In very plain, specific language. They are not vague statutes that can be utilized by creative lawyers to achieve ends never imagined by the people who wrote the amendment.
Any interpretation of the Constitution that repeals the EC also repeals the Senate. the problem with that is that the Senate can’t be abolished or made proportional even by amendment to the Constitution. It’s expressly forbidden to ever take a state’s equal representation away without its consent, which means you’d need a unanimous vote.
So it’s clear that the framers created the EC and the Senate despite the fact that it was an exception to “one man, one vote”. So you’d need to specifically deal with them in amendment language, you couldn’t just repeal them through creative interpretation. And as I pointed out, conservatives could use the 9th amendment as a very potent weapon against the federal government once that precedent was set.
Then we’ve got two parts of the Constitution conflicting with each other. It doesn’t matter, the courts have held that congressional approval is required only when such an agreement impinges on federal supremacy. It’s hard to see how a state’s action in a matter explicitly assigned to the state by the Constitution does so.
You could put together that argument all you like, as an exercise in daydreaming. I think you’ll find it difficult to convince the courts that the Constitution is unconstitutional. Otherwise, why haven’t the Electoral College and the Senate been done away with by the courts long ago?
Both the 14th Amendment and the Reynolds v. Sims ruling came long after the initial version of the Constitution was ratified, as you’d know if you gave a damn. So, you’re seriously telling us that the Founding Fathers (cue heavenly harp music) put the EC in place in order to prevent their descendants in 1868 and 1964 from doing anything about it.
Are you seriously unaware how often the Constitution conflicts with itself, how often people in the real world have rights which cannot all be satisfied simultaneously, how resolving such conflicts is the major part of the Court’s job, one which has kept it busy for hundreds of years? Every single fucking split decision on a Constitutional ruling, which is almost all of them, stands as an example of how one part of the Constitution resntains another part to a degree, or “unconstitutional” since you seem to enjoy such wordplay.
Your second question is simply too silly to require a response. Anyone who took American History in middle school understands “why”.
And yet despite that, you blithely claim that it would be easy to put together a case that the state legislature’s are not explicitly granted sole control of how they choose their state’s electors, and, in fact, go on to claim that the Electoral College would be abolished by it? Seriously? If it was so easy, it would have already happened.
The Electoral College can only be abolished by an amendment abolishing it in specific, plain language. And I also agree that the Popular vote Initative is constitutional, since states do have absolute power to determine how their electoral votes will be allocated.
I think the plan is a bad idea, but mainly because of a small detail: they need to have a contingency plan for if the vote is close. Even if it’s as simple as agreeing to abide by the popular vote totals even if there is some dispute as to their accuracy. There will be no national recount.
You’re misunderstanding the part of the NPVC where the Electoral College is *not *abolished. Also, the part where no national popular vote has been all that close anyway.
How so? It’s an established provision of law that if a law can’t be implemented fully, then it’s implemented as much as possible. So, we have an amendment to the Constitution which requires equal protection to all citizens. We apply that to as much as we can. Can it be applied to the unequal representation in the Senate? No, because unequal representation in the Senate is the one thing in the Constitution which explicitly can’t be changed by amendment. Can it be applied to unequal representation in the election of the President? Sure, the Presidency is a completely different branch from the Senate; there’s no problem with changing the way the President is elected.
Except the electoral college is specifically mandated in the Constitution. It can be repealed, but it would be very creative jurisprudence to repeal it by such indirection as using the 14th amendment in a novel way not thought of in 150 years. And anytime you open up a new avenue for repealing parts of the Constitution, it can be duplicated for other ends.
Yes, sorta. The current standard is one enunciated in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Co. Accounting Oversight Board, a 2010 Supreme Court case that said there are two steps involved: a reviewing court must first decide if all of the remaining, unstruck provisions of the statute are still fully
functional without the unconstitutional one(s) in play. If they are, the court then analyzes whether Congress would be satisfied with the remaining statute – that is, would Congress have still passed it if it looked like it does after the redaction.
But that doesn’t apply to Constitutional provisions. Congress can’t erase those.
Please point out where, in your infinite sense of fairness, you said it would also be easy to put together the opposite case. You’re not even being internally self-consistent, let alone making a convincing argument.
If the EC was merely a statute, then I think he’s right, you could put together an opposite case. But since it’s an article of the nation’s supreme law, you’d need an overwhelming consensus on its unconstitutionality in light of the 14th amendment to be able to abolish it.
The EC not only embodies the thinking of our Founding Fuckups, it’s about the only part that still does. They were not intent on founding an egalitarian democracy, they were intent on building a republic firmly in the control of the better sorts of people, such as themselves.
Anyway, we are probably stuck with it, given the inherent difficulties in doing anything about it. But even as it is, we can take steps to improve how responsive it is to egalitarian principles, or we can let people game the system in order to reward themselves with political power they otherwise do not deserve.
When Bush won 2000 by a negative half-a-million, it was hard not to laugh, but even harder when you are puking your guts out.
I’d like to see a cite on that because in all of the commentary I’ve seen on the compact no one has mentioned that while most point out it needs Congressional approval.
There was some of that kind of thinking with the founders, but they also were founding a nation that consisted of sovereign states VOLUNTARILY joining, and in order to gain that consent, the states had to maintain their sovereignty, surrendering only certain powers to the new federal government while leaving the bulk of the power in their own hands. The most important element towards accomplishing that was control of elections. Each state conducts an election by their own methods, and then they allocate their electoral votes according to those rules.
The goal of the founders wasn’t to create an egalitarian democracy or a republic with rule by the “right kinds of people”. It was to create a form of government where the individual was protected from the depredations of a tyrannical government. Where the government worked for the individual. When the founders said, “the people”, they didn’t mean the same thing socialists would later mean. They meant people as individuals, not people as a group. There is a distinction.
Then why did they say “the people”, if that’s not what they meant? “The people” means the collective. If you want to refer to the individuals, that’d be “the persons”.
