McConnell goes after an "absurd and dangerous concept"

[Greenbeard]

... a national popular vote.

Addressing what he called “the most important issue in America that nobody is talking about,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell warned Wednesday that the National Popular Vote movement is “getting dangerously close to achieving their goal of eliminating the Electoral College without actually amending the Constitution -- without anybody even noticing, unfortunately, what they’re up to.”

The National Popular Vote is a compact among state legislatures under which they pledge that they’ll award their electoral votes to the presidential candidate who wins the most popular votes nationwide, even if that candidate was not the majority choice of their state’s voters.

So far, California, seven other states, and the District of Columbia (all of which have large Democratic majorities) have passed legislation taking the National Popular Vote pledge. Those states and D.C. account for 132 electoral votes. The compact says it is to take effect when states with a total of at least 270 electoral votes have agreed to it.

The only argument they quote him making is that a recount would be hard. Presumably he must've had more than just that.

“Imagine the following scenario: you’ve got a national election within 100,000 votes. That happened in 1968,” McConnell said.

The national popular vote would give “every precinct in America the incentive to have a recount so that recounts are going on in 50 states … When the national popular vote total is the way the president is chosen, then every vote in America in every precinct in America would become the subject for endless litigation. There wouldn’t be a chance the presidency would be resolved by Jan. 20 in time for swearing in.”

This would, McConnell said, be “a catastrophic outcome” and “a constitutional crisis” that “brings this country to its knees. We’ve never had a situation where the president wasn’t sworn in by the date specified in the Constitution.”

He added, “The proponents of this absurd and dangerous concept are trying to get this done while nobody notices, just sort of sneak this through,” and “we need to kill it in the cradle before it grows up.”

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

Let’s create a diversion in the hope voters will forget Senate republicans’ obstructionism.