A pro-Trump Mississippi pastor is now claiming to be a “genius” for coming up with an idea on how Republicans can win Senate races. Spoiler alert: it’s not legal and it’s unconstitutional.
Pastor Shane Vaughn is now pushing the idea that states should have their own “Electoral College” that would bypass voting citizens when voting for U.S. senators.
Vaughn used Republican Herschel Walker’s recent loss of the Georgia U.S. Senate runoff to make his case.
“The only way we ever have a Republican president is the Electoral College,” Vaughn said, as Right Wing Watch reports, and in the RWW video below. “We cannot defeat the population centers without the Electoral College.”
“The entire state [of Georgia] is conservatives, all rushing to the polls,” Vaughn continued, falsely.
“They came to the polls that day and blew the numbers out of the water. They were winning their state, they were turning their state in the right direction until they hit that blue area called Atlanta, Georgia,” he lamented. “Good try, all you great citizens of Georgia.”
“Your voice doesn’t matter because you don’t have the majority of the population,” he said, apparently tossing the bedrock of democracy: one person, one vote.
“So therefore, you really shouldn’t have even shown up to vote because we’re going to stop you in the population centers.”
“And I looked across that state, and I said, ‘You know what? Everyone in that state is a conservative except for those two blue dots.’ And that’s when it hit me like a stroke of genius: That’s what the Founding Fathers feared for the nation, but what they feared for the nation is happening in the states,” Vaughn announced, again, falsely.
“The office of a senator is just like the office of the president; it is a statewide campaign. It is statewide. Therefore, I am of the opinion that the only way to save the Senate in the United States of America is that the Senate elections should also be done by the Electoral College of a state.”
Just days after making those claims, Vaughn learned about the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and that America effectively used to elect Senators in the manner he described, except the “Electoral College” for the states was the state legislature. The 17th Amendment, in effect since 1913, allowed for the people to directly elect their own Senators.
Vaughn is now calling for the abolishment of the 17th Amendment.
“What we must do is repeal 17,” he says, again as Right Wing Watch documents in the video below. “Otherwise, you’re going to have a blue House, and a blue Senate, and ladies and gentlemen, you cannot govern that way.”
You can see his remarks below:
Shane Vaughn is now demanding the repeal of the 17th Amendment, which allows for the direct election of U.S. senators, because voters keep electing Democrats: "It's not fair." https://t.co/exKVM1T6at pic.twitter.com/cXci2Cq2VU
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) December 14, 2022
