The 14th amendment and oath-breakers

The 14th amendment and oath-breakers

In the linked video, Michael Pocock, a lawyer correspondent on the Meidas Network expresses his delight at Baude and Paulsen’s white paper, “The Sweep and Force of Section 3” which argues that the 14th amendment to the Constitution prohibits Donald Trump from holding any federal office, including that of President as the clause forbids holding office by former office holders who then participate in insurrection or rebellion. Baude and Paulson are well known and respected judicial scholars and members of the Federalist Society and known supporters of the originalist doctrine of interpretation of the Constitution. The rest of this article, see overleaf, reproduces the powerful abstract and links to two further news commentaries. ...

Citizen voting power in the US

The last article got me thinking about the US electoral college and so I decided to describe the relative power of its citizens using a ratio. Here’s the chart, and it’s coloured in so you can get an idea of who it benefits, if anyone. I was surprised that Texas is the most disenfranchised …

The EC votes are equal to the number of Congress representatives + two to represent the Senators. Each state must have one Congress representative. The apportionment of the Congress representatives was done nearly 10 years ago and things have changed. Wikipedia has a page on this and I used their table to build my chart, although if I had looked harder, they have one similar.

There are three causes of this inequality

  1. Each state gets a vote for each Senator irrespective of the number of voters in the state
  2. There is a floor of three votes/state which explains the difference in influence between the states with three EC votes
  3. Some states have grown in population, and others shrunk; the allocations are 10 years old.
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