And so it begins. Nine months still to go before the next US presidential election and already the Republican party favourite and former President Donald Trump is sending eyes rolling skywards with his seemingly outlandish statements.
And yet they will delight many of his supporters.
Suggesting at a rally in South Carolina that he would “encourage” aggressors (for example Russia) “to do whatever the hell they want” with Nato countries that fail to pay their dues has prompted an immediate slap down from the White House. A spokesman called the comment “appalling and unhinged”, saying it was “encouraging invasions of our closest allies by murderous regimes”.
Nato Secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg has also responded forcefully, saying: “Any suggestion that allies will not defend each other undermines all of our security, including that of the US, and puts American and European soldiers at increased risk.”
There is one interesting workaround I’ve heard about from time to time, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. It’s a state-level agreement where all the participating member states commit to allocating their electoral college votes to whomever won the popular vote nationally. No need for a constitutional convention since the allocation of electoral college votes is in the hands of state governments, they can decide to do this under the existing constitution.
But you need states to agree to that, which runs into the same issue as an amendment does.
You don’t need as many states to agree to it. Just enough to swing the election.
However the states likely to agree are the ones that reliably vote Democrat, and the GOP has only won one popular vote in the last 30 years. So again, it won’t make a difference.
It will. To change the constitution you need 2/3 of the states. For this plan to work, you need only 50.1% of the electoral votes to agree. Doesn’t matter if they primarily swing democrat, it just has to be a majority.
Not a single “swing” or red state will go through with it. It may be numerically closer, but ideologically, it’s not going to happen. The red states know their favored candidate would lose, the swing states would forfeit their leverage to basically “go with whatever the northeast and west coast say”. Since this requires holdouts to surrender some measure of political power they have, won’t happen.
The comment I was responding to at the root of this said:
And my response was to point out that no, it wouldn’t. It doesn’t. It’s still difficult, sure, but it doesn’t require a constitutional convention to change.
Also, if you actually look it up, there are enough states that have already enacted the compact or are “pending” to get it done. So it’s closer to being done than you are implying.
Of the ones that are ‘done’, they were already consistently democrat and haven’t had to vote against their usual leaning.
Of the ones that are marked as ‘pending’, it is very optimistic to presume that is on its way to anything. It merely requires that some state legislature person proposed it. Maine is “Pending” but has already failed 7 prior attempts over the past 15 years. Many of those “pending” have been “in committee” for about a year. No way it takes a year to seriously bake such a simplistic proposal, it’s dead in committee, just waiting for an election cycle for it to be official.
The reason this is doomed to fail is you’d need states to join that explicitly enjoy political advantage from the current system. A die-hard “red” state will not sign on to a system that basically hands the presidential election to whoever the northeast and west coast vote for. A swing state that may be more ok with a democrat winning consistently would still not want to cede the political influence afforded to them by virtue of being a “swing” state.
All of that can be true and this is still easier than a constitutional amendment.
That is all that I was saying from the start. It remains the case. You don’t need a constitutional convention to make this change, there is an easier way to do it.
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We can also double the size of the House (if not more). Electoral college votes are distributed according to the number of House districts (plus 2 for the senators of each state). Congress can simply pass that law. This is a good idea, anyway, since it was last set in 1911 with a total US population that’s less than a third of what it is today. It becomes harder gerrymander lots of smaller districts, as well, and it dilutes the effect of small states having outsized influence with their guaranteed 2 senate seats.
Would probably need to build new chambers for the House. The current one has 450 seats on the floor, plus 500 in the gallery that are normally for staff and guests, not elected members.
It’d be nice to ditch the electoral college system altogether instead of coming up with these workarounds.