RCP Puts Ohio Back Into "Toss Up" Moving Obama Back To 251 EC Votes

See the map here.

Rasmussen Moves North Carolina Into "Toss Up", Leaving Romney With 181 EC Votes

See Rasmussen's map, here.

He had shown North Carolina leaning Romney for quite some time.

RCP Moves Missouri Back Into "Toss Up", Putting Romney At 181 EC Votes

See the history of map changes, here.

Missouri has been changeable since summer, either leaning Romney or a toss up.

Real Clear Politics Gives New Hampshire To Obama, And 269 Electoral College Votes

One vote away from a fait accompli.

Here.

John Hawkins' Mistake: 'A Republican president IS the conservative movement'

In an otherwise sterling clarion call to stop Mitt Romney, John Hawkins of Right Wing News here displays what is fundamentally wrong with America's current conception of itself as a nation:

"A Republican president IS the conservative movement."

If that's true, then why are we bothering electing representatives and Senators? Why not simply go for dictatorship? One almost wonders if this is some weird transposition of a conception of religious vicariousness to politics: one man dying for the nation and all that. 

No. America led by a single (blended strong) man instead of the founders' America of a nation governed through intimate representation is what the last 100 years have been all about. Since 1913 this country has had 435 representatives in the US House when by today it should have grown to 10,267.

Presidents are elected by electors after all, not by the people. I would rather have 10,367 electors next autumn than today's measly, rich, corrupt 535, precisely because a president would have to persuade a lot more of them, not just before inauguration day, but for the entire four years of his term in office thereafter.

As things stand, however, a president ignores the Congress once he gets elected. Obama has done so spectacularly, even when his own party controlled the House. And make no mistake about it, the less represented you are, the happier is Washington DC, the better to stick it to you, my dear.

An adequately sized Congress is the people, not the president, otherwise America is finished, so-called conservative president or no. Representation, not the presidency, was the most significant issue debated in the ratification debates.

That's why Congress is held in record low esteem today: IT DOES NOT REPRESENT US.

California Becomes Ninth State Seeking To Overthrow Electoral College

The story, reported here, reveals that the anti-constitutional National Popular Vote initiative had its origin in California:

California's involvement, combined with the other eight states, brings supporters nearly halfway there, to 132 votes, said Vikram David Amar, associate dean at the UC Davis School of Law. Amar, along with his brother and another law professor, started the movement a decade ago.


Check the relevant Wikipedia entries and you will find that name, Vikram David Amar, liberally referenced.


The proposal, despite all the protestations to the contrary, is an end-run around the constitution, setting up a process alien to its electoral college assumptions. States who join this plan are in effect agreeing to allocate their electoral votes in a manner different from that prescribed by Article II, Section 1, which assumes that each state will appoint its own electors.

In effect, the National Popular Vote proposal seeks subtly to alter this provision by making the electors creatures not of the individual states, but of the voters and electors of the participating states as a whole. It does this by replacing the method of appointing electors based on winner-of-the-state-takes-all with winner-of-the-country-takes-all.

It is an ingenious and devious scheme which exploits the absence of a prescribed method for appointing electors, something the constitution wisely left up to the states.

It dives into this vacuum with a rival system which will award electors who by law must ignore the will of the very people whose Representatives and Senators appointed them, and represent instead the interests of a larger constituency which did not appoint them.

In Michigan, I expect my electors to cast votes for president based on who won Michigan, not on who won California, Texas, Florida and New York. The electors appointed in those states are appointed by Representatives and Senators for whom I did not, indeed cannot, vote. Requiring my electors in Michigan to answer to them, just because there are more of them, rather than to me thus severs me from my representation, and thus from my liberty.

Put another way, the National Popular Vote seeks to sever the electoral college electors from the people and the states whose Representatives and Senators are the basis for their existence.

Get the word out to stop this pestilence before it goes any farther.

  

National Popular Vote Virus Spreads to Vermont

The whole point of writing the constitution to allocate two senators each to the States was to reassure the smaller ones by population that the larger ones would not be able to exert unfair advantage over them in the nation's Legislative branch, and to get them thereby to join the union.

Another way of stating this principle is that population was meant to be reflected in the composition of the US House, but deflected in the Senate. The latter was originally designed to be a creature of the States, not of the people. That is why State Legislatures elected US Senators until the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, the same year that gave us the Federal Reserve and the income tax. Bad things always seem to happen in threes.

Today it is reported here that the senate of the only State of the union which has a Socialist for a US Senator, Vermont, has decided to advance the NPV measure, which should not be confused with the acronym for the Human Papilloma Virus. The National Popular Vote initiative, already passed in 6 States and DC, seeks to deny the will of the voters in a State by allocating its electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, not necessarily to the winner of that State.

In the same way that the 17th Amendment sought to weaken the power of the State governments, the National Popular Vote initiative would make it even more irrelevant. What is more, the scheme really represents a rival electoral college which seeks to make the president, like US Senators, a creature directly of the people, in this case of the whole people, and a simple majority of the whole people at that.

If you thought the States have not mattered much in recent years, under the NPV they will mean even less than they already do. Large urban population centers, Democrat bastions, will increasingly replace States not just as campaign stops, but as constituencies. And it is they to whom presidents will become increasingly responsive, at the expense of State capitals.

The States are not dead yet, as people who live in the 26 which have successfully challenged Obamacare in court will tell you. But it is a sign of their weakened sense of themselves that so many are staking everything on their appeals in the courts instead of passing counter legislation and forcing the Federals to sue them. Arizona is a striking exception in this regard in the immigration area, and should be imitated more widely and more often, which prospect the recent and deep Republican resurgence in the States may portend.

When pestilences like the National Popular Vote initiative stop getting traction in the Legislatures, we'll have more reason to be sanguine about the future of the Republic. 

    

ANOTHER ATTEMPTED END RUN AROUND THE CONSTITUTION

People who think one state, Florida, jammed an unwanted president down the throats of the American people in the year 2000 now want to make sure this happens more frequently, but on a broader scale. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess. It's called the National Popular Vote (NPV) campaign, an innovation of recent provenance whose latest progress is in Massachusetts, reported here.

I think these people are motivated by a vendetta against George Bush. They still can't get over the guy, and it makes absolutely no difference to them that the country ratified Florida's decision in 2000 by re-electing George Bush decisively in 2004. 

Massachusetts is about to join five other states in what is really an attempted power grab for the Democrat party. I say they are a pestilence on the body politic, and it's time to stop them before more states join Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, Washington and Massachusetts and attempt to sully a presidential election and throw the country into another constitutional crisis.

Imagine what would happen if enough states with 270 electoral votes got together to agree to this, and tried to force their will on the rest of us because their states individually voted to do so. Can you imagine your president elected by just 11 states? That's all it would take under their proposal: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina and Georgia, the eleven most populous states with 271 electoral college votes in all. Do you want them deciding who your president should be?

In 2008, only Texas and Georgia went Republican, giving the Democrats 222 electoral votes. Of the next ten most populous states, Virginia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Missouri, Washington, Indiana, Minnesota, Arizona, Maryland and Wisconsin, only Tennessee, Missouri and Arizona went Republican, giving the Democrats another 77 electoral college votes, more than enough to win.

So in any given election, just 21 of the 50 states could control the outcome of the election, with Democrats highly favored to win the White House every time, by a margin of 299 to 81 in those states. The supporters of the NPV complain that under the present arrangement where it's "winner takes all electoral votes," more or less, in 48 states, elections get determined by battleground states, where candidates actually have to compete for votes. The horror. Their solution? Eliminate the battle.

These five, and now six, states don't want to award their electoral college votes based on who won the election in their respective states, but rather to the winner of the most votes nationally, so that not only can the will of the people of their own states be subverted if necessary, but the will of other states as well, for that is what this revolution of elections would accomplish. It marginalizes the 29 states with fewer than 10 electoral votes by telling them their votes for president don't matter.

And it is easy to imagine a situation where the voters in a state are told that even though they voted for president X the electors of their state are going to vote for president Y because their state is a party to the NPV sponsored law which requires them to cast their votes for the overall winner. It is amusing to imagine electors attempting to hide behind the skirts of this law in this way and pointing the finger at voters in another state exclaiming "They made me do it!"  

The constitution is deliberately arranged as it is to protect the smaller states by population from being lorded over by the states with the larger. That is why even the smallest states have two senators, same as the largest do, to act as a counterweight to the power and interests of the larger states. That is also why changes to the constitution must be approved by states, 75% of them, not popular majorities. The NPV is an end run around this amendment process, which stands in the way of changing the electoral college system, the real enemy of the NPV. On those grounds alone it should be challenged in court as an extra-constitutional attempt to change the constitution. 

Can you imagine a country where a minority of states vote to ignore the electoral college system and try to force their president on the majority? To do so really would be to create two countries, because what the NPV campaign does in actuality is create a rival electoral college. If that isn't seditious, I don't know what is. 

Peter at Bayou Renaissance Man frames the issue helpfully:

The fourth and most worrying element of the NPV campaign, in my eyes, is that it's a blatant attempt to bypass the Constitution of the United States. The provision of an Electoral College is a federal, constitutional matter, not determined by each individual State. You'll find it in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, as modified by the 12th, 20th and 25th Amendments. If we want to change that (or any other) part of the Constitution, there's a mechanism provided to do so (Article 5). The NPV campaign ignores this altogether, and seeks to alter the way in which individual States allocate their electoral college votes without modifying the Constitution itself.

Appropriately quoted in the Boston Globe article, linked above, is Massachusetts Senate minority leader Richard Tisei, who says: "The thing about this that bothers me the most is it's so sneaky. This is the way that liberals do things a lot of times, very sneaky. This is sort of an end run around the Constitution."

Truer words were never spoken.