Virginia’s House of Delegates: Crazier By the Day

Of all the radical measures being conveyor belted through the General Assembly this session by the new Democratic majority, HB177 is one of the worst.

If it passes, Virginia will - as some have said - relinquish its sovereignty to California.

After appearing to be dead earlier in the session, this proposal to have Virginia join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact was revived and passed the House of Delegates this week. 

“Under the compact, Virginia agrees to award its electoral votes to the presidential ticket that receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia,” a bill summary states. “The compact goes into effect when states cumulatively possessing a majority of the electoral votes have joined the compact.”

Nothing can save us from this voluntary surrender of Virginia votes except the State Senate. Even if that chamber approves this bill, this pact will likely not effect this November’s election.

Having spent the first half of the 2020 session carving up the 2nd Amendment, the General Assembly turned its legislative chain saws on Article II, Section 1 of the US Constitution: The electoral college.

Actually, the Democrats just want to make an end run around it.

It’s clear that none of the 51 delegates who voted for this bill were paying attention in high school civics class. They’ve forgotten that the U.S. is a constitutional republic and not a pure democracy. We don’t directly elect our president.

The establishment of the electoral college by the Founding Fathers was intended to thwart a tyranny by the masses. They wanted to guarantee that citizens in rural areas and less populated states would have a voice in the selection of the president and would not be forgotten by the federal government.

It’s genius, really.

This national movement to scrap the electoral college has gathered steam in the past two years, pushed by unhinged Hillary Clinton supporters who refuse to accept the results of hte last election. They’re almost as bitter as their candidate who - in speech after speech - claims she won, even though she fell far short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Clinton had just 227 to President Trump’s 304.

Hillary didn’t win. And she knows it.

I didn’t hear Democrats screaming about the electoral college in 2008 when Barack Obama took 365 votes, to John McCain’s 173. Come to think of it, I didn’t hear Republicans moaning about the electoral college then, either. Democrats were happy with the electoral college again in 2012 when it gave Obama 332 votes to Mitt Romney’s 206. Again, I didn’t notice the losers demanding an end to our constitutionally established method of electing a president.

You see, Obama understood the electoral college and campaigned like crazy in states that he needed to win to secure the win. 

Clinton, in her stupidity, unbridled arrogance or because she was coughing too much, chose not to campaign in all 50 states. Consequently, she came up short in the electoral college, while winning the popular vote.

It’s not the first time that’s happened. In fact, five presidents have been elected without winning the popular vote. John Quincy Adams in 1824, who was elected by the House of  Representatives after a four-way race for president gave no candidate the requisite number of electoral votes. Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, Benjamin Harrison in 1888, George W. Bush in 2000 and of course, Trump in 2016.

Writing for the Richmond Times-Dispatch earlier this month, deputy op-ed editor Robin Beres  argued against this bill.

If the national compact comes to fruition, Beres wrote, “the outcome of every election going forward would be determined by just four states — California, Texas, Florida and New York. The concerns of rural areas could easily become all but ignored as candidates addressed only issues important to urban populations.

“The Electoral College was adopted in 1787 by the Constitutional Convention as a compromise to assuage the concerns of delegates from smaller states who, worried they would have no voice in presidential elections...It’s notable that it was the darling of today’s progressives, Alexander Hamilton himself, who recognized how important the compromise was to avoid creating a majoritarian democracy. In Federalist 68, he wrote in praise of the Electoral College.”

The electoral college quite simply guarantees that all Americans have a role to play in selecting the president. It’s worked for more than 200 years.

You want to be president of all of these United States? Simple. Campaign everywhere.