"This delegate dissonance wasn't anything the Framers of the U.S. Constitution dreamed up. They believed that letting Congress choose the president was a dreadful idea. Without direct election by the people, the Framers said that the executive would lose its independence and vigor and become a mere servant of the legislature. They had the record of revolutionary America to go on."
This is all in the context of an opinion piece dedicated to describing the Democratic Party as inherently undemocratic. Leaving aside that it's John "wiretap 'n' torture" Yoo who's making this argument, it astonishes me that he can't even accurately describe how presidents get elected in this country. Yoo claims that presidents are directly elected by the people so that they can remain independent of Congress. I guess he slept through Constituional Law 101 at Yale because that's not what Article II says (hey, explains his unitary executive theories, too!). Anyone who took elementary civics knows that presidents are chosen by electors who are chosen by the several states, which them makes beholden, if anything, to those several states.
As if this isn't bad enough, Yoo then goes on to describe the 2008 election as akin to that of 1824, where John Quincy Adams won on electors, rather than the popular vote, and the matter was settled in Congress (bad!), just as Art. II, section 1 specifies. Curious Yoo wouldn't think of a more contemporary example like, say, the election of his former boss, but then it wouldn't be a Democrat usurping the will of the people which leaves the question of why the WSJ would publish something like this in the first place.
--Mori Dinauer
