Virginia Democrats seem determined to ensure they will never get elected again. Their determination to turn nearly all Virginia gun owners into criminals led to more than 90 counties in the state declaring themselves to be Second Amendment Sanctuaries.
Now the state’s Democrats want to cede Virginia’s power to decide who it wants to be president of the United States by giving the state’s electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote. The state House of Delegates voted on Tuesday to place Virginia in the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would cede participating states’ electoral votes to the national popular vote winner, regardless of who the people of Virginia voted for.
CNN reported that the compact “will go into effect only if the cumulative total of the states’ electoral votes surpasses the 270 necessary for a majority, which would require states that voted for President Donald Trump in 2016 to sign on.”
The bill was sponsored by Del. Mark Levine, who tried to explain why such a bill was necessary. Levine was the delegate who spent six minutes attempting to explain the definition of an “assault weapon” while getting literally every basic thing about guns wrong. So, that tells you a bit about his knowledge of the electoral college.
“This idea that some American citizens should have more power than other American citizens to choose the president of the United States, I, frankly, find profoundly offensive,” Levine said of the electoral college.
He naturally failed to realize that choosing a president based on the national popular vote solidifies that kind of power.
He claimed that determining the president based on the national popular vote “allows every single citizen of the United States to have a free and equal vote, and in doing so, everyone has an incentive to vote.”
No. The electoral college is what gives more Americans the power to select the president. As I’ve written numerous times over the years, the electoral college allows the people of each state to select who they want as president. America has 51 individual popular votes (each state and the District of Columbia). Electoral votes allow the people of each separate state to choose their president. The national popular vote is a meaningless statistic because it is skewed by California, New York, and Texas.
What Levine and other Democrats are mad about is that people in states other than California and New York want someone other than a Democrat to be president sometimes. The national popular vote would ensure California, New York, and Texas decide who is president, not the people of any other state. Is the Electoral College perfect? No, but it, unlike the national popular vote, gives more states the power to elect the president.
Virginia House Minority Leader Todd Gilbert argued that Democrats have been too aggressive since taking power in the state.
“The last couple of days have been difficult to watch the eroding of things we have tried very hard to protect in terms of protecting Virginia and its citizens. We see the work being done now as damaging Virginians and their opportunities,” Gilbert said.
“So, I think the time for reflection on whether we’ve been able to find any rays of sunshine here will come, but today is probably not it,” he added.