Outside Counsel

I understand the impulse to approach constitutional change cautiously-- the document has been around for a long time, and leaving aside most of the 19th Century it has worked fairly well. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the case for abolishing the Electoral Collage has been pretty well established. It is undemocratic, cumbersome, and damned if it doesn't lead to exactly the sort of bad results that political scientists have predicted for years. Changing it, however, has proved to be a much more difficult task than anyone could have predicted, in part because those aspects of it that are the least democratic are what the people who would be adversely affect by change like the most. Like the Senate, it grants disproportionate political weight to lightly populated states, and don't think for a moment that Senators don't know that. The last really interesting political cause I worked hands on with was when I worked at Birch Bayh's Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, researching Electoral Collage issues, and Senator Bayh was, I think, the last person to try to fix the problem by way of constitutional amendment. The fix that is currently favored is for the legislatures of the states to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. Basically this amounts to an agreement by the states to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote. There are reasons, which I won't go into, for why this is an imperfect solution, but it is a big step in the right direction. Since New York is one of the states that is effectively rendered irrelevant by the Electoral Collage you'd think we'd be on board with this, but we aren't. Come to find out that it is my college classmate, Joseph Morelle who may be holding things up. I should give him a call.....