The founders were biased against knuckleheads, Gov. Walz

Editor’s note: The powers that be at WND.com have told Michael Ackley he may submit the occasional column. As Golden State madness has accelerated, Ackley continues to give in to the urge to stay in the game. Hence, the items below. Remember that his columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell the difference.

In every presidential election year, some knucklehead suggests the replacement of the Electoral College with the selection of our chief executive by direct, popular vote.

This year’s (self-described) knucklehead is the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president of the United States, Timothy James Walz, the incumbent governor of the great State of Minnesota.

Walz, speaking at the home of our own knucklehead, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, said, “I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go. We need a national popular vote.”

Here we find the expression of this quadrennial illusion, whereby the election year’s designated knucklehead shows that he thinks, “I’m really smarter than the nation’s founding fathers.”

Those founding knuckleheads would include Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. Each of these characters was a genius, educated in the classics and a disciplined thinker. Madison, for example, completed the four-year curriculum at Kings College (later Princeton University) in two years.

Further, lacking cellular telephones and video games, they read books, meaning they read everything.

And they understood everything in a moral context because they read the works of the great thinkers of Western civilization, from the authors of the Bible up through the intellects of the Enlightenment. These included those exponents of natural rights, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Hamilton, Madison and Jay were philosophers, in the broad sense of the term. And so the great political challenge of their time, the drafting of the Constitution, was wrestled out philosophically.

Regarding the Electoral College, the authors of the Federalist Papers showed they were republicans, not democrats.

Hamilton demonstrated this in Federalist No. 68 by explaining that the election of the president “should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station.” They would need to be “a small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass,” who “will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations.”

In other words, the electors should be people of discernment, like Hamilton, Madison and Jay. In still other words, they shouldn’t be knuckleheads picked from the general mass of voters.

One may argue that today’s electors – selected state by state – may include a generous admixture of knuckleheads, because today’s “statesmen” are not the educated geniuses of yesteryear. But even without the kind of philosophical giants who drafted the Constitution, the Electoral College yet fulfills the founders’ intention of protecting the nation as a whole from the “mobocracy” of direct election.

This is because the Electoral College prevents America’s great concentrations of knuckleheads – in places like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco – from overwhelming the precincts of quiet consideration and discernment. “Flyover country,” if you will.

Speaking of philosophy: There has been very little philosophizing over the issue Democratic nominee Kamala Harris has made her campaign’s central focus. That would be abortion.

This is discussed as if abortion were simply a word that is the equivalent of “a woman’s right to choose.” Nearly absent from the debate has been mention of the inchoate life that abortion destroys.

As the late Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde argued, the DNA of a new person is encoded at conception. From the start, the now much modified 1977 Hyde Amendment – which forbids the use of federal funds for abortions – included protection for women impregnated by rape or incest or whose lives were threatened by carrying a baby to term.

As the Harris campaign has focused solely on women’s rights, GOP nominee Donald Trump has yet to emphasize the philosophical – and real-world – issue of the child in the womb.

This remains the thorniest moral conflict of our time. Roe v. Wade muffled debate for decades, but the issue remains. If the matter is too difficult for the knuckleheads, where are the statesmen with the courage to tackle it?