All this realignment of the country to the GOP talk has been BS: Trump has now won only by a plurality, and the GOP House majority could well end up at a mere 220-215

 It was no Red Wave, and that fool Trump just had to poach from what little he got.

 

Trump is officially below 50% at Real Clear Politics

 

Harris/Walz 48.3% (226) Trump/Vance 49.9% (312)

Trump is down to 50.1% in the popular vote

 People say it doesn't matter.

It doesn't, except psychologically, especially to Democrats who want to eliminate the Electoral College.

Having an Electoral College landslide without winning a clear majority in the popular vote would only fuel their long-standing rhetoric that it is unfair.

Election results for the popular vote almost always trend narrower as now, and they indicate in this election the same thing the very narrow GOP House win indicates:

This was not a red wave.

The country remains very much divided. And Democrats are wrong to be so dispirited and divided. 

Harris/Walz 48.1% (226) Trump/Vance 50.1% (312)

Couldn't have said it better myself . . . about you

 Raskin: "Authoritarian And Fascist Tactic" To Try To Confuse Everyone About What Happened On January 6th

To Raskin we owe the origins of the National Popular Vote Compact, a progressive end-run around the constitution's electoral college system, among other far-left enthusiasms.

Only the fevered mind of a lunatic like this could turn a riot by a bunch of yahoos into an attempted coup.

How the popular vote works

 Look, as I blow this feather from my face,

And as the air blows it to me again,

Such is the lightness of you common men.

-- William Shakespeare, Henry VI

Four true words

 Trump lacked the discipline.      

Stated here.

That's still the fundamental problem, but that's been the case from the beginning.

Character counts. Trump has never had it and never will. I cut my losses with Trump in 2018 when he exposed himself as a phony on his chief plank, illegal immigration. He already did that in August 2016, so fool me once, shame on Trump. I am not ashamed to state it over and over again.

The rest of the party still hasn't come around, however, with so-called conservatives still yammering on about stuff like pOPuLiSm. But that's because opposition to illegal immigration was never a GOP value. The GOP would never be upset because he lied about that.

It's hard to imagine the GOP pointing to anything in particular which was a line too far. 121 voted in the House to object to the 2020 Arizona vote, 138 to the Pennsylvania vote. Not even three horrible elections in a row is proving to be decisive.

Meanwhile Democrats have exploited Trump's weakness, and therefore the GOP's, to consolidate power with extraordinary new depth. The new regime of mail-in voting everywhere changes everything. The chain of custody of ballots in voting precincts is broken forever.

It's the end run around representative government we only imagined the National Popular Vote Compact would be. It's the path to pure democracy. It's the end of legislatures, the end of republicanism, and makes the tyranny of the majority and the repression of the minority the new, terrible future.

A Supreme Court in principle deferring to the states on everything from election law to drugs, marriage, abortion, gender, etc. is no bulwark against what's coming, indeed, what's already here.

The people will decide by referendum.

The people be damned.

It's odd how this guy never mentions the post-election shenanigans which DEFINE the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would REQUIRE faithless votes in the Electoral College

Time To Eliminate the Possibility of Faithless Electors :

In spite of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Chiafalo v. Washington that states can bind electors to the popular vote, only 14 states have laws in place to do so. This leaves open the possibility that as many as 420 electors across the country could still cast faithless votes with the only remedy being whether or not Congress would choose to count those votes in their Jan. 6 joint session. This is the type of scenario the ECRA is trying to avoid.  

He doesn't say anything about the National Popular Vote Compact here, either, which would potentially nullify the will of the people of a state who voted for one candidate but whose electors were forced to vote for another under the compact. That would be done legally by state signatories, but it would still be wrong.

As of June 2022, [the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact] has been adopted by fifteen states and the District of Columbia. These states have 195 electoral votes, which is 36% of the Electoral College and 72% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force. 

More.

 

All 50 states certified their results in Election 2020, making Joe Biden the winner. Rogue electors weren't recognized by Vice President Pence, correctly, under already existing laws.

Electors would be no less rogue under the NPV.

It would be less ambiguous to these people if the Supreme Court had ruled "shall" instead of "may", but the whole opinion is clear:

A State may enforce an elector’s pledge to support his party’s nominee—and the state voters’ choice—for President.

The Supreme Court on July 6, 2020 concluded by saying that

electors are not free agents; they are to vote for the candidate whom the State’s voters have chosen

which ought to settle the matter, but apparently can't in some minds.

Odd.

 

 

The National Popular Vote Compact, an end run around the US Constitution which also creates faithless electors, is actually supported in Michigan by stupid Republicans and a Hillsdale college instructor

My lunatic former state senator, Dave Hildenbrand, was the chief Republican sponsor of the compact in 2018. He's a lobbyist now.

The former state GOP Chair Saul Anuzis is a huge supporter and consultant to the NPV organization.

You can read all about such fools here and here.

Because the Republican controlled lower chamber has blocked a bill to make it the law since 2018, supporters of NPV are now organizing an end run . . . around THEM.

They intend to make this a ballot initiative, which in Michigan has been the go-to method for deciding hot topics to which elected representatives don't want their names attached through legislation. The method has been the way they wash their hands of issues instead of having the courage to take a stand for or against them.

Ballot initiatives in Michigan should have been curbed long ago, but when you have a spine made of jello, you can't curb anything.

So, given the success of Democrats in 2018 sweeping state offices and a handful of left of center ballot initiatives with them, quietly promoted by Barack Obama's wingman,  Eric Holder, and backed by money from George Soros, it looks like a fait accompli already.

Michigan Republicans are too dumb and too libertarian to stop this.

The only hope is that the US Supreme Court will eventually rule the NPV unconstitutional, given the fact that it has already ruled that faithless electors must award their Electoral College votes to the certified winner of a state wherever such laws require it, not to whomever they want:

The U.S. Supreme Court has unanimously upheld laws across the country that remove or punish rogue Electoral College delegates who refuse to cast their votes for the presidential candidate they were pledged to support.

The decision Monday was a loss for "faithless electors," who argued that under the Constitution they have discretion to decide which candidate to support.

Writing for the court, Justice Elena Kagan, in a decision peppered with references to the Broadway show Hamilton and the TV show Veep, said Electoral College delegates have "no ground for reversing" the statewide popular vote. That, she said, "accords with the Constitution — as well as with the trust of the Nation that here, We the People rule." ...

Thirty-two states have some sort of faithless elector law, but only 15 of those remove, penalize or simply cancel the votes of the errant electors. The 15 are Michigan, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Indiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, Washington, California, New Mexico, South Carolina, Oklahoma and North Carolina. Although Maine has no such law, the secretary of state has said it has determined a faithless elector can be removed. ... For centuries, almost all electors have considered themselves bound to vote for the winner of the state popular vote.

More.

Nevada Governor VETOES bill joining National Popular Vote Compact

Good for him.

Sisolak vetoes bill that would pledge Nevada's support to winner of national popular vote, reject Electoral College

National Popular Vote to become law in Nevada, making it 15 states and DC trying for an end run around the Electoral College

Nevada passes National Popular Vote bill in bid to upend Electoral College:

The compact would take effect after states totaling 270 electoral votes, and with Nevada, the total would reach 195.

National Popular Vote passes in Colorado: First you drug the people, then they give away their freedom without a care

You lose your country by degrees. Colorado is the 12th to go.

Colorado joins effort to elect presidents by popular vote, go around Electoral College:

Although Colorado has trended more solidly Democratic in recent elections, the state represents the first traditional swing state to join the effort. Every other state in the compact has voted for the Democratic presidential candidates in every election since at least 1992. ...

The other states that have signed on since 2007 are California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and the District of Columbia. ...

Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, only 19 percent supported changing the system, down from 54 percent in 2011.

Democrats were a mirror image, with 81 percent supporting an amendment to switch to a national popular vote, up from 69 percent five years earlier.

Rush Limbaugh claims to be the cutting edge of societal evolution, but can't help a caller from Colorado on the National Popular Vote

It's a frickin' end run around the constitution, but Limbaugh just yammers "I'll have to look into it".

Pathetic.

Liberal math: In ME-2 the Democrat came in second but wins the seat anyway

This is how the National Popular Vote will work in the case of president if states adopt the kind of legerdemain citizens of Maine adopted in 2016.

I say legerdemain advisedly, because it is not reasoning but simple trickery. In the case of the National Popular Vote, you will think X won your state but because Y got more votes nationally your state agrees to switch its electoral college votes to Y. In Maine because of an equally arbitrary decision to deprive the top vote getter from winning (the winner must get 50% even though Bill Clinton never did), the winner ends up losing because of "ranking". The last place finisher's votes, person D's, get reallocated to A, B, and C using math reflecting the voters' rankings of all the candidates until someone reaches 50%.

The voters collectively decide how your vote will go, not you, based on their ranking of the candidates, not yours.

In other words, if you happened to vote for D, and probably also for C in this case, your vote was changed to B, not the original winner A.

They say every vote must count, and call it democracy.

I seem to recall the Germans voted for Hitler, too. They gave up their freedom willingly, you see, so it must have been OK.

GOP Rep. Bruce Poliquin loses in first race decided by Maine's 'ranked-choice' system:

Poliquin narrowly got the most votes on Election Day – with 46.1 percent to Golden's 45.9 – but because he didn't get more than 50 percent of the vote, Maine's new law kicked in. Independent candidates Tiffany Bond and William Hoar combined received about another 8 percent of the vote. 

In the new system, approved by Maine voters in 2016, a person votes for their favorite candidate and ranks the other candidates by their order of preference. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the last-place candidate gets knocked out and the ballots cast for them are reallocated based on an algorithm that factors the voters' preferences. That process continues until one candidate has a majority. 

Reince Priebus Is An Electoral College Fiddler. Get Rid Of Him.

We already have fiddling going on with the National Popular Vote campaign. Now it turns out Reince Preibus, RNC chairman, favors a form of fiddling with the Electoral College of his own, here.

That's three strikes against Reince for me. He did a lousy job in 2012. We did nothing but keep the House, in the worst economy since WWII. He attacked the duly elected candidate for Senate in Missouri. I won't mention Indiana. And now this.

Dump Reince Preibus.

It's Democrats Who Overwhelmingly Hate The Electoral College

The reason Democrats hate the Electoral College is that the Electoral College gives too much power to small population states, which sometimes vote in such a way as to prevent winners of the national popular vote in presidential contests from being elected.

Nevermind that that's how the founders intended it, in order to keep minorities from being dictated to by majorities. It is suitably hypocritical of the Democrats to want to oppress minorities, seeing how they have taken minorities for granted for decades, always promising them the moon but never delivering them so much as a sandwich let alone a sub so fast they'll freak.

TheHill.com has a story here on the subject of the Electoral College, referencing the National Popular Vote (NPV) campaign which proposes to make an end-run around the Electoral College provision of the constitution. You know, kind of like seceding from the Union was an end run, because that's what the NPV amounts to. The normal process of amending election procedures involves a constitutional amendment, but the Democrats have hatched a plan, the NPV, which amounts to an affront and challenge to the existing system, agreed to only amongst the states participating without benefit of legitimacy conferred by constitutional amendment. The legitimacy consists entirely in the agreement of the states. As such the NPV represents an insurrection against the rest of the states who do not participate. 

Mostly Democrats favor doing away with the Electoral College, which is in keeping with what animates the Democrats, namely democracy, especially direct democracy. Despite all its problems and blemishes, it is the Republican Party which stands for constitutional arrangements as they exist, notably Sen. Mitch McConnell of the US Senate, the Republican minority leader in the Senate. His support for the Electoral College covers a multitude of sins, and I do mean a multitude.

The Republicans would sound more convincing in their support for the Electoral College, however, if they were to support also repeal of Amendment 17, ratified in 1913.

The reason is that it would show that the Republicans are serious about constitutional principles of representation.

The original constitution envisaged bodies of electors who were different in identity in order to separate the powers of government to prevent tyranny, it is true, but also to spread representation effectively not just to the individuals who make up the nation but also to the governmental institutions which the constitution created as creatures of the people.

The electors originally were three.

The people who elected their US Representatives. These number 435 but should today number 10,267. The process of representation growing with population was halted in the 1920s. Arguably this concentration of power in fewer hands was a response to arrogation of democratic power by the Senate in 1913.

The states originally elected their US Senators, "chosen by the Legislature[s] thereof". Elected as they are now, popularly because of the 17th Amendment, they do nothing but make a redundancy of the US House of Representatives. And not just a redundancy but a trump. The Senate possesses much more power because they are not answerable to the people but every sixth year instead of every second. If anyone is responsible for gridlock in our times, it is this new imperious US Senate since 1913, not the political parties who duke it out in the House. The US Senate literally lords it over the US House as a kind of Super House. They only occasionally answer to the same people as the US House when they should be answering to, and representing, the states. The latter now possess next to no voice at the federal level except through the court system, where they must sue to be heard. A fine kettle of fish, that.

The Electoral College is now the last bastion of representation left to the states as states, and Democrats seem bent on taking it. The Electoral College is composed of persons appointed by the states in number equal to the number of Representatives and Senators, and they elect the president. The electors cast their votes now more or less everywhere based on which candidate wins the popular vote in the presidential election in each state. It is a winner take all system which blends popular sovereignty with states' rights. But the NPV would nullify this, casting the votes of the electors not for whomever wins the state, but for whomever wins the country.

As sketched above, the history of these developments is a history of lost representation. A US House member should represent 30,000 people max, but today supposedly speaks for over 700,000 on average in each district. State legislatures no longer have a voice in the halls of Congress because Senators are popularly elected just like the House. And if the Democrats get their way, smaller states will also lose their voice in electing the president because no matter what the citizens of Wyoming, New Hampshire and Montana want, the citizens of California, Florida and New York who are more numerous will dictate otherwise.

And Democrats are about nothing if not dictation. 

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. 

    

A Rival Electoral College

As we pointed out previously, the National Popular Vote Campaign is an extra-constitutional end run around the constitution's designated amendment process which seeks to replace the constitutionally prescribed electoral college with a rival process in which states agree to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote nationally.

Is this not a form of sedition, indeed a revolt, against our long-accepted "federal democracy"? Jeff Jacoby is right to style the rival proposal a "national democracy," utterly foreign to our experience.

He also rightly points out for The Boston Globe in "Massachusetts for Palin?" that the new process would have nullified the votes of Massachusetts voters by awarding their electoral college votes to Republican winners of the popular vote nationally, like Richard Nixon and George Herbert Walker Bush, when they had voted instead for liberal Democrats, like George McGovern and Michael Dukakis.

Jacoby's assessment coheres with our own:

Massachusetts is the sixth state to approve this end run around the Constitution, following Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington. It is no coincidence that all six are Democratic strongholds. The movement is fueled by lingering Democratic resentment of George W. Bush, and of the Electoral College system that made him president in 2000, even though Al Gore drew more popular votes. It is a comical irony that if the compact ever goes into effect, its only practical impact in these states will be to occasionally award their presidential electors to the Republican nominees their voters reject.

But the other side of the coin is that in 2008, just two of the eleven largest states by population went Republican, and just three of the next largest ten. The situation for them in 2008 would have been just the reverse under the National Popular Vote scheme, and Republican majorities in Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri and Arizona would have seen their electoral votes cast for Obama, not McCain.

To quote a famous ex-president: "That doesn't make any sense."

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.