It would seem that the National Popular Vote Compact movement is a quiet movement no longer:
Conservatives and leading liberals slammed the campaign to effectively end the Electoral College's role in presidential elections, saying that the National Popular Vote Compact Law circumvents the Constitution, saying it resembled President Barack Obama's abuse of the law through his extensive use of executive orders.
"It is pretty startling," Bill Kristol, founder and editor of The Weekly Standard, told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV this week. "If they want to make the case for the popular election of presidents and a Constitutional amendment, they should make the case.
"But the left these days doesn't make the case, and they don't go the normal route of changing the law if they don't like the law," Kristol added. "They think of gimmicks and evasions and ways to get around the normal popular debate.
"This is all happening kind of quietly. I'm really struck by the way they’re doing it."
Not any more, it's not. Which means that the chance of this thing going into effect - I say "thing" because it wouldn't be a "law" but a herd of state laws designed to circumvent the U.S. Constitution - is greatly diminished in proportion to the degree to which swing state legislatures are wise to what its plotters and schemers are trying to do with and by it. It's really a sibling to an actual twenty-first century presidential campaign, since so far only the bluest of "blue" states have joined the NPVC. The chance of it "going over the top" rests upon fooling enough swing state legislators with ersatz bleats of "fairness" and "the will of the people" (and to hell with the states, ironically enough), and phony coos of "make national candidates have to campaign throughout the country." It's a most curious case of another potential constitutional crisis in the making, only from the grassroots up instead of the top-down.
But then this very subterfuge reveals the Nutroots' confidence level in their being able to sell the notion of jettisoning the Electoral College to the public at large, doesn't it? Bypassing a 2/3 vote of Congress altogether, needing only a minority of states that happen to add up to 270 Electoral Votes (and what an ironic nomenclature THAT is) rather than thirty-eight actual states - they know they can't get what they want legally, so, "Bleep the Constitution, we're shoving it down your throats anyway." It's why I call it a leftwing Article V convention without Article V.
Even a few token sane libs are crying foul:
Even such liberals as Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz and Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf blasted the campaign.
"It's nuts," Sheinkopf told Malzberg. "Here's a case of where they're trying to go around the Constitution, around the law, to do something that's patently illegal and wrong. It's the same way the Obama administration issues executive orders.
"Our Constitution, that's worked very well for 200 years, is now being tampered with. A bad move.
"This system was put in place to ensure that crazy people couldn't get control of the government," Sheinkopf added. "And that's why it works.
"Don’t change something that shouldn’t be changed for the purpose of making some people happy."
Dershowitz said the compact "certainly violates the spirit of the Constitution. Plainly, the founders of the Constitution did not intend for there to be a conspiracy among certain states to essentially abolish the Electoral College."
Here again - and I know this site's proprietor will differ with me on this, but so be it - as brilliant and foresighted as the Founding Fathers were, I don't think any of them could have imagined the States - the creators of the Constitution - turning around and conspiring to undermine the very governing document on which they collaborated. Or, rather, one faction - and factionalism was something with which the Founders were familiar and which they steadfastly opposed, but whose pervasiveness they did not anticipate - gaining control of enough State governments to essentially overthrow the Constitution and the United States government along with it.
At any rate, I don't think the NPVC scheme will succeed. And it does reveal how unconfident the Left is in a Hillary Clinton 2016 candidacy, and how little hope they appear to have of a Barack Obama coup de tat. To which I, in lieu of The One, must deliver the inevitable reply: "Oh yea of little faith, why do you doubt?" Your False Messiah isn't done, yet. Not by a long shot.
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