Jesse Wegman > Quotes

“Campaign managers and other staffers point to at least three major benefits that would flow from a national popular vote: more public participation, more political moderation, and more presidential legitimacy.”
― Jesse Wegman, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College

“Any informed debate about how and why we have an Electoral College must begin with these often forgotten circumstances of its birth. It was not, as many of us learned in school, a brilliant part of the framers’ plan. It did not reflect any coherent political theory but flowed instead from deals the delegates had made in response to the specific conflicts they faced at a particular moment in history. It was settled on only after every other method failed to win enough support. It was, in the words of one constitutional scholar, a “Frankenstein compromise,” adopted mainly so the delegates could finish their work and go home.”
― Jesse Wegman, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College

“In theory, at least, the Union’s victory in the Civil War had reaffirmed the supremacy of the national government over the states. But of course the states of the former Confederacy had not come back willingly. They rejoined the union at gunpoint, and only after being forced to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and rewrite their state constitutions to ensure equal rights for newly freed blacks. Even then, it took the constant presence of federal troops, who fanned out across the South, to fight off attempts by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists to intimidate, terrorize, or murder black citizens who dared try to cast a ballot.”
― Jesse Wegman, Let the People Pick the President: The Case for Abolishing the Electoral College

“Let my soul dwell with Common Sense.”
― Jesse Wegman, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution

“According to originalists, the Constitution means what it was understood to mean at the time of its adoption. If Wilson’s role in that critical period is erased, the originalist meaning of the Constitution is distorted.”
― Jesse Wegman, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People's Constitution