Posted on 04/21/2014 8:22:59 AM PDT by Cheerio
Conservatives and leading liberals slammed the campaign to effectively end the Electoral College's role in presidential elections, saying that the National Popular Vote Compact Law circumvents the Constitution, saying it resembled President Barack Obama's abuse of the law through his extensive use of executive orders.
"It is pretty startling," Bill Kristol, founder and editor of The Weekly Standard, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV this week. "If they want to make the case for the popular election of presidents and a Constitutional amendment, they should make the case.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
This is what the left does. Politics is war to them. The sooner the right realizes this the better.
“A republic if you can keep it”-Benjamin Franklin
Art I, Section 10: No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, ... enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State...
Supreme Court decision would be necessary to determine if this is constitutional.
On the one hand, the Constitution gives each state legislature absolute authority to determine how its electors are chosen.
OTOH, the Constitution prohibits compacts between states without permission of Congress.
Does this thing fall into the category of prohibited interstate compacts? I have no idea.
Of course, if Congress were to agree it would be indisputably constitutional.
Great minds and all that.
There is no national popular vote as such.
We have 50 state elections, plus an election in the District of Columbia, to choose electors to the electoral college.
I need to brush up on the constitution, but, I think elections are always conducted by the states, within the states, with the federal government having very limited roles in how elections are conducted.
The 12th amendment indicates that states choose their electors to the electoral college. They aren’t even required to choose electors by popular vote. Every state does use the popular vote, but are not required to.
This plan is sunk if any state decided not to have a popular vote for presidential electors. Then you would be comparing apples to oranges to try to determine the national popular vote winner.
The left wants mob rule...
They want the cities to rule and ignore the parts that feeds them and provides energy.
The liberals want this because they are still angry about the 2000 election.
Does everyone else remember, on election night 2000, Bush was slightly ahead in the unofficial national popular vote.
But then, the next day, Gore had pulled ahead slightly. Perhaps due to voting the graveyards and other shenanigans in various places around the country???
It is quite possible that the liberals could manipulate the popular vote totals in various places, to try to push their candidate over the top in this national popular vote total.
Imagine Florida style recounts in the whole country, rather than restricted to a particular close state.
Remember in 2000 in Florida, Bush was ahead in the popular vote in Florida by about 1,900 votes on election night. After three weeks of recounting, taking into account the hanging chads and dimpled chads and all that, the final official margin ended up being 537 votes.
How was it that Bush had a 1,900 vote margin in the original tally, but Gore picked up 1,400 extra votes in the Florida recount?????
I guess I figure, in an election with a clear margin of victory, the electoral vote and popular vote winner would be the same anyway. And in a close election, the liberals will try to steal it, whether within individual states, or in a nationwide popular vote tally.
Relegating us to serfdom.
Conservatives realize that. The problem is that the GOPe work for the Rats and their jobs it only to appear to oppose them.
This time.
And when their little scheme doesn’t work out for them, they’ll want to switch the process back.
This “compact” of states is quite odd, really. It is a law within a state that awards that state’s electoral votes to the winner of the popular election in that and other states. It is as if decisions about local issues were, by statute, determined on the basis of what the electorate in Nevada decides to do. Perhaps I should argue for legislation in Rhode Island that determines the state income tax rate to be whatever the people of Texas decide it should be. Or better yet, whatever the people of Estonia deem best. Perhaps the state of Vermont could subordinate sanitation laws to the popular consensus in Mumbai. This opens up all sorts of fun ideas. However, it doesn’t make much sense unless you expect socialists to dominate all national votes for all time going forward. It homogenizes and subordinates states to a socialist federal gov’t.
The whole push for a "national popular vote" gained momentum after the 2000 and 2004 elections. I've been under the impression that the whole issue died off after Obama was elected in 2008.
Even these popular vote agreements that have been passed in state legislatures are idiotic no matter how you look at them. The problem is that all of the states that have passed these measures are deep "Blue" states, which makes the measures completely one-sided the wrong way, for them. If California, for example, has a law that says its electoral votes will be cast for the candidate who wins the national popular vote, then there are only two scenarios that could unfold in any given presidential election:
(1) a Democrat wins the national popular vote and California's electoral votes are cast for the Democratic candidate ... who would have won more popular votes in California anyway.
(1) a Republican wins the national popular vote, and California's electoral votes are cast for the Republican candidate ... even though the Democrat would have won more votes in California.
The whole thing is a joke. If this measure had been in effect in California in 2000, then California's electoral votes would have remained unchanged (Gore won California).
If this measure had been in effect in California in 2004, then California's electoral votes would have gone to Bush even though Kerry won the state by a wide margin.
I fear it will turn to bloodshed before then.
Actually, the scheme is anti-democratic, because it nullifies the votes of the majority of voters in states who supported the candidate with the lesser popular vote nationally.
Yes, I remember it well.
There was a count and a recount and a re re count and a re re count. Their goal was not a fair election but a scheme to get Gore elected.
And the more they handled the ballots and in all of the chaos of finding new ballots and losing others and not counting the military, etc. etc., it was easier for them to cheat. And, in my mind, there was absolutely no doubt that their plan was to cheat.
This would make every presidential election a landslide, with the winner getting ALL of the electoral college votes. There is something creepy and totalitarian about that.
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