“A Botanist Singapore Sling with Cointreau for Cerise,” Rose recited with a dulcet tone as she handed out drinks in the living room of the family home in Fairfax, “a coconut almond milk vanilla Stoli White Russian with Galliano Ristretto for Katje, a Rémy Martin XO and Grand Marnier Sidecar for Arthur, a double Talisker 18 on the rocks for Tom, Red Bull and Jagermeister for Jason, and an Auchentoshan Triple Wood and Carpano Antica Rob Roy for… Rob Roy! And last but not least,” she proclaimed as she held it aloft, “a Patron Añejo Tequila Sunrise for me! Muchas gracias to Tom for supplying all the top shelf ingredients – and the organic free-range turkey, his own secret-recipe walnut, almond, macadamia and pecan wild rice stuffing, his marvelous fresh Maine island bog cranberry sauce with German linden flower honey and fresh-squeezed Spanish blood orange juice (some of which I made sure he brought along to make this tequila sunrise) and those six absolutely fabulous bottles of wine from Burgundy, Bordeaux and the Loire Valley, too, of course. Now make yourselves comfortable while I take this into the kitchen and get everything ready out in the dining room.”
As regular readers of this Web log know, bartending is a tradition held in high esteem in my family, and Rose takes considerable pride in her skills. Beyond the doors leading from the living room lay a huge Thanksgiving Day feast, complete not only with the aforementioned turkey, dressing and cranberry sauce, but also with a full complement of every other expected accompaniment, prepared by Rose and all the children in her and Arthur’s hordes old enough to work in the kitchen without injuring themselves. And as usual every year, at Katje’s request – demand, actually – that fare had been reinforced by a very respectable variety of vegan dishes. She had slaved all morning since before sunrise in her own kitchen, preparing an alternative feast of tofurkey with vegetable gravy, vegan stuffing, pumpkin sage risotto, clover sprout salad, lentil shepard’s pie, aloe vera casserole, flax seed pudding and so forth, all of which she schlepped over to Rose and Arthur’s abode and none of which anyone but Katje would touch, of course. Such creations as those invariably end up being taken right back to Katje and Rob’s home as leftovers. There, after the inevitable exhaustion of the genuine Thanksgiving doggy bags they never fail to leave without, Jason and Rob Roy stare at them over the dinner table with Katje for the following two or three weeks, finally relenting to consume, as neither of them know how to cook.
“And, now, everybody,” Rose chided in a very pointed Parthian shot as she slid through the doors to the kitchen, filling the living room with a delectable medley of heady culinary aromas, “this year, let’s avoid discussing politics, shall we?”
The longest two minutes and eleven seconds of silence I have experienced in years ensued as we all quietly sipped our drinks and gazed at one another while Jason contemplated his can of Red Bull, his glass of Evian ice cubes and his shot of Jagermeister. At last, he poured the energy drink over the ice, dropped in the shot glass and took a swig.
“Aunt Rose sure picked a ridiculous year to insist on that,” he dryly opined.
“Okay,” Katje opened, “Cerise? Tom? Arthur? Have you signed the Electoral College Petition yet?”
“Mom and Dad have already signed it,” Jason confided with a significant eye roll, “naturally.”
“And you should too!” Katje admonished him.
“Petition?” Arthur asked, mystified. “What petition?”
“She’s talking about the one at Change.org,” Cerise explained. “It’s a petition for the members of the Electoral College to vote for somebody besides Donald Trump on December nineteenth.”
“December nineteenth?” Arthur exclaimed. “What’s this stuff about December nineteenth?”
“That’s when the Electoral College cast their votes for President of the United States,” Cerise continued. “According to the Constitution, they’re the ones who actually elect the president, you know.”
“Oh, yeah?” Arthur barked. “Says who?”
“It’s right there in Article 2, Section 1,” Cerise confirmed.
“Also in the twelfth and twenty-third Amendments,” Jason added.
“Correct,” Cerise agreed. “The states – and the District of Columbia – choose Electors, and after the popular vote is known, the Electors cast their votes for president.”
“All right,” Arthur huffed, “so Donald Trump got more Electors than Hillary Clinton, and so when they vote on – what is it, December nineteenth – he wins and that’s it, right? So what’s this petition about?”
“It’s about the fact that in twenty states, the Electors aren’t legally required to vote for the presidential candidate who received the most votes in their state,” Katje asserted.
“And this petition you’re talking about,” Arthur fumed, “the people who sign it want those Electors to vote for Hillary Clinton?”
“Not necessarily,” Rob Roy told him. “The folks at Change.org, as well as a lot of Democrats, would certainly prefer that, but it’s not essential. What’s important is that those Electors vote for somebody besides Donald Trump.”
“Why would they do that?” Arthur sputtered. “Donald Trump won the election, didn’t he?”
“Actually,” Katje pointed out, “Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, and at this point, it looks like she won it by more than two million votes. That’s the largest margin since the Civil War.”
“You sure?” Arthur demanded.
“Well,” Cerise elaborated, “in any election where the candidate who received more popular votes got fewer Electors, anyway.”
“So it’s like the 2016 World Series,” Arthur scoffed, “where the Chicago Cubs won the most games, but the Cleveland Indians scored more runs. So, where’s the Web site with the petition to give the Cleveland Indians the 2016 World Series, huh?”
“There’s a difference,” Katje hotly replied, “between which baseball club house has some silly trophy in it, and whether or not some bellowing, ignorant, boorish, ludicrous comic opera Hitler is ruling the Free World from the Oval Office!”
“Godwin’s Law,” Jason smirked, “converges mighty quick these days, doesn’t it?”
“Who’s Godwin and what does he have to do with this?” Arthur indignantly demanded.
“Never mind,” Jason shrugged. “We’re talking about the Electoral College, not online discussion thread meme semantics.”
“Oh, a bunch of that post-modern crap, huh?” Arthur griped. “That’s what I figured – trigger points, micro-aggressions, safe spaces – all that nonsense. So tell me, Katje, how many hipsters covered with tattoos who spend all day reading philosophy books written by French commie fairies on their smart phones have signed this stupid petition, anyhow?”
“About four and one half million Americans,” Katje haughtily sniffed back at him, “have petitioned the Electoral College to fulfill the purpose for which the Founding Fathers intended it.”
“Well, all right,” Arthur chuckled, “I’m not going to ask how many of those four and a half million signatures on that Internet petition belong to Seymour Bunns, Phil McCrackin, I.P. Standing, Chuck U. Farley, Ima Hoar, Harry Priapus and their friends. Let’s just assume they’re all legit – so what? Are you saying the Founding Fathers intended the Electoral College to rig elections, just like Donald Trump said they are? Because that’s what it would be, wouldn’t it – a totally rigged situation where the election got stolen from a candidate who played by the rules and won the contest fair and square!”
“The five hundred counties that went for Hillary Clinton,” Rob Roy chimed in, “produce sixty-four percent of the American economy. All the thousands of other counties in the US, the ones that went for Trump, they only produce thirty-six percent. The real American economy voted for Hillary Clinton.”
“And the majority of the American people did too,” Katje repeated.
“And like Trump said,” Arthur superciliously told her, “if the presidential election was decided by the popular vote, he would have just campaigned in New York, California and Florida. And he would have won the election anyway, and more easily, for that matter.”
“The fact remains,” Katje insisted, “that if you gathered together all the people who cast the votes which constituted the majorities Trump won by in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, you couldn’t fill the University of Michigan football stadium with them.”
“For one thing,” Arthur objected, “that happens to be the largest football stadium in the country. And for another, maybe if Hillary had actually campaigned in Michigan, things might have been different. What’s the matter with the Democrats, anyway? Why weren’t they marching through the streets and raising a huge ruckus three weeks before the election instead of three weeks after it? You know what it is? I’ll tell you what it is – the Democrats are all about handing out participation trophies and protecting their children’s self-esteem and giving them do-overs all the time. And now that those coddled little brats have all grown up, and they’ve suddenly realized they totally screwed the pooch, they’re standing there bawling like two-year olds, pitching a fit and demanding a do-over! And if you ask me, that’s what this Electoral College Internet Petition is all about – a bunch of spoiled Democrat babies crying for a do-over!”
“The Democratic Party of the United States is not a bunch of babies crying for a do-over!” Katje shouted. “They are serious, loyal, concerned, involved, committed Americans who, unlike some people I can think of, Arthur, actually care about the rising tides of racism, economic inequality, nativism, bigotry, corporate welfare and global climate change which threaten the very existence of our way of life! And furthermore, Donald J. Trump is too unqualified, ignorant and just plain dangerous to be president! Three days ago, he said that a president can’t have a conflict of interest! That’s just like when Nixon said that if the president does something, it’s automatically legal, no matter what it is!”
“Nixon was an okay president,” Arthur maintained. “He founded the EPA, didn’t he? He got us out of Vietnam, didn’t he? Aren’t those things you Democrats like?”
“Richard… Milhous… Nixon,” Katje muttered between clenched teeth, “was insane!”
“He did kind of nearly destroy our system of government,” Jason noted, “sort of.”
“And he did have to resign in disgrace,” Rob Roy added. “I guess Katje’s just saying that there’s still time for the Electoral College to do something so America doesn’t have to almost come apart at the seams like that again.”
“Horse hockey!” Arthur bellowed. “I say, the Electoral College is not there for sore losers to get a do-over and rob the presidency from a deserving patriot like Donald Trump!”
“On the other hand,” I interjected, “in Federalist Paper Number Sixty-eight, Alexander Hamilton stated that although the Electoral College should be informed by what he called ‘a sense of the people’ as expressed by their votes for president, the final choice should remain with those ‘most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station’ of the presidency. So, in fact, a very reasonable argument could be made that the Electoral College exists specifically for the purpose of giving the Republic the opportunity to have a ‘do-over,’ as you put it, if, for example, something comes up that convinces them the person with the most Electoral votes doesn’t possess the necessary ‘qualities adapted to the station’ of the presidency.”
“Like telling the world he’s above the law,” Katje suggested, “or refusing to put his international hotel business in a genuine blind trust and have his family run it while he’s president instead, or refusing to release his taxes so we can see what kind of dealings he’s been doing with Putin, or telling the Queen of England who Her government should appoint as the British ambassador to the United States, or naming a white supremacist as his…
“God damn it!” Arthur interrupted. “Like Trump says, Alexander Hamilton is over-rated!”
“Trump said the Broadway musical named Hamilton is over-rated, Arthur,” Cerise emended, as politely and respectfully as possible. “I don’t believe he’s ever actually said anything one way or the other about that fellow whose portrait is on the ten dollar bill.”
“Well,” Arthur growled, “I bet as soon as Trump finds out what Alexander Hamilton said about the Electoral College, he’ll be tweeting about it in a New York minute!”
At that, Jason took a deep draught of his Jagerbomb, knit his brow and peered up at the ceiling, composing something in his mind. “Oh, yeah, I can see it now: ‘Sneaky @ AlexanderHamilton said steal presidency with scam in @ ElectoralCollege – good thing @ AaronBurr shot him. Hash-tag AwesomeTrumpWonGetOverIt.’”
“I thought,” Rose scolded as she re-entered the living room, “that we were all going to avoid discussing politics this Thanksgiving!”
For some reason, the thirty eight seconds of silence following that remark seemed considerably longer than the two minutes and eleven seconds which had preceded our conversation.
“Um… hey, Arthur,” Rob Roy tentatively volunteered, “what’s up with Kanye West, anyway, huh?”
“Ahh…” Arthur waved his left hand dismissively as he rose from his chair with his cocktail, “simple nervous exhaustion, that’s all.”
“You really think so?” Cerise inquired as we all stood up and began filing into the dining room. “Couldn’t there be something more to it?”