See the bolded, underlined, black text.
According to the 12th amendment, if a candidate fails to reach the majority of electoral college votes (270), the House of Representatives decides amongst the top 3 vote-getters.
Since the NPV Interstate Compact is not an amendment, the Article VI supremacy clause rules that the 12th amendment supercedes as Constitutional law of the land.
I'm simply pointing out that the NPV Compact is being sold as a method to get around the Electoral College, but it is also a scheme to get around the House of Representatives, too, via circumventing the 12th amendment.
Since an interstate compact requires Congressional consent, one can lobby the House to withhold their consent because they would be ceding away one of their unique powers to a handful of states. Under the NPV Interstate Compact, there would never again be a case where a candidate fails to attain the majority of electoral college votes. It's debatable as to whether that's a good or bad thing.
For those who argue that this is not a compact requiring Congressional consent, I argue that taking away a Constitutional power of the House without their consent, when the remedy is already in the Constitution (Congressionial consent for interstate compacts), then this fact is enough to demand Congressional consent to the compact.
-PJ
It is difficult to sustain the argument that preserving the opportunity for the U.S. House of Representatives to choose the President was ever a significant guiding factor (much less a constitutional imperative) in the choice of the size of the House. In the time between ratification of the 12th Amendment and 2008, the size of the House has been such as to make the size of the Electoral College an even number in only about half of the years in which presidential elections were held.
The Solicitor General’s brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010 in the case of John Tyler Clemons et al. v. United States Department of Commerce traces the history of the various statutes that set the size of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The (ultimately unsuccessful) plaintiff in that case argued that the present-day size of the U.S. House of Representatives is unconstitutionally small because it creates unconstitutionally large differences in the number of people represented by congressmen from different states.
If Congress thought that the opportunity to break a tie in the Electoral College was a constitutional imperative—or even a worthy secondary objective—Congress could have easily accommodated that factor when it periodically adjusted the size of the House.
If it were unconstitutional to enact an electoral arrangement that has the almost-certain practical effect of depriving the U.S. House of Representatives of the opportunity to occasionally choose the President, then the House has operated with a constitutionally impermissible structure for about half of American history.
The contingent election procedure exists in order to resolve a deadlock if one should arise in the Electoral College. The existence of a contingent procedure does not create a constitutional imperative that other statutes be fashioned so as to guarantee that the contingent procedure will be used.
The Solicitor General’s brief shows that Congress did not view protection of its own prerogative to elect the President and Vice President as a factor in setting the size of the House.