June 22nd 2020

By Thom Hartmann

George W. Bush and Donald Trump both lost the popular vote, by a half-million and 3 million votes respectively, yet occupied the White House even though a majority of Americans didn’t want them there.

Similarly, in 2012 Democrats got 1.4 million more votes nationwide for the House of Representatives, yet that body was controlled by Republicans with a 33 seat “majority.”

There are numerous states where the majority vote goes for Democrats, producing a Democratic governor, but, because of gerrymandering, the state legislatures and their congressional delegations are still controlled by Republicans.

Fully 59 million Americans, in fact, live under such “minority rule“ in states where Republicans control their legislatures even though a majority of the legislative votes in the past election were cast for Democrats.

And now, according to reporting in the Guardian, corporations like Chevron and Citigroup are pouring money into Republican operations to not only maintain minority rule, but to expand it.

And billionaire-funded rightwing groups like Freedomworks are actively reaching out to millions of Americans saying that allowing us to vote by mail during this pandemic would amount to “voter fraud,” the largely nonexistent bogeyman they have used for years to throw tens of millions of Americans off voting rolls and prevent people from voting.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg is reporting that China has decided they want Donald Trump to stay in the White House. This report follows by just a few days the release of John Bolton‘s book in which he says that Donald Trump begged China’s President Xi to help him get reelected.

Donald Trump in losing in poll after poll, but Republicans continue to rule numerous states where republicans got the fewest number of votes. And the last two Republican presidents were not elected by the majority of Americans because of the electoral college.

The Supreme Court has ruled that Americans don’t have a constitutional right to vote, which is a large part of the reason for this situation. If we don’t get money out of our politics and enforce the laws against foreign meddling in our elections, we may well see the end of the American experiment in democracy. The stakes have never been higher.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.