Lakhota
Diamond Member
By Steven Rosenfeld
A movement to reform the Electoral College and elect the president based on the national popular vote has half the states it needs.
Republican Senator Mitch McConnell calls it absurd and dangerous. The Wall Street Journal says it deserves to die. The Heritage Foundation calls it unconstitutional. The Washington Post calls it flawed. A Republican National Committee resolution says it is a radical, un-American, questionable legal maneuver.
It is awarding the presidency to the candidate who wins the most votes.
The United States is not a democracy and shouldnt be, said Michael Munger, Duke Universitys Political Science Department chairman and a 2008 Libertarian gubernatorial candidate attacking it at a League of Women Voters forum. There is NO moral force in the majority. It is just what most people happen to think.
These right-wingers are truly worried that a plan reforming the way the president-electing Electoral College works is gaining legal ground and could bring the biggest change in the political landscape in decades. The National Popular Vote plan would replace the current system, in which states award Electoral College delegates to whomever wins the presidential vote in that state, with a new interstate agreement where a participating states delegates would be bound to the national popular vote winner.
In other words, as soon as states with a total of 270 Electoral College delegates sign onand they are halfway therepresidential elections where one state swayed the outcome, such as Ohio in 2004 and Florida in 2000, would be no more.
It is born from a frustration of a system that is inherently broken, a system that allots two-thirds to three-fourths of resources in a presidential campaign in the last six or seven weeks to six states. That isnt democracy, said Pam Wilmot, Common Causes National Popular Vote coordinator. We cannot and should not have a small number of states deciding the outcome of presidential elections for the rest of us.
The idea that voters across the countrynot just in politically split battleground stateswould elect the president scares the Republican Party and arch conservatives on so many levels. It would upend the way candidates and political parties and consultants now work to retain their power and influence. It would force presidential nominees and parties to campaign in more racially diverse states, more cities and suburbs, addressing those communities and their concerns.
We need to kill it in the cradle before it grows up, McConnell told a Heritage Foundation audience last December.
Right-wingers say these changes are terrible, and not just because they might empower Democrats and relegate the GOP as it now exists to historys dustbin. But even worse, they say this is a constitutional coup because the founders great insight was that some branches of the governmentsuch as the presidency and Senatehad to be set apart from the passions of majority opinion and the tyranny of mob rule.
Much More: Why the Right Wing Is Petrified of Letting Voters, Instead of the Electoral College, Pick Presidents | Election 2012 | AlterNet