DIRECT ACTION CAN DO IT!

                     DIRECT ACTION

Virginia with 13 electoral votes has now joined the Compact.  The magic number is 270.  Now the count to it is 209 and rising.  Only 61 more electoral votes to go.  Which state will be next?  Which state will be the one to finally make it so? 

Save American Constitutional Democracy from the coming singularity via The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact

 

In 2016  Clinton got 3 million more popular votes than Trump but Trump was elected President against the will of the majority of the American voters and the odds are that something like it is going to happen again in 2020. And if it does, the Constitution of the United States will be revealed as incompatible with American Democracy and something cannot help but give. There cannot fail to be a paradigm shift AKA a revolution against the Constitution as it stands.

Indeed there has already been a quite Constitutional coup already via the Electoral College. One thing is sure--Donald Trump was not elected by a popular majority.  And all the polls ever since have never showed him having such a majority, hovering between a low of just below 40% and a high just below 45%. A permanent constituency even while being impeached that can never rise to a popular majority. 

Nevertheless he can be re-elected the same way as he was in 2016.  And if something like this can happen twice in a row, especially against such vile political circumstances, it can become the new abnormal and the collapse of American Constitutional democracy, potentially as what happened to the democratic Weimar Republic which legally elected Adolf Hitler.

Worse still, perhaps, by 2016 more states than not had   become reliably Democrat or Republican, and many of them with large populations and therefore many Electors, but not enough for either the Democrat  or the Republican to win the 270 electors needed in the Electoral College to elect a president.  So by the time Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton, it was understood that the election would be won in three or four so-called "battleground" or "swing" states which together had more than enough Electors to make one or the other a winner in the Electoral College. So the Trump machine, where this was understood, concentrated on these few states with sophisticated well-aimed use of social media with their own trolls and hackers and those of Russian Intelligence.

That is how Trump, though losing the popular vote by 3 million votes to Hillary Clinton,  became president in 2016.  And since it worked then, not only is Trump going to do it again, but the Democrats, having learned their lesson the hard way, will try to do likewise and hope to win more electoral votes in the Swing States than the Republicans. Whoever wins this way, whoever loses, this is not modern or just electoral democracy, and the American people will lose their belief in the legitimacy of Constitutional Democracy itself.

Can both American Democracy and Constitutionality avoid being sucked into this political black hole? 

Yes it can. By The National   The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.  For those who want the long version in copious detail with maps, history, legal arguments,  the numbers in great detail  go here to the definitive story on Wikipedia:  

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact on Wikipedia

Here is the short version:Under the Constitution, whatever you may think you know, even though the names of the candidates you may think you are voting for are on the ballot,  Americans actually vote for the unnamed "Electors" chosen by states to meet in the Electoral College a majority vote of which elects the Presidents.

According to the Constitution, the number of Electors from each state is the total of their House Representatives plus the 2 Senators every state has. The Constitution gives the power and duty them to select to its Electors according to the method mandated by each state legislature. Period. 


Constitutionally, state legislatures may choose Electors by their own vote or have a popular state vote according to only the individual state laws, and there is no federal requirement on how the states chose their Electors. In the beginning, most of the original 13 states Electors were chosen by the state legislatures, there was not a two party system, and the Electoral College worked much like the House of Representatives, with the Electors representing the state governments who chose them, with or without a vote by the people, and had a  certain flexibility.

Cut two centuries more or less to the present and faceless and nameless Electors are chosen by their faceless and nameless party machineries to represent their presidential candidates whose names are on the ballots.  The Electors chosen by the party whose candidate wins the state popular vote go to the Electoral College where they are required by law to vote for that candidate and the Electoral College elects the president by majority vote

If this seems weird, well it is. No other democracy with a president who actually governs chooses a president this way. The standard is a two step election. In the firelection, many diverse candidates can run, and if one of them gets a clear majority he or she is elected, but if not, the top two vote getters run against each other  and one or the other has to win the president by clear majority.

There are various versions, but this is the template that makes clear, simple, democratic sense. So why does the United States, which has the oldest continuous Constitution in the world, which invented constitutional democratic government,  still choose its president the way it does? Why doesn't the United States simply adopt its own version of what makes clear, simple, democratic sense?

Well the Constitution does include a means of amending itself. But it was deliberately and wisely made more difficult to do than a simple majority in Congress which would render a Constitution  superfluous.  An Amendment to the Constitution requires a 67 % vote in both houses of Congress and the approval by 75% of the state legislatures.  Difficult, very difficult, but not impossible, designed so the Consitution can only be changed by the overwhelming will of the people, protecting itself from passing elected democratic dictatorship of simple majorities.  

And it has been done upon occasion. The first 10 amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, were part of the original Constitution, amended there to get the unanimity of the 13 states needed for its adoption. Later on, there were  amendments mandating popular election of Senators, giving the freed slaves full voting citizenship after the War Between the States, the vote for women, Prohibition, removal of that amendment, and so forth, generally either keeping up with the changing times that a large majority favored, or won by hard direct action.  Discounting the first 10 which were not exactly amendments, 15 in two centuries, rare but doable.

But replacing the Electoral College with a simple election by the people like every other presidential democracy is something else, a Catch 22.  Attempting to do it by Constitutional amendment would require a two-thirds agreement in the House where the number of a states Representatives is determined by the size of population, but also in the Senate, where states like , say Idaho or Montana with small populations have the same two votes each as, say New York, Texas, and California. And worse still, or so it seems, 75% of state legislatures would then have to vote to approve it with an even one vote each.

However The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact already exists, is within the bounds of existing Constitutionality,  would only need passage by legislatures  of states commanding a total of 270 electoral votes. States signing The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact agree to have all their Electors in the Electoral College vote for the winner of the national popular election where it takes only a majority of 270 electoral votes to elect the President.

Thus can the United States join the ranks of true, simple, popular electoral presidential democracies, neither by politically impossible Constitutional amendments nor breaking its own Constitution.  Thus can American Democracy and Constitutionality both be saved.


And states whose legislatures have already signed on currently control 196 elector votes.  Meaning only another 74 such votes are now needed not to remove the Electoral College but to render it superfluous. Those who go around, get around.


There is a total of 131 bills not yet voted on but still in play in various state legislatures as of now, and if you want the full list go to Wikipidia.  But to give you an idea, there are a mere 5 such legislatures, those of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Ohio, who all by themselves control 74 elector votes, enough to seal the deal.

This is forthrightly a call to direct action.  I invite viralizsation of this posting.  I hereby put it in the public domain so that any newspaper,r national or local, may publish it,  and any group may distribute copies of it.

Because this is uniquely a national demand for justice and true electoral national democracy.  All candidates running for the presidency, including Donald Trump, should be asked whether they support this Compact, yes or no, and if no, why so.


But the fight for The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact can be, indeed must be, won state by state, state legislature by state legislature.  National marches for national goals are difficult to organize and usually win little.  But this is a national necessity that can only be won state by state,  where politics are local and representatives politically vulnerable to direct action.

Save American electoral democracy and Constitutionality to stand together.Get it done before election day.

That a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

 


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