Losing the Republic

See UPDATE below!

Chilling developments in a topic I've written on before that gets too little attention (see here, here and here):

Attacks on the Electoral College Gain Momentum

You won’t hear about it in the mainstream media, but the Electoral College is on the verge of being eliminated. One important legislative vote could occur Thursday. Two others could occur in the upcoming days and weeks.

A California-based group, National Popular Vote, is lobbying hard for a dangerous piece of anti-Electoral College legislation. My NRO article on the mechanics of the legislation is here. Five states have already approved NPV, but now three additional states are dangerously close to joining them: Delaware, Massachusetts, and New York. Another trio of state legislatures approved the scheme, but their governors vetoed the plan. These latter states remain important; a reasonable argument can be made that the gubernatorial vetoes are irrelevant.

If each of these states is counted, NPV could have as many as 169 electoral votes in favor of its plan. It needs 270. NPV has come startlingly close to success even as most Americans remain completely unaware that the presidential-election process is so close to being turned on its head.

The scheme is based on states colluding to cast their electoral votes for the national popular vote winner, rather than for the winner of their own particular state!

This is complete madness -- state lawmakers are essentially declaring that they will theoretically squander their citizen's votes on a candidate that zero people in the state voted for.

This wrongly strips out the state-vote aspect of the Electoral College, which was never intended to be a proxy for the popular vote -- it is a weighted average of the popular vote with a state-by-state vote, since both the people and the states ceded power in the Constitution to form the federal government.

And that is why both are represented separately in Congress.

States already had their interests gutted when the 17th Amendment changed Senators from being appointed by State governments (as their direct representatives) to being elected by popular vote. And now Senators receive national money to run their election campaigns, and thus are beholden to special interests instead of the State interest.

These "progressive" moves towards greater and greater democracy are not a good thing -- we were set up as a Republic for a reason.

UPDATE: Case in point on the destructiveness of the 17 Amendment -- Sen. Harry M. Reid building war chest by tapping donors beyond Nevada

Harry M. Reid needed money, and lots of it....The senator began dialing old and new friends across the country, asking for their help. Many had one thing in common: They had a financial stake in legislation that Reid, as the most powerful member of the Senate, helps control....Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, which monitors campaigns, said trial lawyers and other Democratic-leaning donors probably want to help Reid stay in power -- but other new outside interests may want something else from him.

Clearly, it is a fantasy that Reid represents Nevada as a state.