2sense
July 9, 2006, 6:18am
121
The Supreme Court has historically been pretty friendly to interstate compacts. The current construction appears to be that compacts don’t require Congressional approval unless they’re “directed to the formation of any combination tending to the increase of political power in the States, which may encroach upon or interfere with the just supremacy of the United States”. Since states have explicit plenary power over the mode of choosing electors, it’s hard to see how this compact would encroach upon federal power.
(Actually, I’m not sure this plan even rises to the level of an “interstate compact”, since it doesn’t seem to entail any interstate enforcement mechanism. It sounds more like a simple reciprocity law. But the authors describe it as an interstate compact on their web site, so I’ll take their word for it.)
My constitutional concerns concerned the explicit interstate compact I mentioned and not the plan discussed here. But thanks for the information.
I don’t agree. It’s true that over-representation of small states favors the GOP; Bush carried 31 states with an average of 9.2 EV’s each in 2004, versus 20 states with an average of 12.6 EV’s for Kerry. This will persist as long as the GOP is popular in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, as they have been since the 1950’s.
However , the more important distorting effect of the EC is the WTA feature, and that can favor either party, almost randomly, from one election to the next. A small shift in Ohio–one which certain members of this board insist would have taken place if the votes had been counted correctly–would have left Kerry the minority-vote EC winner in 2004.
Just my 2sense