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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   26548 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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An actual historian may correct me, but once upon a time in my AP History class going on 25 years ago, we learned that early on in America the President and the Vice President were directly voted on by the Senate, and could even come from different parties! This... didn't work great. The system was quickly revised for the President and Vice President to be a joint ticket. The problem of having an Executive Branch at odds with itself was quickly made manifest.

250 years later, we're putting a Republican President at the top of a Democrat Executive Branch and pretending we haven't just circled back to the same problem. I get if you are a Democrat you are thrilled that a class of professional civil servants is a check on a President you didn't vote for, and an accelerant for a President you did. But you should probably also consider that somewhere in the range of 60% of Americans1 approve of Trump cleaning house and getting the Executive Branch in line with his policy objectives. Maybe because they agree with his agenda, maybe because they understand and have lived through the issues of a divided government, or maybe because they just hate the Federal Government after Covid Tyranny and natural disaster fecklessness.

  1. I saw this in some CNN poll. It might be bullshit, I don't know.

An actual historian may correct me, but once upon a time in my AP History class going on 25 years ago, we learned that early on in America the President and the Vice President were directly voted on by the Senate, and could even come from different parties!

Before 1804 there was still the Electoral College system for electing the President, but whoever got the second-most electoral votes became the Vice President. The Twelfth Amendment was then made which gave us essentially the system we have today.

Perhaps OP is getting confused about the changes introduced by the 12th and the 17th Amendments. The 12th (as you said) gave us the modern system whereby electors vote for both president and vice president, superseding Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. The 17th Amendment provided for the direct election of senators by the people of each state, superseding Article I of the Constitution, under which senators were elected by the state legislatures.

Per Article II and also, with minor changes, per the 12th Amendment, in the event that no presidential candidate achieves a majority of votes in the electoral college, the House will choose the president. But at no time did the Senate ever vote for the president.

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