Minority Rule January 17, 2013 If a little thing the Republicans are now cooking up for 2016 had been in place a few weeks ago, the President’s nearly 5 million vote majority would have resulted not in his winning the Electoral College by 126 votes, as he did, but, rather, in his losing it. Rachel shows how. Some of our electoral weirdness was baked into the compromise of 1789, which led — preposterously — to Wyoming’s half million residents today having as much clout in the Senate as California’s 37 million. Seventy times as many people; same number of senators. But some is much more recent. The filibuster, for example. Nowhere to be found in the Constitution, it has given the minority enormous power. Or take Florida. Florida leans slightly Democratic in registrations. Obama won the popular vote — barely. So it’s basically a 50-50 state. How come, then, the Florida Congressional delegation is skewed 17 to 10 in favor of the Republicans? How come in Tallahassee there are 26 Republican state senators to just 14 Democrats? And an even more lopsided 76-44 in the Florida House? And while we’re how-coming . . . how come — though more Americans voted for Democratic Congressional representatives than for Republican — Republicans control the House? Watch Rachel’s clip. Unless we do something, it’s about to get a whole lot worse. DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS My New Yorker cartoonist from Kansas (did you miss Friday?) reminds me that he’s from Kansas City, Missouri — oops — so I got it wrong too. J. Kasley: “The gods in that cartoon were possibly two of the Greco-Roman gods who were always messing with the life of man. It must have been boring to be up there with Zeus with all that perfection floating around, so the only fun was monkeying around with the fate of mankind, the way kids play with ants. Barsotti’s Christian gods generally have halos.”