does give a pretty good explanation of how our Constitution works and it's written for kids, so it's right up my alley! I'm thinking most adults today would have trouble keeping up with this book though. And I know they don't teach any of this in depth in our modern high schools, which is a sad state of affairs really. How do we keep our liberty if so few understand how our system is supposed to work?

One quote for you from the very end of the book. "These lessons have failed entirely of their purpose if they have not excited a desire to know much more of our system of government and to become better prepared to assume these responsibilities. If the great experiment in free government now trying in our country is to be successful, the masses of her citizens must be intelligent as well as virtuous. They must understand her institutions and glory in their citizenship."

I don't think the book failed. I want more and I want to do more.

Electoral College

No, it's not somewhere you go!

So, today's page of Easy Lesson on the Constitution was about the Electoral College. I'm so confused. The Constitution says this:

Article 2, Section1, Clause 2
"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."

Why would we not just let the people vote for president? Because states with very small populations would not have any voice in the election. Small states have at least three votes in the Electoral College system.

But! The States choose the electors and tell them how to vote. Not sure how that is just yet. I'm working on it. But California gives all 55 of its votes to the winner of the popular election. I'm not really sure how that is right though. If 55% votes for one candidate and 45% votes for another, the electoral votes are not split up accordingly, they are all given to the majority winner. Hmm...

There is a call to get rid of the Electoral College all together, but I'm thinking that the guys that came up with the system had a lot more historical/philosophical knowledge than all of our current Congress combined, so until one of them can come up with a sound reason why it was made up in the first place and how human nature and history have changed so much in the last few years that we have to throw it out and go with another system, I'm not even going to consider it.