Many commentators believe that Article Two of the U.S. Constitution, which says the U.S. House chooses the President when no one gets a majority of the electoral college vote, injures independent presidential candidates, or the presidential nominees of new parties. But Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., a member of the Wall Street editorial board and a columnist for that newspaper, writes here that the provision would actually help Michael Bloomberg if he ran for president this year as an independent.
This article at The Moderate Voice discusses Jenkins’ column and quotes extensively from it.
Here is a message that I wrote (to the Sacramento County Central Committee, and the State Central Committee, of the Peace and Freedom Party of California) on the evening of Friday, February 5, 2016, in regard to the presidential election this year:
“After being a truly undecided voter for quite some time now, in this presidential election of 2016, I made a decision this morning to endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States of America. Consequently, I changed my party registration from the Peace and Freedom Party to the Democratic Party and I will vote for the Senator in the California Democratic Party Primary Election on June 7th of this year. Therefore, I must resign from my position on the Sacramento County Central Committee, and the State Central Committee, of the Peace and Freedom Party of California.
This decision is something that I put a lot of study and thought into and I made the choice that is right for me. It is my trust (and expectation) that all the other members of the Peace and Freedom Party are also thinking and doing research regarding this very unique phenomenon — and that each person will make the decision that is the appropriate one for her or him.
Sincerely and warmly,
Phil Sawyer
(Philippe Lawrence Sawyer)”
Phil, too bad that the P&F Party has continually been against working together for the past two decades when they had been continually offerred the plan over and over, year after year, by the United Coalition.
Their chairs Akin and others reacted by physically expelling the United Coalition candadates, just as all party bosses have done, and so the progress for unity has been deep-sixed by those who chose to go behind our shoulders and knock out the good way for unity.
Phil, California law lets voters switch parties only 2 weeks before a primary, so you could have waited until May 24 to do that, over three months away.
The referenced article is not news, it is very poorly reasoned opinion.
The idea that Bloomberg would be elected president by the House of Representatives is insane. If such a fanciful event actually happened, almost every Republican House member would be soundly defeated in the election two years after they betrayed the Republican base and elected the most anti-gun presidential wannabe of our day.
It’s not gonna happen – and IMO, Richard’s continued posting of such idiocy diminishes the trustworthiness of what else is posted here.
There’s not much question that should Mayor Bloomberg run as an independent, with his anti-gun, nanny-state mentality, he will draw more voters from the Democrats than the Republicans. That said, he might win a few electoral votes.
Would that be enough to draw the election into the House of Representatives? We’ll see.
What Don & Bob said.
Don, to many Establishment Republicans, the possibility of Donald Trump winning the R nomination is insane. To many neoliberal Democrats, the possibility of Bernie Sanders winning the D nomination is insane. If Trump and Sanders were the nominees, and Bloomberg managed to get the election thrown to the House between the three of them, is it too outside of the realm of possibility that the Establishment members of Congress would rather vote for one of their own to become president rather than relative outsiders? And do you think they wouldn’t find some way to spin Bloomberg’s anti-gun views away into irrelevance, as they and the corporate news media manage to do with so many other issues? I think you unfairly criticize Richard Winger for continuing to occasionally cover this very real possibility.
There’s a candidate out there already who should satisfy the principled anti-duopolist – Vermin Supreme.
Mandatory tooth care and a pony for everyone!
Joshua H. – Your description of Bloomberg’s election as a “very real possibility” is ridiculous. The actual chance of Bloomberg’s election is negligible (dictionary.com: “so small, trifling, or unimportant that it may safely be neglected or disregarded”).
Bloomberg has a much greater chance of winning through the electoral college than via a Republican House of Representatives. I’d take 100-1 odds against an electoral college win and 1000-1 odds on winning in a Republican House. My guess is that you have no idea of the passion of gun owners and the fury of their revolt should the Republicans appoint Bloomberg. With the next President’s two or three Supreme Court appointees, the 2nd Amendment would become a dead letter under a Bloomberg presidency. You obviously don’t live in a state where the gun issue is a big deal, or you dislike guns. FYI, I live in Wyoming.
The GOP is going to win. Bloomberg will only take New York, and all the other possible states he might take are all Democrat. Plus, there’s no chance Hillary or Bernie will win. Keep in mind that’s just my view.
You don’t need to spell out the definition of negligible, Don, I was a Journalism major and an English minor in college. But you have a point; I might well be underestimating the anger gun owners have at any perceived or real attempt to take away their guns. You might have guessed from my choice of college major/minor that I prefer words instead of guns, although I still believe that responsible gun owners should be able to own and keep their guns, with a few reasonable regulations such as background checks.
Back to the topic at hand, we’re still nine months away from the general election, and a lot can change between now and then. I still think Bloomberg might have a chance if Trump and Sanders are the Republican and Democratic Party nominees, but again you are correct in that it would largely depend on the reaction of gun owners and whether representatives in the House would listen to their constituents, or circle the wagons around their fellow Establishment politician.
But in the end, this is all likely academic, a “what-if” scenario. My guess is that Sanders won’t win the Democratic nomination due to Hillary’s superdelegates, and Bloomberg will back down, seeing as the Establishment has a candidate in the race in the form of Hillary Clinton. And then I’ll most certainly be voting for Jill Stein, and many of Bernie Sanders’ supporters probably would as well.
But Sanders could still surprise me in the end. The D/R primary is the focal point of this entire election.