In an exclusive interview with the Heritage Foundation, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had strong words for President Obama:

Liberals have concocted yet another method to get around the founders’ Constitution. They plan to elect the President in 2012 on the basis of the national popular vote, rather than by a majority of the electoral college.

Although earlier progressive innovations have confused the process, the Constitution is quite clear that the President is chosen by electors, appointed by each state “in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct.” Like the bicameral Congress, the presidency was infused with federalism—the states as states would have a role to play in the choice of the chief executive.

Indeed, the framers expected that, after George Washington, few men would have sufficient stature to command an electoral college majority. Thus the President would be chosen by the House of Representatives, by a special method in which each state delegation would cast one vote. But in time, the political parties produced a system in which the popular vote majority almost always was the electoral vote majority.

More important, the founders wanted to make sure that the President could not claim to embody the people. The presidential election would not be a plebiscite, of the kind that produced Caesar, Napoleon, or other demagogic dictators.

In short, the Electoral College would keep the President a constitutional president—limited and balanced by the other levels and branches of the constitutional system.

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As a movement conservative, constitutionalist, and believer in the First Amendment, I do believe that Tara Ross and others are entitled to opinions related to the current effort surrounding the National Popular Vote, a state-based plan to reform the Electoral College. They are not, however, entitled to their own set of the facts. I’d like to set the record straight.

First the idea that National Popular Vote “abolishes”, “attacks”, “neuters” or “subverts” the Electoral College, the Constitution or “intent of the founders,” is simply not true.

National Popular Vote preserves the Electoral College and the intent of the Constitution, that is to say, that the states continue to have the right to determine how they award their electoral votes.  This effort is an appropriate approach to reforming the way we elect our President under Article II of the Constitution.

It allows states to replace current winner-take-all rules, the current method of awarding all Electors to the candidate who wins the most popular votes in a given state. Forty-eight states currently use winner-take-all rules, relegating two-thirds of Americans irrelevant when electing their president because they live in a “fly-over” state where the Republican or Democrat candidate for President is comfortably ahead or hopelessly behind.

Our Founding Fathers did not oppose or support a national popular vote or any other method of electing our president, instead leaving it to the states to award electors in a manner that is in the best interest of the people that they serve.  They certainly did not favor the current state-by-state, winner-take-all system we currently use to elect the President, nor would they bless a system that relegated 11 of the 13 original states to “fly-over” status during the 2008 Presidential campaign.

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