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Focus on real issues

By Staff | May 9, 2019

Without much effort, we can name five real questions that presidential candidates of any political party should spend time answering while they are on the 2020 campaign trail.

Here goes:

1. Even with Obamacare in place, thousands of Americans still have no health insurance at all, or have insurance that doesn’t serve them very well. How do you propose to fix this?

2. How do we ensure the solvency of Social Security in the years and decades ahead as more Americans continue to retire?

3. Do you support an eventual full ban on the extraction and/or use of coal, oil and natural gas in the U.S.? If so, how do we meet ever-increasing global energy needs?

4. As our nation continues adapting to the realities of the 21st century economy, specifically further globalization and automation as it relates to physical labor, how do we create living-wage jobs for those who lack bachelor’s degrees?

5. How do we reach the point at which poor white people in Appalachia are not blaming poor African-Americans and Latinos in places such as Chicago for their problems, and vice versa?

We could easily continue, but you probably get the idea.

Despite these obvious problems, several Democratic presidential candidates – along with some Democrats in Congress and in the media – continue pounding the drum of abolishing the Electoral College. This is a complete waste of time for multiple reasons, but the most obvious is there is no chance the 2020 election will be contested by a popular vote.

Because the Electoral College is specifically part of the Constitution, the only way to end it is to pass a constitutional amendment. According to the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the Constitution provides that an amendment may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in BOTH the House of Representatives and the Senate, or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the state legislatures.

At this point, it is unlikely half the Senate would vote to eliminate the Electoral College, much less two-thirds. This is also true of the 50 individual state legislatures.

Therefore, the 2020 presidential election will be contested the same way it has since the days of President George Washington. Democrats should accept this and do their best to win, just as they did as recently as 2012.

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