Fresh off covering the vice presidential debate, Good Morning America anchor and former Clinton press secretary George Stephanopoulos spent Thursday morning strategizing with liberal activist Ben Sheehan on how to skew elections in favor of Democrats by abolishing the Electoral College. Sheehan, formerly with the left-wing comedy site Funny or Die, was there to promote his new book explaining the Constitution to a younger audience in modern terms. But not once in the whole interview did Stephanopoulos inform the GMA audience of his guest's political work or leanings, including how he founded a political action committee whose sole purpose was to elect Democrats in GOP-controlled swing states.
Instead, Stephanopoulos eagerly inquired about Sheehan’s book, which has earned the praise of Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Handler. The journalist asked his guest to educate viewers about the Electoral College. But for someone who apparently knows the Constitution well enough to write a book on it, Sheehan made one of the most common mistakes distorting the three-fifths compromise while completely ignoring the vital reason for the Electoral College:
STEPHANOPOULOS: So I’m going to put you to the test. Here's a question my kids ask all the time and I do my best to answer it and they're never satisfied. How come the person who gets the most votes in a presidential election doesn't win?
SHEEHAN: So I think it's important to understand the Electoral College by going to what it's based on which is the number of senators and representatives in each state and it's also important to know how those representatives were counted back when the Constitution was written. So apportionment was based on free people counting as one, people who were serving for a fixed amount of time counting as one, Native Americans who weren't taxed counting as zeros and all other persons counting as three-fifths of a person [Stephanopoulos scoffs] and what the effect was, slave holding state has more power and Virginia, for example, had the most enslaved people at the time the Constitution was written and four of the first five presidents were from Virginia.
Of course, Stephanopoulos loved that highly skewed answer. He didn't explain that the framers feared "tyranny of the majority" so the system they came up with balances the competing interests of citizens in both large and small states while protecting smaller states from getting their interests and principles trampled by those in more populated states.
Unconcerned with looking like a liberal hack, Stephanopoulos then schemed with Sheehan on why we need to fix the Electoral College "problem":
STEPHANOPOULOS: You just perfectly illustrated the problem. Does it have to change? [giggles]
SHEEHAN: I think it should. What is unique about the Electoral College for the United States is that we're the only country that elects our leaders in such a way. So I think it's overdue for a refresh.
Democrats would be more than happy to have a few highly populated states decide elections for the whole country from here on out but what's more alarming is how journalists parrot this dangerous propaganda for them.
ABC using covert liberal activists to mislead viewers about the electoral process was paid for by advertisers Volkswagen and Xfinity.
Read the transcript below:
ABC’s Good Morning America
10/8/2020
8:45:07-8:47:38AM EST
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Now a fresh new take on America's most vital document, Ben Sheehan has set out to make the Constitution simple to understand in his new book, "OMG, what does our Constitution actually say? A non-boring guide to how our democracy’s supposed to work.’ You call the Constitution an instruction manual which I guess means by definition it's hard to follow?
BEN SHEEHAN: Yeah well going back and looking at it, the grammar is strange, the punctuation is bizarre. Even though it's in English, in some ways it feels like a different language so I thought maybe by keeping the information the same but giving it sort of a modern refresh it could be understandable to new generations of people.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And how did the idea come to you?
SHEEHAN: So, the work I was doing in 2018, we were doing these events to educate people about the importance of state executive races so governor, secretary of state and attorney general and at these events people would come up to me and start asking questions about Jeff Sessions or Rex Tillerson and it dawned on me they didn't know that they had a state attorney general or a secretary of state so I started investigating civics education and that's which learned that only eight states today require a year of civics or government education at some point between kindergarten and 12th grade so we're teaching less of this than ever and they're going out and entering the world as adults and don't exactly know how the country works so I thought maybe starting with the founding document would be a good way to bring people up to speed.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So I’m going to put you to the test. Here's a question my kids ask all the time and I do my best to answer it and they're never satisfied. How come the person who gets the most votes in a presidential election doesn't win?
SHEEHAN: So I think it's important to understand the Electoral College by going to what it's based on which is the number of senators and representatives in each state and it's also important to know how those representatives were counted back when the Constitution was written. So apportionment was based on free people counting as one, people who were serving for a fixed amount of time counting as one, Native Americans who weren't taxed counting as zeros and all other persons counting as three-fifths of a person [Stephanopoulos scoffs] and what the effect was, slave holding state has more power and Virginia, for example, had the most enslaved people at the time the Constitution was written and four of the first five presidents were from Virginia.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You just perfectly illustrated the problem. Does it have to change? [giggles]
SHEEHAN: I think it should. What is unique about the Electoral College for the United States is that we're the only country that elects our leaders in such a way. So I think it's overdue for a refresh.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Ben Sheehan, thanks very much.
