A few days ago there were a number of letters to the editor in the Wall Street Journal calling for the retirement of the Electoral College in favor of direct election via popular vote. Indeed, one letter damned the Electoral College as disenfranchising those who voted for the losing candidates in the various “winner take all” states.
That letter in particular made clear that its writer does not understand the genius of the Founders in creating the College. The common mistake made by detractors of the College is to imagine the United States as a democracy – which it absolutely is not, and never has been, despite the best efforts of progressives to claim otherwise in pursuit of their socialist agenda. The United States is a federal republic of sovereign States, with democratically-elected leaders at every level (at least, ever since the poorly-conceived, populist Seventeenth Amendment was ratified) except for the federal Presidency. The Electoral College, far from being a tool of disenfranchisement as the one writer would have it, is rather a very “small-r” republican institution which distills the essence of partisan, populist democracy (i.e., the popular vote) into a rational and balanced method of choosing a president for the Federal Republic, while preserving at least the perception that the putatively-sovereign States continue to control the Republic of which they are a part. Those States could, if they chose, reassert that control; it is, after all, written right there in the same Constitution that establishes the Electoral College as the way we choose a President.
That being said, it is unlikely that there would be so much smoke and fire regarding the Electoral College if the balance between the three branches of government were not terribly askew. There have been times in our history when Congress was in the ascendant; there have been times (including now) when the Executive was in the ascendant. Rather than creating yet another Constitutional crisis by modifying how we elect the Executive, wouldn’t it be far better for Congress to work actively with the States to reign in the existing Constitutional crisis of an out-of-control Executive and its underlying, bloated bureaucracy?