By Cliff Montgomery – Nov. 30th, 2019
Recently, a number of well-placed individuals have fought this drive to make the popular choice for U.S. president the only legitimate choice. They routinely wax poetic about the ‘sacred document’ called the U.S. Constitution and ‘the need to protect the original intent of the Founding Fathers.’
Yet ‘the original intent of the Founding Fathers’ included a tacit recognition of slavery as a valid institution. We felt no need to hold on to that intention for all time.
Let’s be honest: The wealthy, white male landowners who wrote the U.S. Constitution, and created the intellectual underpinnings for it, were chiefly interested in creating an exclusive and limited republic. A nation of the few, by the few, and for the few. Most of them hated and feared democracy.
Alexander Hamilton, the principal writer of the Federalist Papers – a collection of writings which served as a philosophical basis for the U.S. Constitution – openly declared that the “turbulent and changing” majority “seldom judge or determine right,” and fought hard to establish a “permanent” class of elites who would “check the imprudence of democracy.”
Edmund Randolph boldly declared that the pains then being suffered by the new United States stemmed from the “turbulence and follies of democracy.” Elbridge Gerry commonly railed about democracy as “the worst of all political evils.”
A youthful Governeur Morris openly shared his fear of democratic rule, stating that “the mob begin to think and reason, poor reptiles . . . They bask in the sun, and ere noon they will bite, depend on it.”
As an interesting opinion piece written by Louis René Beres and published by the U.S. News and World Report put it, the U.S. Constitution’s “literal creators had displayed a deeply visceral distrust of all democratic governance.
“Unsurprisingly, with no more than a half-dozen exceptions,” Beres continued, “the men of the Philadelphia Convention were scions of conspicuous wealth and privilege.
“For them, quite naturally, any expectations of serious thought by the general population would have seemed downright unfathomable, even ‘revolutionary,’ ” added Beres.
Luckily, our wealthy elites do not think this way today (ahem) …
Remember all this as you read the CRS study, or the report’s summary, which the American Spark publishes below:
“The National Popular Vote (NPV) initiative proposes an agreement among the states, an interstate compact that would effectively achieve direct popular election of the President and Vice President without a constitutional amendment.
“It relies on the Constitution’s grant of authority to the states in Article II, Section 1 to appoint presidential electors ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct…. ’ Any state that joins the NPV compact pledges that if the compact comes into effect, its legislature will award all the state’s electoral votes to the presidential ticket that wins the most popular votes nationwide, regardless of who wins in that particular state.
“The compact would, however, come into effect only if its success has been assured – that is, only if states controlling a majority of electoral votes (270 or more) join the compact.
“At present, 15 states and the District of Columbia, jointly accounting for 196 electoral votes, have joined the compact. Adoption of the compact in the states has been uneven: after approval by 8 states and the District of Columbia between 2007 and 2011, the pace slowed – but since 2018, the compact has regained momentum as 5 additional states with 31 electoral votes joined.
“As of October 2019, NPV legislation was pending in 2 states with a total of 25 electoral votes where the legislature was in session. In 5 other states with 45 votes, NPV remained ‘live’ and eligible to be ‘carried over’ for consideration when their legislatures reconvene for their 2020 session.
“Opposition has emerged in some states. In Colorado opponents succeeded in placing a measure on the ballot in 2020 as a referendum that would repeal that state’s membership in the NPV. In 6 other states—Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Washington—measures to repeal NPV legislation have been introduced in state legislatures, but to date, none of these has been successful.
“The NPV initiative emerged following the presidential election of 2000, in which one ticket gained an electoral vote majority, winning the presidency, but received fewer popular votes than its opponents. NPV grew out of subsequent discussions among scholars and activists about how to avoid similar outcomes in the future and to achieve direct popular election.
“NPV proponents claim it would guarantee that (1) the presidential candidates who win the most popular votes nationwide will always win the presidency, (2)NPV would end the alleged inequities of the general ticket/winner-take-all system of awarding electoral votes, and (3)candidates would extend their focus beyond winning the ‘battleground states,’ campaigning more widely and devoting greater attention to issues of concern to other parts of the country.
“They further assert that NPV would accomplish this while avoiding the exacting standards set for amendments by Article V of the Constitution.
“NPV opponents argue that (1) it would undermine the authority of states under the Constitution and the Founders’ intention that presidential elections should be both national and federal contests, (2) it is an admitted ‘end run’ around the Constitution that would circumvent the amendment process, and (3) it might actually lead to more disputed presidential elections and politically contentious state recounts.
“The NPV has also been debated on legal grounds. Some observers maintain that it must be approved by Congress, because it is an interstate compact that would affect key provisions of constitutional presidential election procedures. NPV Inc., the organization managing the initiative’s advocacy campaign, responds that congressional approval is not necessary because NPV concerns the appointment of electors, a subject that falls within state constitutional authority, and that the Supreme Court has previously rejected arguments that similar compacts would impair the rights of non-member states.
“Other critics claim that NPV might violate the Voting Rights Act by diluting minority voter influence and avoiding the recently invalidated pre-clearance requirement for election procedure changes in covered jurisdictions. NPV Inc. [however] counters by claiming that the compact is ‘entirely consistent with the goal of the Voting Rights Act.’
“This report monitors the NPV’s progress in the states and will identify and analyze further developments as warranted.”
