By Jim Inhofe
& Trent England
Monday, December
13, 2021
Over the years we have witnessed a
reliable pattern develop in American politics: When the Left loses, instead of
changing its arguments or its candidates it opts to change the rules. When
Democrats lost the White House and President Trump filled three vacancies on
the Supreme Court, they called for packing the Court. When they failed to win a
large enough majority to advance their radical agenda in the Senate, they
called for abolishing the filibuster. And perhaps most insidiously, after
losing presidential elections, they have set their sights on scrapping the
Electoral College.
In 2006, frustrated Al Gore supporters,
still fuming from his close loss to George W. Bush six years prior, launched
the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC), a voluntary agreement
among states to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national
popular vote. The NPVIC is designed to go into effect once its signatory states
comprise an absolute majority of all electoral votes (EV) — 270 EV, under the
current map. Ten left-leaning states initially signed on, including California,
Illinois, and New York, and five more blue states joined them after 2016. The
plan is now nearly three-quarters of the way to taking effect, and in Michigan
its supporters are currently
gathering the signatures needed
to put it on the ballot next year. While it suffered a major setback with
Republican Glenn Youngkin’s win in the Virginia governor’s race, the NPVIC is
coming closer and closer to fruition, making our efforts to oppose it more
vital than ever.
NPVIC supporters’ aim is to eliminate the
Electoral College without doing the hard work of amending the Constitution. The
Compact requires states to choose presidential electors based not on their
state popular vote, but on the national popular vote. This sounds simple, but
the devil is in the details. Each NPVIC-signatory state would determine the
national popular vote on its own. That means a single official in each state
would decide what votes to count from every other state. In a world of perfect
peace and harmony, that might work. But American politics is not a world of
perfect peace and harmony.
What’s more, even if it were — even if the
potential for partisan abuse were never realized — the NPVIC would still
dramatically increase the power of big cities at the expense of the rest of
America. Without the Electoral College, our national elections would become a
coastal affair. Just nine states — including the liberal bastions of New York,
Illinois, and California — make up more than 50 percent of our population.
The NPVIC would strip away the voices of
Oklahomans, North Dakotans, Alaskans, Arizonans, and many others. Some Democrats see this as a feature of the plan, not
a bug.
The Constitution reserves nearly all the
power over elections to the states. It requires state legislatures to determine
how best to represent their state in the Electoral College. It bars federal
officials from serving as presidential electors. The Electoral Counts Act of
1887 reiterates this constitutional design by limiting federal power to
interfere in states’ electoral-vote counting — no matter how good the
intentions or real the concerns of members of Congress.
The United States is hardly alone in using
a two-step democratic process to choose our national executive. Parliamentary
systems work that way, and Germany and India have their own unique
electoral-college systems. Requiring concurrent victories across multiple
states or districts forces presidential candidates to appeal to the broadest
possible cross-section of the electorate, which in turn ensures a government
that reflects the diversity of its constituents.
Our great American Founders knew what they
were doing in constructing a system of government that delicately balances
power between cities and rural communities, between coastal communities and
inland regions. The Electoral College is a critical part of that system, a
guarantee that while political candidates may treat states such as Oklahoma as
flyover country, Oklahomans will have as clear and powerful a voice in electing
presidents as San Franciscans and New Yorkers. The very future of our republic
depends on its preservation.
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