|
The examples you give are of a kind that give minorities rights that cannot be overridden by voting. EC and Senate are a very different arrangement - they don't protect any rights as such, they simply give some people more votes than others. Which means that not only those people can then veto majority decisions (even when they don't actually infringe on their rights) - but they can impose legislation that curtails rights of the majority. As for it being a short-sighted view that majority should generally have its way, well, here's Federalist #22, for one: "Every idea of proportion and every rule of fair representation conspire to condemn a principle, which gives to Rhode Island an equal weight in the scale of power with Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or New York; and to Delaware an equal voice in the National deliberations with Pennsylvania, or Virginia, or North Carolina. Its operation contradicts the fundamental maxim of republican Government, which requires that the sense of the majority should prevail. Sophistry may reply, that sovereigns are equal, and that a majority of the votes of the States will be a majority of confederated America. But this kind of logical legerdemain will never counteract the plain suggestions of justice and common sense. It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the People of America; and two thirds of the People of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last. The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on Union, ought readily to renounce a pretension, which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration." Was Hamilton short-sighted when he wrote this criticism? You can argue that it was originally aimed at the Articles of Confederation, not EC and Senate. But it's clear that this is a rather generic criticism, and it's applicable whenever "larger States ... receiving the law from the smaller" becomes commonplace - which depends on how many states there are, and their relative sizes, which have changed a lot since the original 13 colonies. Looking at the outcomes of the presidential and parliamentary elections in the past 20 years, I'd say that this condition is already fully in force, and so is the warning. |