Posted on 05/07/2018 2:19:36 PM PDT by tcrlaf
Connecticut’s legislature has passed a bill that would give the state’s Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote nationally.
The state Senate voted 21-14 on Saturday to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which includes 10 states and the District of Columbia. The state House passed the measure last week, 77 to 73.
The compact requires its members to cast their Electoral College ballots for the presidential candidate who wins the national popular vote. The agreement goes into effect once states representing at least 270 electoral votes — the number needed for a candidate to win the presidency — signs the compact.
Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) has promised to sign the legislation committing his state to the interstate agreement. Once he does so, the compact will have 172 electoral votes. California, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia have already signed the accord.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
On election night, or the morning after, the whiny little ****s supporting whatever nitwit Demagogic Party nominee gets beaten so bad their grandkids can't sit down, will be calling for as many faithless electors to switch sides as necessary, because they don't like the outcome. NPV isn't a good idea just in general, but it's a classic foot-shooting by the Demwits. Thanks tcrlaf.
Norman Williams makes an interesting argument - but I don’t think it would actually hold up.
Article II, Section 1 certainly does give the state legislatures the right to appoint electors in whatever manner they want to do so.
“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”
His argument against this relies, in part, on the decision made in the “U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton” case in 1995. It decided that the states could not impose term limits on their members of Congress.
The argument in favor of allowing the states to imply these limits came from Article I, Section 4, specifically the part that states that the states may set the “Times, Places and Manner” of holding elections for Congress.
The (successful) argument against was that this imposed a new qualification requirement on members of Congress beyond those specified in the Constitution. And since this encroached on Federal authority, it should not be allowed.
Another part of the argument comes from Article I, Section 10, which reads “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress ... enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State”. However, in “Virginia vs Tennessee” (1893) it was decided that this only applied in cases where the compact between the states eroded the powers of the Federal government.
The approach neither places additional qualifications on elected officials, nor does it erode the powers of the Federal government.
No, it isn't just you. Under the status quo, the Connecticut electoral college vote would always go to Democrats. Under their new rules, their vote will have to go to a Republican whenever the GOP candidate wins the national popular vote. The new rule also means that the way CT residents vote doesn't really matter in the election (which will probably mean very low turnout if people think their votes are wasted - which is also bad news for Democrats and good news for us).
I will strongly disagree with you.
Our founders wisely set up the seperate sovereign states as the fundamental building blocks of our Constitutional Republic. One man, one vote is just raw democracy and tends to oppress the minority. Winner take all on a state by state basis is how our founders envisioned the system. That we ate racing toward totalitarian socialist tyranny has nothing to do with winner take all states, and everything to do with the communist infiltration of our schools, news rooms, movie and TV studios, journalism colleges, churches, and every other sacred institution that worked for 200 years, and subsequent brainwashing rhree generations of Americans.
I am reading the constitution exactly as written. “Each state shall APPOINT, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress:....”- Article Two, Section 1, paragraph 2.
If the legislature wanted electors to come form the Clown College it is ENTIRELY within its prerogatives.
The “presidential” vote is a vote for ELECTORS not a person.
Presidents are elected by these ELECTORS who have committed themselves to vote for a particular candidate but are not legally bound to do so.
Electors have the entire power over a presidential appointment.
REPUBLICAN principles are what are guaranteed within the constitution, not democratic principles.
So we elect state legislatures to represent us which then elects electors who then elect a president.
We are a representative republic. In short, the winner of the popular vote only gets a participation trophy.
Wrong again.
“In Luther v. Borden, 326 the Supreme Court established the doctrine that questions arising under this section are political, not judicial, in character and that ‘’it rests with Congress to decide what government is the established one in a State . . . as well as its republican character.’’
https://constitution.findlaw.com/article4/annotation18.html
That’s true, but in that case representatives were representing their constituents. Not so under the compact. They are representing the voters of ALL the states. That’s not a republican form of government WITHIN the state, any more than it would be to apportion electoral votes based on a public opinion poll in Iran.
I think it is going to be too far removed to ruled unconstitutional.
I get the point you are making - and I don’t disagree with the effective outcome of the compact. But I don’t think it is going to be found to be unconstitutional.
The Constitution demands that the states provide a Republican form of government. That is satisfied by allowing the people to elect representatives to their state legislature.
The representatives are under no obligation to check in with their constituency when making decisions from that point on. We hope that they do. We can vote them out of office if they don’t. But once elected, they can base their decisions on any information they choose.
This compact doesn’t impact the state legislators. It impacts the electors that they choose to send to the electoral college. That is an action taken by the legislature - not the selection of the legislature.
So the selection of electors for the Presidential election is really more akin to the legislators passing a law rather than an election being held. It is an action by the sitting legislature.
State legislatures are free to (and often do) look to other states to decide how to vote on various bills. I believe this is going to be looked at in the same way.
Interestingly, there is also nothing in the Constitution that says how the electors in the electoral college vote. Any of them could get there and cast a different vote than what was expected of them. At the Federal level, there is nothing that can be done about that. While that isn’t really relevant directly to the current conversation, I think that the separation and freedom of action is similar and will have bearing on any judicial decision.
This action is unconstitutional. States can’t unilaterally determine how the Electoral College system works. Bunch of losers still crying over 2016.
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They could just flip a coin, I suppose. How's THAT for voter suppression? Not much worse than what they're pulling now, I suppose. However, at this particular juncture in US history, it's all moot.
At some point maybe it will be understood that a breaking point was reached during the previous regime, and the decision was made that fundamental reform was going to happen no matter what.
Hillary was not going to be installed as POTUS, period. No matter what.
The reform operation underway now will not be derailed by an election, assassination, FF, or anything else. No matter what.
This is where we are, and we all know perfectly well exactly how we got here. Whatever these states do or don't do, matters not a whit.
That doesn’t contradict what I’ve said. The clause concerns the responsibilities of the Federal government. The only one, therefore, that can violate it, is the Federal government, if they were to fail to uphold those responsibilities.
I take “heads”.
The clause means that the federal government is obligated to ensure the states provide their citizens with a republican form of government. So they have every right to rule a state law unconstitutional on that basis.
I think there’s a clear difference between an legislator who might “look to other states to decide how to vote on various bills” and mandating that each elector MUST represent the will of voters outside the state. That’s crossing a line and should clearly be unconstitutional if the meaning is taken seriously.
“The clause means that the federal government is obligated to ensure the states provide their citizens with a republican form of government.”
Yes, exactly. The clause obligates the federal government, not the states. So only the federal government can fail to live up to that obligation, and thereby violate the clause.
Not being a constitutional scholar nor a SCOTUS scholar, I can't argue the merits of the ruling.
However, I can offer the lay observation that this clause might have been intended to keep states from ganging up on each other, rather than erode federal power (that's a rather insular view coming from a federal branch, BTW).
For instance, what is to prevent all the coal-producing states from forming a compact amongst themselves to deny coal to the rest of the union? There is no "federal power" involved, but a compact like this would surely hurt the nation.
What if coastal states compacted to deny fish to the heartland states, or heartland states compacted to deny wheat to the coastal states?
Wouldn't Congress want to step in and stop these practices from happening
-PJ
If you can’t understand by now that the clause can be applied by the federal government to rule the compact unconstitutional then I guess no amount of explanation is going to help.
But I don’t think it is going to be found to be unconstitutional...
I agree, and with what follows.
This compact doesn’t impact the state legislators. It impacts the electors that they choose to send to the electoral college.
It's the word "choose" that is troublesome. With the NPV compact, the legislatures are "choosing" to let the nation-at-large "choose" for them, instead of the people of their own state. In effect, the voters of a state will still not know, after their own state's vote is counted, who won their state.
I say that it's troublesome not from a constitutional perspective, but from the idea that a state is sovereign and makes its own vote for the executive. This sovereignty is now subordinated to the votes of the largest states. Perfectly constitutional to me, but troublesome if I were a voter in that state.
Interestingly, there is also nothing in the Constitution that says how the electors in the electoral college vote. Any of them could get there and cast a different vote than what was expected of them.
To me, this is unchanged from the current method. The NPV compact is not a simple scoring mechanism where the state's EV goes to the national popular vote winner; the actual mechanic would be that the predetermined slate associated with the candidate who wins the NPV will go to the Electoral College. At that point, it's still up to the electors to vote their way - they are not required to vote for the popular vote winner although they are assumed to want to do so.
-PJ
If we hadn't drifted so far from the original intention of federalism, this wouldn't be an issue, as there would be no votes to be suppressed.
In federalism, the states are the sovereign government entities of the people. The federal government exists to manage interstate and collective state vs foreign interests. The federal government was never meant to involve itself in the daily lives of the people; that was the role of the state legislatures and the governors.
In federalism, the people voted directly for their representatives in the House, and the state legislatures voted for their representatives in the Senate. Furthermore, the legislatures voted on how to choose electors to the Electoral College for selecting the President of the Executive branch of the federal government, since the federal government was there to serve the state governments as the state governments served the people. The people vote for their state legislators in part based on whom they support for the Senate.
The 17th amendment destroyed federalism in Congress by disconnecting the Senators from the body they represent, that is, the states. There was a symmetry to the people voting for state legislators and federal representatives, and then state legislators in turn vote for Senators. Congress then represents the interests of the people via the House, and the interests of the states via the Senate.
The National Popular Vote movement is an attempt to destroy federalism in the Executive, by bypassing the sovereignty of states and subordinating their unique votes to the will of the population-at-large.
The people were never intended to vote directly for the President, as the President was there to resolve interstate disputes and represent foreign policy collectively for the states. Today, federalism is upside-down. The Senate represents the federal parties first, and the states last. The President serves narrow special-interest groups of the people first, and the states last.
The National Popular Vote movement is a power play by special interests of people to take the selection of the President away from the states and give it to the powerful few, using the ruse of "one person, one vote" as the lure.
-PJ
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