In early May, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, including then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, were told Zelenskiy was seeking advice on how to navigate the difficult position he was in, the two people told the AP. He was concerned President Donald Trump and associates were pressing him to take action that could affect the 2020 U.S. presidential race....

State Department officials in Kyiv and Washington were briefed on Zelenskiy's concerns at least three times, the two sources said. Notes summarizing his worries were circulated within the department, they said.

The briefings and the notes show that U.S. officials knew early that Zelenskiy was feeling pressure to investigate Biden, even though the Ukrainian leader later denied it in a joint news conference with Trump in September.

#58

I think Jeff was trying to say that the slave states representation was lessened than it would have been had slaves been counted fully equal to non-slave citizens, though he stated it awkwardly. But as usual, your points are dead on.

Why are Republicans who defend the EC such ------- liars?

Because they refuse to understand that the 3/5ths compromise was SOLELY based on using the physical existence of (then) indentured non-citizen slaves to bolster the political power and influence of slaveholding states, nee slaveholders themselves.

States have manufactured boundaries, and if a future day arises where like-minded citizens support such, there is nothing to keep certain liberal-dominated states from dividing themselves into more smaller states - each with at least one congressional representative and two Senators. Californians flirted with such an amendment to create 7 states out of one, with 5 likely being consistently blue. How long do you think it would take Humtake to change his tune if all of a sudden there were say 60 US states and Democrats dominated the EC?

The very reason that this is even a constitutionally legal consideration underscores that the EC is not a democratic construct, it's exactly the opposite. It over-empowers some citizens - while diminishing others' - simple because of where imaginary lines are drawn on paper maps. The EC exists because of the unique proportional status (albeit immoral) its compromise creation afforded slaves to augment the power of slave states. Slavery is no longer legal. Neither should the EC be.

There was a physician on tv this morning that speculated Trump's visit may have been tied to a diagnostic test (likely coronary-based) which would be done prior to an annual physical. He was versed in the vascular medication Trump is taking and stated that he has shown a marked increase in arterial plaque over the last decade and tied the trip to this likelihood, FWIW.

#9

He's being facetious Galaxy, not serious.

To further elaborate, slaves could be killed at the whims of their owners without any legal sanction whatsoever. What other citizens can kill other citizens with impunity? Why this political carveout?

Literally, slave owners bred their slaves to maximize their value and marketability. They could control their numbers and in practice "buy" votes if they increased the number of slaves in their holdings.

Is that consistent with the notion of "one man, one vote" that lies as the basis for democratically-held elections? You obviously haven't thought of how anti-democratic the notion of allowing owners voting power based on their property holdings unique to only slaves.

There is no democratic/republican rationale for such a system to have ever been enshrined other than the political compromises of the times based upon the then realities of trying to form our nascent republic peacefully.

Question Long Form : Design a system that includes slaves but isn't racist.

Why? Should farm animals in the North be counted so that their owners increase their own political power? How about proportional voting based on the amount of acreage owned? Of course not. The system itself was based on a corrupt, dehumanizing premise.

The only reason this topic is considered racist is because the vast majority of slaves were of a different race than those who owned them. The slaves were property as a matter of law, not free individuals who were exercising their God-given constitutional rights as citizens of the United States.

I'm surprised the simplicity of this escapes you: Why should any electoral system allow certain individuals the right to unduly influence government because they own other individuals who - by law - are unable to express their own personal political feelings and views and are treated by these same laws as chattel property, not citizens with constitutional rights?

For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay "Why the South Must Prevail," white Americans are "entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally," anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of "the advanced race.") But America's institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation's oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.

The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in -------. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they'd already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country's slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South's congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.

What's clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states' electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It's the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It's precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.