Hear Me Out: The House Should Elect The President

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Society & Culture, News

4.6 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today’s episode of Hear Me Out… Parliamentary America? It’s Super Tuesday, and the process by which we elect a president is on full display (warts and all). Americans on both sides of the aisle agree that the electoral college has to go. But what should replace it? Maxwell Stearns, author of Parliamentary America: The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy (out 3/5/2024), presents his case for restructuring American government to look more like a parliamentary system — and, in the process, to take presidential elections out of the hands of voters and conventions and into the hands of elected coalitions. If you have thoughts you want to share, or an idea for a topic we should tackle, you can email the show: [email protected] Podcast production by Maura Currie. You can skip all the ads in Hear Me Out by joining Slate Plus! Sign up now at slate.com/hearmeoutplus for just $15 a month for your first three months. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Here Me Out. I'm Celeste Hedley. Welcome to Super Tuesday. If you are in one of the 15 states holding elections today and you haven't yet, go vote.
0:11.0	But while you're grabbing your keys, keep listening because we're going to talk
0:15.1	about how we elect the president. In both our presidential primaries and the general
0:20.3	election, voters are not actually directly electing the president.
0:25.3	You are electing delegates to party conventions and the electoral college respectively.
0:30.4	The majority of Americans want the Electoral College gone and to put the popular vote in its place.
0:37.0	But a new book out today argues there's another way forward, one where we the people don't directly vote for the president.
0:44.0	What we really want to do is empower voters.
0:47.0	We want to give them meaningful choices.
0:49.0	And the system that I propose does just that.
0:52.0	It lets them cast two ballots for the House
0:54.8	Representatives in a way that lets them say where they want the coalition to go.
0:59.2	Maxwell Stern's a law professor and author of Parliamentary America joins us in just a moment.
1:05.6	Stay with us.
1:07.6	Welcome back to Hear Me Out. I'm Celeste Hedley. This is Super Tuesday. First things first, please go vote if you haven't done so already. The stakes are high and not just in the presidential contest, but in the smaller races too.
1:23.0	Still, today we'll talk about how we choose the occupant of the White House every four years.
1:29.0	Since the founding of this country, we've had 58 presidential elections and in five of them the winner did not
1:36.1	get the most votes. John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George
1:41.3	W Bush and Donald Trump.
1:43.2	Coincidentally, they were all Republicans except Adams who was in office
1:47.6	before the GOP was founded.
1:49.6	You can lose the popular vote in this country and still win the presidency because our Constitution
	...

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