Victor Davis Hanson
8. Destroying the Electoral College. Next, we come to an array of leftwing proposals designed to destroy the Constitution as we have known it, all for the short-term advantage of the Left. Vice presidential candidate, the buffoonish and so often untruthful Tim Walz just boasted, “The Electoral College needs to go.”
And indeed, that is the first and prime target of our Jacobins. The Electoral College is an institution that they once revered when it was dubbed the indomitable “Blue Wall.”
Remember, prior to 2016, in the “golden” Obama years when the Electoral College was as indomitable as the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople—consisting of the unbreakable triad of California, Illinois, and New York (home to America’s three largest megalopolises, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York), thus guaranteeing the Left an automatic 104 electoral votes before the balloting had even begun. Then there was the supposedly reliable “rust belt/lunch belt” sureties (Obama’s “clinger” states) of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania with another 46 more “automatic” electoral votes.
But in 2016, Donald Trump blew up the Midwest triad, lost the popular vote, but was still elected president by a fairly easy Electoral College margin.
So suddenly, the College was “anti-democratic,” “racist,” and antiquated”—fill in the usual leftwing blanks of disparagement. None had read the Federalist Papers or the vast literature surrounding the writing and drafting of the Constitution and thus were ignorant of the Founders’ reasoning for the creation of the College.
Under federalism, we are the United States, not just an amorphous nation, but rather 50 united entities, semi-sovereign, distinct regional jurisdictions with unique characteristics and powers; and the College was also designed to disperse the voting so that fraud more likely from a single national popular vote would not be completely determinative.
And in Jeffersonian terms, the College was supposed to give rural geographical balance to urban densities, i.e., the map of the U.S. would show rural, small-town, and agrarian areas (now “red” states) to cover geographically the vast majority of the American nation, while the urban areas would account for half or more of the population but be confined in area to a few states and clusters.
The College thus would prevent candidates from simply visiting 10 or so mostly coastal major cities in relatively close proximity and ignoring the vast interior expanses of the nation.
In typical leftist fashion, the Democrats sought an unconstitutional means of circumventing the lengthy constitutional amendment process of requiring any change to win 2/3s of the combined Congress and 3/4s of the state legislatures—a process designed exactly to prevent partisan zealots from rigging and tearing apart the Constitution to fit their short-term ambitions.
No matter. The Left dreamed up “The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC),” a leftwing funded effort to get state legislatures and governors to pass legislation nullifying the Constitution, by pledging not to honor their states’ tallies in electing electors by pledging them instead to the winner of the national vote. The compact now requires just a few more states with a total of 61 more electoral votes to achieve the magical winning 270-vote majority of the College. But to ensure that unconstitutional change, the Left also needs to change the makeup of the Supreme Court. And so read on….
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