Both sides of this disagreement believe they are defending the will of the American people, and each is right to some degree. We may never know.
But this disagreement obfuscates another problem, one more insidious, one that, unlike the above disagreement, will remain with us long after inauguration day. That problem is the gaslighting and mass censorship accomplished by mainstream media and big tech social media in combination with the Democratic Party.
The original “corrupt bargain” emerged from the fraught presidential election of 1824. The cooperation of the media and the Democratic Party we witnessed this year is the corrupt bargain of 2020. If this bargain isn’t broken up, then every election hereafter could be stolen ... legally. I say “stolen,” not necessarily because of kraken-level computer hacks, but because of something worse: a hack of the American public mind. This hack subverts the sovereign people’s will and makes them believe the candidate put forward by a small cadre of self-appointed experts is the people’s own choice.
The ‘Corrupt Bargain’ of 1824
In January 1823, John Taylor of Caroline, an aged senator from Virginia, proposed an amendment to the Constitution respecting the election of president and vice president. Taylor was convinced by circumstances surrounding the rise of party politics that the work he and others had done in passing the 12th Amendment 20 years earlier was yet incomplete. The exceptional process of allowing the House of Representatives to elect the president in a contingent election in such circumstances, he feared, was insufficiently republican and too easily susceptible to the accidents and force inherent in the petty divisions within the House.The Senate debated Taylor’s proposed amendment for over a year. In the end, though, it died in the Senate, and then, just four months later, Taylor did too. Just six months after that, in the presidential election of 1824, Taylor’s exact fear was realized.
Of the four candidates—Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and William Crawford—not one garnered 50 percent of the Electoral College vote, and so the election fell to the House. In spite of Jackson winning more electoral votes, the House elected Adams. Shortly after the election, though, a plausible rumor emerged that Adams had offered Clay the position of Secretary of State in his cabinet if Clay’s supporters in the House backed Adams.
Jackson was furious and dubbed the backroom dealing the “corrupt bargain.” He beat Adams over the head with that label for four years, and in 1828 won more than double Adams’s votes in the Electoral College, leaving Adams, like his father before him, a one-term president.
That “corrupt bargain” was exactly the kind of shenanigans that Taylor was hoping to prevent. The contingent election in 1824 allowed “an inconsiderable proportion” of the American people to decide who would be president. Taylor’s proposed constitutional amendment would have required a run-off election within the Electoral College if no candidate won 50 percent, thereby requiring a contingent election only if there was an exact tie after the run-off, a highly unlikely situation.
The American framers of the Constitution always intended the contingent election option to be exceptional. In 1823, however, Taylor could foresee that what was expected to be exceptional was becoming more probable.
From this historical context, today’s opponents of the contingent election, then, appear right in their condemnation of it as anti-republican. They are wrong, though, to conclude that it’s necessarily so, for the framers intended this exception to protect, not subvert, the people’s choice. If five candidates all split the Electoral College vote and four received 19 percent of the vote and one received 24 percent, could it really be said that “the people” had chosen the winner? In such a case, it seems at least more republican for the people’s representatives, voting by state, to choose the best candidate.
The ‘Corrupt Bargain’ of 2020
A more forceful argument, based on undeniable evidence, against a more insidious and more dangerous threat is that of the corrupt bargain of 2020.The guardians of political speech in the United States—mainstream and big tech social media giants—have demonstrated no shame about being the servants of the Democratic Party ever since Donald Trump became a serious political force in 2016. In fact, they have considered it their duty to “resist” Trump in every way possible.
These outrages against the American people are not limited to sins of commission but of omission too: The media has simply ignored stories that would hurt the Democratic Party such as California Rep. Eric Swalwell’s revealed relationship with a suspected Chinese spy.
The pundits and talking heads this week will all focus on the dramatic debate between those members of Congress who oppose and those who favor rejecting the results of the Electoral College in several key states. Just remember, this is all largely a distraction of the corrupt bargain of 1824 variety. A contingent election is not as dangerous to the republican form of government as we will hear.
In fact, the larger, more dangerous threat is the 2020-style corrupt bargain, that between the main levers of mass communication in this country and a single political party. That latter form of corruption will still be with us in two weeks, while the former will likely be only a distant memory by then.
John Taylor could see the constitutional danger that was coming in his day, but his efforts to prevent it failed. In our own day, we have already experienced the ill effects of the corrupt bargain of 2020. Will we continue to do nothing, or will Republicans somehow follow Andrew Jackson’s example and use the revealing of this corruption to their advantage in 2024?