Luck with that, good.
Posted on 10/19/2017 9:57:17 AM PDT by blueyon
A liberal-led push to overhaul the Electoral College could be moving from the op-ed pages to the courtroom, as a Harvard professor who flirted with a dark-horse Democratic presidential bid last year vows litigation to change the system.
Criticism of the Electoral College was resurgent in the wake of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 loss. Clinton recently said she wants the system "eliminated." The latest effort isn’t aimed at dismantling the structure entirely – but rather, the winner-take-all system used by 48 states in awarding electors, which ends up focusing presidential races on a handful of battlegrounds.
“With a winner-take-all, most of America is ignored,” professor Lawrence Lessig said in previewing his legal case – which, like any challenge to the Electoral College, faces a steep uphill climb.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Here in NY, they would have had to give 35% of The electoral votes to trump. They won’t abide that here.
The election of two Senators per state regardless of the state’s population also “violates the 14th Amendment’s one-man-one-vote principle.” The “one-man-one-vote” principle is totally irrelevant to the election of Senators and the appointment of electors.
Luck with that, good.
Unfortunately, the Constitution now says whatever the hell five out of nine Supreme Court Justices want it to say at any time.
I have no doubt they can find an Obama appointed district judge to rule their way and maybe get the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to go along, but I doubt they can convince 5 of the current Supreme Court Justices to go along. It is close though. The four far left-wing liberals on the Court will go along with anything that keeps liberals in power.
I bet President Ninth Circuit (the true ruler of this country) will decide to end the Electoral College.
The bigger error is that the phrase “one man, one vote” cannot be found in the 14th Amendment.
DEMOCRATS READ THE CONSTITUTION!!
I have NO ISSUE with doing away with the Electoral College, as long as the Constitution is changed.
Same for gun control - I have no issue with confiscation of guns...as long as the Second Amendment is repealed first (and good luck there!).
There is nothing stopping the state legislature from declaring that there will be no popular vote, and that the electors will be assigned by a vote of legislators.
-PJ
Manhattan is less than 0.041% of the land mass of the State of NY. If you add the land mass of all of the boroughs of NYC it is around 0.55% of the land mass of NY state. All of these liberals complaining about representative government essentially want the people living in these small areas of America to determine how the entire rest of America lives. That, is not representative. That essentially means that no one living in a rural environment, including those who produce the food that the people in Manhattan eat, would have a voice at all. Would the Democrats be in favor of apportioning electoral votes in a manner that factors in the land mass of the counties that vote? I highly doubt it.
True enough, but it also flips Texas around some, too. There are liberal enclaves in TX, just like every other state...
After the election I did some back of the envelope calculations, +2 EV for every state won, and dividing the rest based on the House of Reps elections. IIRC, the results were roughly the same.
The article does mention it.
What proponents of the National Popular Vote don't tell you is that the compact is not necessary.
Any state can pass a law now to award their Electoral College vote to the winner of the national popular vote on its own. Why will no state step up and unilaterally do this to be a leader for the cause?
Why are they hiding behind this need to have a compact of 270 votes lined up before making the change? Why won't some liberal state lead by example, take that first step, and just do it now?
-PJ
South Carolina didn’t chose electors based on popular vote until 1868.
Want? No, that is indeed what they are doing and getting. Frightening to see the rule of law literally crumbling before our very eyes.
Most of us here would agree that holding out hope that ANYONE goes to jail for all of this corruption is NOT going to happen.
The rule of law is DEAD and we’re kidding ourselves otherwise. I wish one day I’d wake up to see people in hand cuffs, but I think it’s just wishful thinking. We’ve been entirely betrayed by the vast majority of “public servants”.
I am all for California and New York doing it.
I'd like to see a discussion of the National Popular Vote movement relative to Article IV Section 4:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government...According to Wikipedia:
This clause, sometimes referred to as the Guarantee Clause, has long been at the fore-front of the debate about the rights of citizens vis-à-vis the government. The Guarantee Clause mandates that all U.S. states must be grounded in republican principles such as the consent of the governed. By ensuring that all states must have the same basic republican philosophy the Guarantee Clause is one of several portions of the Constitution which mandates symmetric federalism between the states. ...The Federalist Papers also give us some insight as to the intent of the Founders. A republican form of government is distinguished from a direct democracy, which the Founding Fathers had no intentions of entering. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10, "Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
The National Popular Vote movement certainly creates an asymmetric federalism between the states by having half the country's states voting separately while the other half votes as a direct democracy bloc.
Even if Congress accepted the National Popular Vote compact, wouldn't it still be a violation of Article IV Section 4?
-PJ
Until the late 1960s, in several Southern states, unpledged electors were on the ballot instead of Presidential candidates. Once elected, the electors could vote for whichever candidate they wanted to vote for. Consequently, the popular vote totals for Presidential elections prior to 1968 are estimates, since in some states no one voted for a Presidential candidate.
I think National Popular Vote scam would clearly violate Article IV Section 4. It is also a pretty blatant attempt to circumvent Article II, Section 1, Article V, and the 12th Amendment.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.