Leila's Lines- Week 6

What is The Squad?

During the 2018 midterms, four women of color and first-time candidates were elected to congress. This tetrad has claimed the name “The Squad” and is composed of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley. As they gained popularity, they became the subject of Trump’s ridicule; his tweets once read “why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” Aside from the completely incorrect grammar, this tweet is quite nonsensical considering three of the four women in question were actually born in the United States. And the fourth woman, Ilhan Omar, is a naturalized citizen after becoming a Somalian refugee. Essentially, Trump is telling them to go back to the United States to fix the crime...sounds about right.

Tlaib and Omar were the first Muslim women to Congress, and Omar became the first woman to wear a hijab in Congress. Ocasio-Cortez was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and Pressley became the first Black woman from Massachusetts to win a House seat. Because of their historical victories, CBS did an interview on the group. To supplement the interview, the group posed for a picture and, jokingly, Ocasio-Cortez suggested each woman posts the picture with #squadgoals. The group’s name may be attributed to this picture and the popularity it gained.

The Pelosi House approved a border funding bill, which led liberals like members of The Squad to think that the House was granting too much control to Trump to misallocate the funding. Pelosi neglected these serious concerns under the impression that the group was “only” four people out of the much greater group of congresspeople. Ocasio-Cortez did not let Pelosi ignore their opinions, explaining that Pelosi was engaging in the “singling out of newly-elected women of color." This conflict between squad members and other members of the House sparked a string of Trump’s tweets, including his comments about how he thinks they should go back to where they came from. He then continued to express beliefs that The Squad doesn’t “love America” and is actually hateful towards the country. Ironic, right?

House election result update (still some undecided):

• 218 Democrats (flipped three seats)

• 203 Republicans (flipped ten seats)

Honoring Suffragettes:

Throughout the 20th century, suffragettes worked to secure the right for women to vote. As the first woman vice president-elect, Kalama Harris, delivered her first speech on November 7, she likely gave a nod to these suffragettes with her white suit.

This past year, the Democratic Women's Caucus in the House organized an effort to have all the women in Congress wear white during Trump’s State of the Union speeches to honor suffragettes. When Clinton accepted her nomination for the Democratic Party, she, too, wore white in honor of the suffragettes. Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice presential candidate, also wore white during her nomination acceptance. Furthermore, Harris’ niece wore white in honor of the suffragettes.

On Saturday, November 7, Harris said, "all the women who have worked to secure and protect the right to vote for over a century – 100 years ago with the 19th Amendment, 55 years ago with the Voting Rights Act and now in 2020 with a new generation of women in our country who cast their ballots and continued their fight for the fundamental right to vote and be heard."

Flaws of the Electoral College:

The framers of the Constitution didn’t think that candidates would be well known enough on a national level due to the lack of quickly spread information. Therefore, they crafted the idea of state electors who were wealthy, white men (which were characteristics often synonymous with being educated) in order to vote for the president on their state’s behalf. This idea is completely irrelevant in today’s modern society; information is widely and quickly spread through a myriad of media platforms ranging from news shows to social media pages. The idea that Americans would not know the candidates well enough to elect them themselves is completely inaccurate with the advancements of mass media. Especially during this election, I’ve seen social media become a strong drive in the movement to register people for voting, educate people about candidates and their voting rights, and encourage people to show up to vote.

Furthermore, wealthy, white men should no longer be the face of politics today. Framers thought of these people as the most capable of making decisions within the nation’s government, but that should not stand today. I understand that the electoral college is more so an idea and electors are generally faithful to their state’s popular vote, but the idea that there needs to be another level of people to make the decisions rather than the people making them directly is completely invalidated by today’s standards and has remained unjust since the electoral college’s inception.

The “winner takes all” nature of the electoral college is an ineffective way to elect a president. Essentially, anyone who didn’t vote for whom all their state’s electoral votes go to gets their vote erased, routinely discounting votes. The New York Times put out an interactive map explaining how just 20 counties could determine the outcome of this election. This should simply not be the case. The fact that 20 counties’ outcomes will essentially decide the president is such an undemocratic process. Small counties in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida should not hold such significant power over the entire election process. A vote for a president should count as a vote for that president, regardless of which state the voter resides in.

The electoral college creates safe states. Presidential candidates generally won’t waste their time visiting states that they know they’re going to win; they’ll divert their energy towards swaying voters in battleground states. This also means that candidates’ policies and promises will align more so with the people’s desires of those battleground states; the candidates somewhat neglect the wants and needs of citizens in safe states. We saw this in this election with Biden’s promise to protect fracking which appealed to Pennsylvania’s’ union members, key voters in such an important swing state.

In the 1960s, Senator Bayh tried to abolish the electoral college and replace it with a popular vote, and his efforts were actually somewhat successful. The amendment passed through the House, but as it made its way through the Senate, three Southern segregationalist senators led the charge to block the debate, which killed the idea altogether. Bayh died on the Senate floor in a filibuster, and the push to abolish the electoral college hasn’t gone as far since. Time and time again, the Republican Party benefits from the disparity in outcome of the popular vote versus the electoral votes. So, until both parties see the flaws in the system and feel the negative implications of it, the debate will remain on halt.