Fromm the middle of the article...................
This Interstate Compact Violates the Constitution
It is a bad idea, but does that mean it is unconstitutional? Not on those grounds alone, but the compact clearly violates the plain language of several sections of the Constitution. The first clue is in its title. Any interstate compact must raise the issue of the Compact Clause in Article I of the Constitution, which holds in relevant part that “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress … enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State.”
That’s a pretty strong statement. No penumbras and emanations here, only the unequivocal language of the Constitution that says any compact among the states must be approved by Congress. Even in those analyses of the NPVIC that support its constitutionality, authors admit that “read literally, this provision would require all agreements between states to be approved by both houses of Congress and to be signed by the President before coming into effect.”
“Read literally.” What other way should a law be read? Do the NPVIC’s advocates think the language is metaphorical? Do they suppose the Constitution’s authors were being whimsical when they wrote this phrase? Even originalists can admit that some passages in the Constitution are vague, but to read the words any way other than literally invites us to have no standard at all.
Non-literalists point to historical examples of agreements between states that never received congressional approval, yet have never been invalidated. Most of these involved border adjustments between two states, a necessity in the days of imprecise measurements. Drawing on an 1893 Supreme Court ruling in Virginia v. Tennessee, they maintain that Congress does not need to approve all compacts, only those involving “the formation of any combination tending to the increase of political power in the States, which may encroach upon or interfere with the just supremacy of the United States.”
This is taken as evidence in the NPVIC’s favor, but it is more naturally read the other way. Even if the carve-out invented in Virginia v. Tennessee remains good law, it suggests only that minor agreements with no effect on the union as a whole should be exempt from congressional approval.
The exact contours of the Virginia-Tennessee border (the subject of that case) do not change the balance of power between the states and the federal government. While important to people living along that state line, it has no federal implications and is hardly even a compact; it is merely the clarification of an earlier (in this case, colonial) agreement on a physical boundary.
Compare that to the NPVIC, which effectively rewrites an entire section of the Constitution. The compromises struck at Philadelphia in 1787 were not made lightly. Decisions on how the president would be elected and how many votes each state would get are the product of lengthy negotiations and trade-offs. To overturn those arrangements based on the alliance of a few states—likely not even a majority of them—turns that finely balanced design on its head.
A compact among these states that will determine the election of the president is the farthest thing from the minute adjustments to a colonial-era state border. The Constitution provides one method of electing a president, while the NPVIC substitutes another. Nothing could be more of an encroachment upon “the just supremacy of the United States.”
http://thefederalist.com/2019/03/07/still-sore-2016-democrats-trying-unconstitutional-way-institute-national-popular-vote/
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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