Source: Liberty News Daily

Following both the 2000 and 2016 presidential elections, the electorate’s stubborn refusal to choose the candidate clearly favored by the media and academic elite led to lamentations over the fact that Americans do not live under an entirely centralized political system administered by supposedly enlightened overseers.

In both of those elections, the Democratic candidate carried population centers on both coasts, while a county-by-county breakdown showed negligible support in what is called “Fly-over America.” One purpose of the Electoral College is to prevent a situation in which a few large states will determine the outcome of the presidential election. Predictably, distraught liberals are once again seeking the abolition of the Electoral College, which impedes their ability to consolidate power. One commentator, author and Washington Post columnist Lawrence R. Samuel, has urged the abolition of the separate states.

According to Samuel, “we need to rethink the notion of the `United States of America.’ Our states are no longer culturally diverse regions with their own respective identities; rather, they are artificially constructed geographic entities that certainly would not be formed today.”

“A federation of states was a wonderful idea in the late 18^th century, but represents an unnecessary and costly burden in the early 21^st,” he continues. “Two layers of government – federal and local – offers a cleaner, more sensible and much more affordable system than our current one,” he contends.

A much sounder idea than abolishing the states that created the federal government would be to reduce the states’ creation to a size appropriate to carrying out its constitutionally specified roles.