Originally Posted by
Flanders
And is it not odd that the ruling was unanimous? Surely, if original intent has any meaning at least one or two justices would have dissented. Not one dissent told me that every justice must believe that the Founding Fathers intended crooks to steal elections.
Now that the Supreme Court has vouchsafed the power of a state to require its presidential electors to vote in line with their state’s popular vote, a new question glimmers in the constitutional mist: Could a state require its electors to vote against the wishes of the state’s own voters? That might seem a ridiculous question. Feature, though, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
It’s a workaround designed to commit the states to use the Electoral College to deliver the presidency to the winner of the national popular vote. It’s the first thing that came to mind when the Supreme Court today unanimously concluded that states have the power to punish faithless electors. Most justices credited the language in Article 2, which grants states the power to appoint electors.
The key phrase is that each state shall appoint its electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” The court, in an opinion by Justice Kagan, reckons this gives the states the power to attach conditions to the electors it appoints, such as the requirement that they vote for the candidate their home-state voters prefer. It can punish them if they don’t.
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, though, is a scheme under which states agree to instruct their electors to ignore what their own state’s voters want and, instead, vote for the winner of the national popular vote. The compact goes into effect when it has been ratified by states whose combined electoral vote count is 270, i.e., enough to choose a president.
So far, some 15 states, with a total electoral vote of 196, have signed the confounded compact. The Sun is against it on the grounds that an Electoral College that handed up Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Calvin Coolidge, and Ronald Reagan, among others, ought not to be trifled with. We can see, though, that it’s newsworthy.
Which is why we’ve written about this issue half a dozen or so times in recent years. And why, after today’s ruling, the Wall Street Journal plated its vast array of presses with an editorial marking the issue. For the court’s decision on faithless electors suggests the Nine might well let a state legislature require the state’s electors to ignore the state’s own voters.
Just to mark the point, what the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact would have done, were it in effect in, say, New York in 2004, is require the Empire State’s votes in the Electoral College to be cast for George W. Bush — even though the Texas Republican lost the popular vote in New York State to Senator John Kerry by a whopping 16 percentage points.
The Journal covers one caveat, which is that the Constitution forbids any state from entering any compact or other agreement with any other state absent the approval of Congress. That prohibition, the Journal warns, could spell heavy sledding at the Supreme Court were the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact ever enacted by enough states to put it into effect.
One reason all this has been on the boil in the past generation is that 2000 and 2016 were both years in which the Electoral College chose a president who’d lost the national popular vote — and, in Mr. Trump’s case, by a substantial tally. That may be the constitutional way of doing things, but it’s not surprising it produces a certain amount of sturm and drang.
So why not simply amend the Constitution to provide for electing presidents by the national popular vote? It seems that such an amendment wouldn’t stand a chance. The Democratic states like, say, New York and California may favor it. The compact, though, makes a mockery of the idea that America is, in part, a confederation of sovereign states. So the big test of whether the Supreme Court is committed to the Electoral College is yet to come.
A brief recap of Socialism/Communism
Socialists/Communists (DEMOCRATS) are determined to abolish the Electoral College by giving the SCOTUS the unconstitutional authority to legislate. They will do anything except call for a constitutional amendment. That is the same incremental strategy Socialists developed in the late 19th century.
Early Socialist planners planted the misconception in the late 19th century when they set out to acquire political power incrementally, while Communists preferred violent revolution.
https://www.justplainpolitics.com/sh...53#post2885553
Note that frustration drove Socialists to adopt violent revolution. Television’s liars tell us about the violence every day without ever connecting the violence in our cities to the never-ending Communist Revolution.
Start the clock in 1913 and you see that incrementalism won victory after victory throughout the judiciary, and in the federal bureaucracies —— most notably transforming this country into democracy’s tyranny one small bite at a time. Basically, countless top Democrats tell us that “We must save our democracy.” They never say ‘We must save our Republic.’ nor will they ever say ‘We must save our individual freedoms.’
On the plus side, Socialist incrementalism ran into a roadblock after decades of trying to make the Second Amendment obsolete; hence, frustration. In short: So long as the Second Amendment is enforced Socialists/Communists everywhere are in danger of losing more than a century of nibbling around the edges.
Finally, I wonder of this sick do-gooder knows she is defending Socialism’s incrementalism:
We feel like we have been Awakened, but this is just one step. There are countless more that need to be taken.
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