Yes, the system is ‘rigged’ against Trump, Sanders
Donald Trump won the Georgia primary pretty easily, beating Ted Cruz back on March 1 by 14 percentage points and earning the pledged votes of 42 of Georgia’s 76 delegates to the Republican National Convention.
But that didn’t settle the matter. Oh no.
As a private organization, the Republican Party sets and enforces its own rules. And under Republican Party rules, Trump’s victory did not give him the right to handpick the 42 delegates pledged to him. The right to name those delegates was instead left to Georgia Republicans who attended and ran district conventions over the weekend. And in that part of the process, Trump got thumped. Thanks to the superior organization of the Ted Cruz campaign, many of those 42 official Trump slots will be filled by delegates who actually back Cruz.
Let’s be clear what that means: On the first ballot, those 42 delegates will still have to vote for Trump. However, if Trump fails to win the nomination in that first round and additional balloting is required, those delegates will be free to abandon Trump and follow their conscience to Cruz. Since that same phenomenon is being repeated in the delegate-selection process around the country, the odds are rising that Trump leaves Cleveland without the nomination.
And how would Trump supporters react to their man being “cheated,” as he puts it?
“I hope it doesn’t involve violence,” Trump said this weekend. “I hope it doesn’t. I’m not suggesting that. I don’t think it will. But I will say this, it’s a rigged system, it’s a crooked system.”
He’s right. The system is indeed rigged against him, just as the system in the Democratic Party is rigged against Bernie Sanders. But it is “rigged” for good reason.
The genius of the American system — the key to its survival for more than two centuries — is its ability to let the people govern themselves and make their own decisions while ensuring that self-governance does not devolve into mob rule, where the passions of the moment overwhelm common sense. The Founders in particular were deeply fearful of what James Madison, the chief architect of our Constitution, called “the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority.” As a result, our politics and government are replete with circuit breakers designed to slow and if necessary frustrate the easy expression of popular passions.
That’s why the unwieldy, seemingly anti-democratic Electoral College, not the popular vote, was made the deciding factor in presidential elections. That’s why the Bill of Rights forbids the majority from infringing upon, abridging or disparaging the basic rights of the minority. The presidential veto exists to check temporary passions that might sweep through a legislative body, and the Supreme Court is given the power to override both Congress and the president if populist pressures push them to take unconstitutional action.
The political parties have installed similar checks on populist passions, designed to require second thoughts or even third thoughts before rash action can be taken. The delegate-selection process, the existence of superdelegates on the Democratic side — they are all designed to slow a revolution, to make it more difficult but not to make it impossible.
Those obstacles are a feature, not a bug, and it’s a feature worth preserving.
