Dems pressing on with junking the electoral college, but 227,000 Coloradans object
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, or NPV, is an attempt to change the way the president is elected without having to amend the Constitution.
Since the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, states have awarded all of their presidential electors to the candidate receiving the most votes in that state only, with a few eccentric exceptions notwithstanding. However, states that enter into the NPV compact agree that their electors will be pledged to the candidate that wins the most votes nationwide, regardless if a majority of citizens in the state chose a different candidate.
As an example of how the compact could change an election outcome, if the compact had been in place for the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton would have defeated Donald Trump to become the nation's 45th president.
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have entered into the compact, which does not become active until enough states have joined such that the total of their electors would surpass 270, the number required to win the presidency. The governments that have signed on thus far represent 196 electoral votes.
Back in 1789 representatives of the original 13 states were trying to devise a new Constitution. They needed all the states to agree to it. But the states with fewer people were worried that the president would always be from the larger states, since they had more votes.
To resolve these worries the Founders devised a compromise: the "electoral college" method of electing our president, which is specified in the Constitution. It was that compromise that persuaded all the states to ratify the Constitution.
If you're a college-age American and had never heard anything about that, I'm not surprised. The schools don't want you to know jackshit about our real history, preferring instead to wail that the Betsy Ross flag was raaaacist and similar crap.
Now: what everyone does know, thanks to the wailing of the Mainstream Media, is that the electoral college system can sometimes allow a candidate to win despite getting fewer total votes nationwide. You know that because that's what happened in 2016. So naturally the Media has been wailing ever since, and have run dozens of articles on how AWFUL that system is.
The same thing happened in the 2000 election, and Democrats have been fuming and scheming to find a way to abolish the electoral college since then.
Although this candidate winning the presidency has only lost the popular vote five times in our history, Dems knew that their plan to let millions of poor foreigners become American citizens would ensure they'd win the popular vote for the next century or so, so they wanted to ensure that the winner of the popular vote would ALWAYS win the presidency.
Of course the Founders provided a legal method to amend our Constitution, and the Democrats could try to get their way using an amendment. The problem with that method was that the Democrats knew they could never get the necessary two-thirds of the states to ratify an amendment that worked to the disadvantage of roughly 40 of the 50 states.
But Democrats are very cunning in finding legal loopholes to let them do whatever they want to do. And sure enough, in 2001 a law professor suggested that the Dems could force the election of the president by the winner of the national popular vote--effectively eliminating the electoral college system--without the trouble of trying to amend that "Constitution" thingy.
Many people have called the resulting plan an "end run around the specific provisions of the Constitution." But the ultra-liberal liars at Wikipedia didn't like that phrase, so they described the plan as
The plan hinged on a seeming ambiguity in the Constitution: The Founders never imagined that the "electors" from a state would even remotely consider casting their vote for the party a majority of their state's voters didn't choose. It never occurred to the smart, rational people who drafted and negotiated the Constitution that rational people would even consider such insanity.
And it's a measure of how far our nation has gone to hell that the Dems are not only considering it, but are doing everything they can to make that the way we elect the president.
Let me explain: The plan pushes states to sign on to an "interstate compact" in which each signing state promises to cast its electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote. States with 196 electoral votes have signed on. If states with another 74 votes do the same, the scheme takes effect.
It's almost satanic in its cunning way to eliminate a specific provision of the Constitution without an amendment. It's almost like they want to destroy the country or something.
Now: Last February Colorado's Democrat-controlled legislature passed a bill committing that state to the compact. Days later the state's gay Democratic governor (Jared Polis) signed it into law in a private "ceremony," in which no video or photos were allowed.
Wow, it's almost like he didn't want to call attention to this outrage, since it's likely that many Colorado residents didn't know the bill was even being considered, nor the seismic shift away from the Constitution that it would institute.
Of course Colorado's liberal newspapers instantly recognized that a private signing, with no pics or video allowed, might alert voters to the fact that the Dems were doing something they didn't want to publicize, so they spun that key information, saying simply that the governor "signed the bill into law without fanfare."
But amazingly, many Colorado voters objected, and have now used an "initiative petition" process to put the new law to a statewide vote of the people. The group says it turned in 227,198 signatures--far more than the 125,000 needed to legally get the question on the ballot in November of 2020.
And here's where things get interesting: The Democrat party has repeatedly shown that it will ignore any and all laws it doesn't want to obey. In particular, even though most state constitutions allow citizens to use the initiative process to overturn laws, in recent years when citizens have used the initiative process to do something, Democrat elites have simply ignored the demand.
For example, in 2000 voters in California succeeded in getting a proposed law ("Prop 22") placed on the ballot limiting "marriage" to being a union between a man and a woman. That November it passed. In 2008 the state's supreme court ruled that the law violated the state's constituion.
Anticipating this, in 2008 outraged voters succeeded in getting an amendment to the state's constitution placed on the ballot, doing the same thing the 2000 law had done. It passed. In 2009 the amendment, was ruled constitutional by the California Supreme Court in Strauss v. Horton. But as you probably know, in August 2010 judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the amendment was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
A year later, after retiring, Walker admitted he'd been a homosexual for ten years. But of course there wasn't even a hint that his ruling could have been biased or tainted, cuz...well that's just crazy talk.
Point is, the effort by Coloradans who don't want their state to commit to the Dems' national popular vote scheme is fabulous and admirable, collecting more than twice as many signatures as needed to put the measure on the ballot. But as the ultimate judicial reversal of both California's Prop 22 and Prop 8 show, the Dems have lots of ways of blocking ANY lawful efforts to prevent them from doing what they want. So I suspect they'll find a way to block this ballot measure as well.
I'll try to keep an eye on this and update it when needed.
Since the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1789, states have awarded all of their presidential electors to the candidate receiving the most votes in that state only, with a few eccentric exceptions notwithstanding. However, states that enter into the NPV compact agree that their electors will be pledged to the candidate that wins the most votes nationwide, regardless if a majority of citizens in the state chose a different candidate.
As an example of how the compact could change an election outcome, if the compact had been in place for the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton would have defeated Donald Trump to become the nation's 45th president.
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have entered into the compact, which does not become active until enough states have joined such that the total of their electors would surpass 270, the number required to win the presidency. The governments that have signed on thus far represent 196 electoral votes.
Back in 1789 representatives of the original 13 states were trying to devise a new Constitution. They needed all the states to agree to it. But the states with fewer people were worried that the president would always be from the larger states, since they had more votes.
To resolve these worries the Founders devised a compromise: the "electoral college" method of electing our president, which is specified in the Constitution. It was that compromise that persuaded all the states to ratify the Constitution.
If you're a college-age American and had never heard anything about that, I'm not surprised. The schools don't want you to know jackshit about our real history, preferring instead to wail that the Betsy Ross flag was raaaacist and similar crap.
Now: what everyone does know, thanks to the wailing of the Mainstream Media, is that the electoral college system can sometimes allow a candidate to win despite getting fewer total votes nationwide. You know that because that's what happened in 2016. So naturally the Media has been wailing ever since, and have run dozens of articles on how AWFUL that system is.
The same thing happened in the 2000 election, and Democrats have been fuming and scheming to find a way to abolish the electoral college since then.
Although this candidate winning the presidency has only lost the popular vote five times in our history, Dems knew that their plan to let millions of poor foreigners become American citizens would ensure they'd win the popular vote for the next century or so, so they wanted to ensure that the winner of the popular vote would ALWAYS win the presidency.
Of course the Founders provided a legal method to amend our Constitution, and the Democrats could try to get their way using an amendment. The problem with that method was that the Democrats knew they could never get the necessary two-thirds of the states to ratify an amendment that worked to the disadvantage of roughly 40 of the 50 states.
But Democrats are very cunning in finding legal loopholes to let them do whatever they want to do. And sure enough, in 2001 a law professor suggested that the Dems could force the election of the president by the winner of the national popular vote--effectively eliminating the electoral college system--without the trouble of trying to amend that "Constitution" thingy.
Many people have called the resulting plan an "end run around the specific provisions of the Constitution." But the ultra-liberal liars at Wikipedia didn't like that phrase, so they described the plan as
"...involving a way to embrace state legislatures' power to appoint electors, rather than resist that power.[68] By coordinating, states constituting a majority of the Electoral College could effectively implement a popular vote."...embrace." "coordinating." Yessss, everyone at Wiki agreed that sounded much better.
The plan hinged on a seeming ambiguity in the Constitution: The Founders never imagined that the "electors" from a state would even remotely consider casting their vote for the party a majority of their state's voters didn't choose. It never occurred to the smart, rational people who drafted and negotiated the Constitution that rational people would even consider such insanity.
And it's a measure of how far our nation has gone to hell that the Dems are not only considering it, but are doing everything they can to make that the way we elect the president.
Let me explain: The plan pushes states to sign on to an "interstate compact" in which each signing state promises to cast its electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote. States with 196 electoral votes have signed on. If states with another 74 votes do the same, the scheme takes effect.
It's almost satanic in its cunning way to eliminate a specific provision of the Constitution without an amendment. It's almost like they want to destroy the country or something.
Now: Last February Colorado's Democrat-controlled legislature passed a bill committing that state to the compact. Days later the state's gay Democratic governor (Jared Polis) signed it into law in a private "ceremony," in which no video or photos were allowed.
Wow, it's almost like he didn't want to call attention to this outrage, since it's likely that many Colorado residents didn't know the bill was even being considered, nor the seismic shift away from the Constitution that it would institute.
Of course Colorado's liberal newspapers instantly recognized that a private signing, with no pics or video allowed, might alert voters to the fact that the Dems were doing something they didn't want to publicize, so they spun that key information, saying simply that the governor "signed the bill into law without fanfare."
But amazingly, many Colorado voters objected, and have now used an "initiative petition" process to put the new law to a statewide vote of the people. The group says it turned in 227,198 signatures--far more than the 125,000 needed to legally get the question on the ballot in November of 2020.
And here's where things get interesting: The Democrat party has repeatedly shown that it will ignore any and all laws it doesn't want to obey. In particular, even though most state constitutions allow citizens to use the initiative process to overturn laws, in recent years when citizens have used the initiative process to do something, Democrat elites have simply ignored the demand.
For example, in 2000 voters in California succeeded in getting a proposed law ("Prop 22") placed on the ballot limiting "marriage" to being a union between a man and a woman. That November it passed. In 2008 the state's supreme court ruled that the law violated the state's constituion.
Anticipating this, in 2008 outraged voters succeeded in getting an amendment to the state's constitution placed on the ballot, doing the same thing the 2000 law had done. It passed. In 2009 the amendment, was ruled constitutional by the California Supreme Court in Strauss v. Horton. But as you probably know, in August 2010 judge Vaughn Walker ruled that the amendment was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
A year later, after retiring, Walker admitted he'd been a homosexual for ten years. But of course there wasn't even a hint that his ruling could have been biased or tainted, cuz...well that's just crazy talk.
Point is, the effort by Coloradans who don't want their state to commit to the Dems' national popular vote scheme is fabulous and admirable, collecting more than twice as many signatures as needed to put the measure on the ballot. But as the ultimate judicial reversal of both California's Prop 22 and Prop 8 show, the Dems have lots of ways of blocking ANY lawful efforts to prevent them from doing what they want. So I suspect they'll find a way to block this ballot measure as well.
I'll try to keep an eye on this and update it when needed.
posted by SF at
4:42 PM
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