Explaining the Twelfth Amendment for Those in the Media Who Seem to Be Reading Impaired
By Shipwreckedcrew | Jan 05, 2021 7:30 AM ET
I have already largely completed an article addressing the question of what Vice President Mike Pence might do in an alternative universe under a certain set of hypothetical circumstances on January 6.
But I’ve grown weary from reading articles from online pundits that purport to tell everyone what the Congress is going to do, can do, won’t do, can’t do on Wednesday when it meets in Joint Session.
So, before my other article hits the presses, I’m taking a step back and going through — you know — what is actually WRITTEN in the Twelfth Amendment about counting electoral votes.
The Twelfth Amendment was adopted in June 1804 — ahead of the Presidential election of 1804 — and replaced the provision regarding the function of the Electoral College that was set forth in Art. II, Sec. 1, Clause 3 of the Constitution as originally drafted.
The purpose of the Amendment was to address the extraordinarily close outcomes of the Presidential election in 1796 and 1800. The process set forth in the Constitution had resulted in the election of a President and Vice President from different political parties in 1796 — which turned out to be problematic since the one-party was pro-British and the other was pro-French in the armed hostilities between the two countries at the time.
In 1800, a tie in the Electoral College vote led to 36 ballots in the House of Representatives before it finally elected Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr — both from the Democrat-Republican Party. Both had received the same number of Electoral Votes since under the original system each elector cast 2 votes without distinguishing between a vote for President and a vote for Vice President.
The Twelfth Amendment was passed to remedy the deficiencies of the original Electoral College as they had been revealed in the first two times it was used to determine a contested election — George Washington having been elected twice without opposition.
Now that we know “why†we have a Twelfth Amendment, let’s set aside the various idiot punditocracy pronouncements about what happens by ….. let’s say ….. READING THE TEXT!!
I’m going to break it down here in the individual component parts revealed by the text (I’ve redacted some of the language not necessary to understand the process):
more w/explanation
https://redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2021/01/05/explaining-the-twelfth-amendment-for-those-who-seem-to-be-reading-impaired-n304483
