Not content with just raising taxes and calling it "good for us," Democrats are arriving in this new Congress with big ideas.  Big, big, very big ideas.

No more of that Clintonian reform around the edges, the small-fry midnight basketball thing – Democrat plans today are bigger.  They'd like to start by remodeling the Constitution, for one.  After all, it always seemed to get in the way of their big plans to create a New Soviet, er, American Man, er, Myn, or whatever they call it, so now they're effectively admitting they've never liked it, and now they want to get rid of it.

One of them, incoming Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee, has put out a bill to eradicate the entire electoral college.

According to CNN:

Rep. Steve Cohen has proposed two constitutional amendments, one that would abolish the Electoral College and another that would prohibit presidents from pardoning themselves, their families, members of their administration or their campaign staffs.

The idea is to institute "direct democracy" over the current republican form of government, and ultimately, tyranny of the majority.  They'd very much like to rub out the votes of all those people who live in red states who voted for Trump, those bothersome places such as Wisconsin, which take so much time and effort to travel to.  That way, they can focus solely on coastal blue states and enable their lording it over the red states with no say-so from the latter.

Writer Nick Nolte at Breitbart exposes the issue well:

Desperate to bring the Tyranny of the Majority to our representative democracy, on the first day Democrats assumed control of the House of Representatives, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) submitted a bill to kill the electoral college.

"In two presidential elections since 2000, including the most recent one in which Hillary Clinton won 2.8 million more votes than her opponent, the winner of the popular vote did not win the election because of the distorting effect of the outdated Electoral College," Cohen said in a press release.  "Americans expect and deserve the winner of the popular vote to win office.  More than a century ago, we amended our Constitution to provide for the direct election of U.S. Senators.  It is past time to directly elect our President and Vice President."

Democrat frustration over losing the presidency when they won the most votes is certainly justified.  But it is also their own fault.  If these triggered snowflakes would get over their Red State prejudices and dare to live amongst us, that influence might flip enough states. But they refuse to.  These snobby bigots find Middle America icky, so they cower together in coastal and big city bubbles.

The electoral college was established explicitly to get the thirteen colonies to come together as one nation.  Each colony had been set up earlier as a near sovereign entity, and small states knew that if a single nation with no protection of their interests were to be created, it wouldn't take long for a large state such as New York to be the only game in town as far as elections went.  The small states had every interest in keeping their votes worth something, too, or they would be better off as sovereign nations in their own rights.  So in the compromise that followed, the founding fathers created the Electoral College to ensure equal representation in the choice of a president, without regard for a state's size.  Were it not to have been created, every election would see the influence of New Jersey trounced by the influence of New York, which is why New Jersey chose to oppose any union unless its rights were recognized.

Democrats don't want that.  They never liked the Constitution, and they never liked the electoral college.  Democracy as it exists in the U.S. has always frustrated them, because there's so much they'd like to change about it and can't.  They don't want us having nice sports equipment in our garages, or taking airline trips, or enjoying things elites enjoy based on our ordinary labors.  They want nice things for the elites and Obamacare and gruel for everyone else so as to ensure "proper control."

So very like Hugo Chávez before them, their agenda is rewrite the entire system, not merely pass new laws that could be repealed by a future Congress after the public sees how destructive they are.  They're thinking big.  Perhaps they're doing that, despite just getting their feet in the door, because they're naïve and don't have much appreciation for why laws are the way they are and how protecting minorities is important.  But more likely, it's because they know that socialist ideas don't sell all that well anymore.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez aside, most didn't run on openly socialist platforms, though we know they are socialists anyway.  So instead of having to sell every socialist idea, they opt to just change the system in their favor.

We can see this latest swing at republican democracy in the name of tyranny of the majority as part of a pattern.  We know they already gerrymander districts to manipulate voters for their own benefit.  We also know they changed the rules in California to legalize ballot-harvesting, so that votes could be counted, and counted, and counted, through "helpful" Democratic operatives, including illegal immigrants, until they got the result they wanted.

We also know that they have already made a swing at the primary system, with deep-blue California moving its primary to the forefront in order to end retail politics, and ensure that only big money gets the say-so in the early part of the election.

Now they want the electoral college to go and for tyranny of the majority to take precedence.

These ideas are the very ideas that gave Hugo Chávez the absolute power to turn Venezuela into a hellhole.  One can only hope that Republicans fight them on this tooth and nail to preserve our unique freedoms.

Image credit: Barry Kronenfeld, via Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.