YOUR VIEW

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I read Mr. McCartney’s letter to the editor with sincere interest in that I agreed with him that “All Americans have a stake in the integrity of our nation and its leadership”, that we have the “responsibility to challenge our leaders when their words and actions become illogical, evasive, petulant” and that “citizens not only elect leaders, but such citizens must also hold them accountable.”

Amen, brother. And for those very reasons, I have spent the past eight (8) years calling and writing President Obama and Sen. Brown to express my displeasure with their policies and voting record. Mr. McCartney is free to do the same for the next four years, and I will fight for his right to do so, although I severely disagree with his positions.

Additionally, Mr. McCartney stated that “Hillary Clinton won the popular election”, to which I must reply, “So what?”. Ours is a nation of partially self-governing states that form a federation and that operates as a republic. Our nation does not operate as a borderless, single body, although there is a centralized federal government, but its powers are specifically limited by the Constitution (Article I, section 8).

Each state holds its own election and the overall results are tallied so that each state has proportional influence. Our Founders deliberately designed a system so the small population states were not made irrelevant by the large population states. For example, each state gets two US Senators and they get US Representatives based on their proportion of the population.

This prevents the situation where a few states (e.g. California, New York) could have complete control both in the legislative branch and in elections and essentially override the will of many other states. Think of this as the original “anti-bullying” law. Talking about her winning the popular vote only has meaning in the context of each individual state.

I truly wish that the media would act as an educator in such matters, but that presupposes that they actually understand, and support, our form of government.

— Kevin Culp

Lewis Center

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