Democrats across the nation are trying to run an end-around on the Electoral College.
The latest stand? Right here in Wisconsin, where they’ve introduced legislation to make Wisconsin’s electoral votes go to whichever candidate wins the popular vote, no matter who actually wins in Wisconsin.
Talk about disenfranchising Wisconsin’s voters.
It’s Assembly Bill 751, introduced on February 15 and fast-tracked for a hearing the following day.
Here’s what the bill does:
SECTION 3. 5.11 of the statutes is created to read:
5.11 Interstate compact on election of president and vice president.
AGREEMENT AMONG THE STATES TO ELECT THE PRESIDENT BY NATIONAL POPULAR VOTE.
It subverts the U.S. Constitution. Period. From Article II of the U.S. Constitution:
The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President, if such Number be a Majority of the whole Number of Electors appointed; and if there be more than one who have such Majority, and have an equal Number of Votes, then the House of Representatives shall immediately chuse by Ballot one of them for President; and if no Person have a Majority, then from the five highest on the List the said House shall in like Manner chuse the President. But in chusing the President, the Votes shall be taken by States, the Representation from each State having one Vote; a quorum for this Purpose shall consist of a Member or Members from two thirds of the States, and a Majority of all the States shall be necessary to a Choice. In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President.
The last two sentences were modified by the 12th Amendment, but it’s clear: the Founding Fathers did not want direct popular election of the President. Four times in our history, a candidate won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College, the most recent being in 2000, when George W. Bush won the presidency but lost the popular vote to Algore.
This bill renders the votes in Wisconsin meaningless. If Candidate A wins in Wisconsin but Candidate B wins the overall national vote, Candidate B gets the state’s electoral votes, contrary to the wishes of the people. And when enough states composing 238 electoral votes approve such legislation, it goes into effect.
Right now, as a swing state, Wisconsin sees quite a bit of national candidates. We see both Republican and Democrat presidential candidates regularly. So do states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, etc. Both candidates tend to avoid states that are solid red or blue states. The Battleground States get most of the attention.
This changes under the Democrats’ scenario. Our vote here becomes irrelevant, since which candidate gets our electoral votes is determined by voters in other states. The cemetery precincts in Chicago, for example, can determine who gets Wisconsin’s electoral votes.
Writing at the MU Law School Faculty Blog, Shark and Shepherd‘s Rick Esenberg notes:
The Electoral College forces candidates to pay attention to states that they otherwise might not. But there may be a certain genius to that. Forcing candidates into battleground states requires the candidates to engage each other before an electorate that is truly up for grabs and to do so by engaging – at least to some degree – in retail politics – much as the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary do in the nomination process.
That truly is the genius of the Electoral College.
Esenberg also drops a dirty little secret about just who is financing this effort to subvert the Constitution: George Soros.
Imagine that: the Left’s Dr. Evil wants to reduce the U.S. Constitution to two-ply and be able to essentially select the President by himself with his money. Soros, a traitorous Jew who spent his youth in Nazi-occupied Hungary selling out Hungarian Jews to the Nazis, wants to run the United States as his personal fiefdom and subjugate it under United Nations control. His dirty money is behind just about every leftwing project from Media Matters to Center For American Progress to Open Society to ACORN that you can name. No surprise here that he’s trying to circumvent the Constitution to guarantee an endless string of progressive Presidents.
The bill is also unconstitutional under Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution, the Compact Clause:
[T]he National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is examined and found constitutionally deficient. The Compact is actually a compact under the Compact Clause of the Constitution, because the Court has broadly construed what makes a compact. In particular, because the Compact is not effective until a critical mass of States have enacted it, and because States are constrained from withdrawing from the Compact too close to a presidential election, the Compact falls under constitutional scrutiny. Additionally, the Compact addresses a political matter that affects the interests of non-compacting sister States, and the compacting States enhance their political power at the expense of other States.
Article I, Section 10 reads in part:
No State shall enter into any Treaty, Alliance, or Confederation; grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal; coin Money; emit Bills of Credit; make any Thing but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts; pass any Bill of Attainder, ex post facto Law, or Law impairing the Obligation of Contracts, or grant any Title of Nobility.
Wisconsin Family Voices objects to the disenfranchisement of Badger State voters:
If you think your vote is just one of many in the state right now, imagine what little impact your vote would have if it was only one of millions and millions of votes! With the Electoral College, your vote is a higher percentage of the total votes from the state and has a greater impact on the presidential election. With a national popular vote, the states with the highest populations determine the president, and then Wisconsin is forced to ratify their vote, regardless of whether that candidate was the choice of the majority of Wisconsin voters.
Even the Racine Journal Times is opposed to this legislation. Via Fred at RDW:
Whenever we hear the words “fast track” and “legislation” in the same breath, our ears perk up because we know there is a bag of rubbish someone is trying to speed through the Capitol before it gets full scrutiny or the public has a chance to react.
The latest fast-trash bill hit the Assembly last week. It was introduced on Feb. 15 by state Rep. Kelda Helen Roys, D-Madison, and already had a hearing before the end of the day Wednesday.
The bill would change the way the United States elects its president and would essentially make the Electoral College useless.
Supporters say it would guarantee that the presidential candidate with the most popular votes would be elected president. That idea has a lot of traction with the public and those who argue that in a democracy the majority rules – or should rule, anyhow.
Except, of course, the United States is a republic, a representative democracy, and we always have been.
It was set up that way by the nation’s Founding Fathers – who also set up the Electoral College in that small, precious document known as the Constitution. According to some historians, their motives were to set up a little buffer against democracy out of fears that average work-a-day citizens might be stampeded by impulse on a popular vote.
“… fears that average work-a-day citizens might be stampeded by impulse …”
Gee, ya mean like Hopenchange in 2008?
[...] to loot the general wealth of the nation. One such faction, the left-wing coalition, seeks to do away with the electoral college, which would remove yet another institutional barrier to the ruling [...]
[...] in order to entrench its own political power. One such faction, the left-wing coalition, seeks to do away with the electoral college, which would remove yet another institutional barrier to the ruling [...]