by Aaron Klein
• Remind people that the law is already benefiting millions of Americans by providing health care coverage, reducing costs and providing access to healthcare coverage. This message will include the ideas that these are benefits that politicans/the Court (are) trying to take away from average Americans.
• Frame the Supreme Court oral arguments in terms of real people and real benefits that would be lost if the law were overturned. While lawyers will be talking about the individual responsibility piece of the law and the legal precedents, organizations on the ground should continue to focus on these more tangible results of the law.86
With a straight face of its own, the New York Times reported the White House denials that it was “trying to gin up support by encouraging rallies outside the Supreme Court, just a stone’s throw from Congress on Capitol Hill.”87
In truth, rallies and demonstrations were exactly what they planned—as evidenced by national media—and not only outside the Supreme Court.
FUNNY NUMBERS
“The process of finding out just what’s in ObamaCare continues!” So wrote Jim Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise blog on March 15, 2012. Under one scenario, he wrote, “the gross costs through 2022 could be $2.1 trillion if even more businesses than expected decide not to offer health insurance and more people need government subsidized coverage.”88
Even a writer at the left-wing msnbc.com admitted:
Figuring out the ten-year cost of the Affordable Care Act is like trying to track a constantly moving target. That’s partly because the ten-year forecasting window keeps advancing each year: the new forecasting window covers the years 2012 to 2022.89
Those comments were elicited by a stunning revision issued by the Congressional Budget Office two days earlier, to the effect that its cost estimate of $940 billion over ten years—made at the time President Obama signed the bill in March 2010—would actually be nearly double, at $1.76 trillion.90 How could such a shocking underestimation have occurred? Let’s call it Democrat sleight of hand. Philip Klein explained at the Washington Examiner:
Democrats employed many accounting tricks when they were pushing through the national health care legislation, the most egregious of which was to delay full implementation of the law until 2014, so it would appear cheaper under the CBO’s standard ten-year budget window and, at least on paper, meet Obama’s pledge [in September 2009] that ObamaCare would cost “around $900 billion over 10 years.”91
Rick Moran stated it more bluntly at the American Thinker:
Being wrong is not the same as lying. Obama wasn’t wrong. He knew the funny numbers his administration was putting out. He knew the accounting tricks the Democrats were playing. He knew it all. And he looked the American people in the eye and lied to them.92
Klein reminded us that, prior to the bill’s passage, critics of the CBO score93 had predicted “that the true 10 year cost would be far higher than advertised once projections accounted for full implementation.”94
As of this writing, no one can predict how much—if any—of ObamaCare will remain after the Supreme Court issues its ruling, probably in this summer, on the legal challenges to the law. There is also the prospect that Congress might respond with new legislation if the justices invalidate only parts of the law. With so many variables, we cannot foresee the precise course of events. But one thing is certain. If progressives in Congress have the upper hand after 2012, and Barack Obama is reelected, single-payer health care will have become America’s burden.
9
ELECTIONS: STEALING THE FUTURE
A CAMPAIGN IS UNDER way to change the very nature of American presidential elections. In true progressive fashion, its organizers have been working since 2006 to accomplish their goal—to borrow a Fabian Socialist expression—by stealth. Under the rubric of a “National Popular Vote,” this plan would allow the fourteen most populous American states, mostly majority-Democrat, to determine the outcome of future presidential elections. The voters of the thirty-six less populous states would then effectively be disenfranchised. If successful, this stealth campaign would give Americans less democracy, all in the name of giving us more.
Naturally, most Americans have no concept whatsoever of the existence, import, objectives, financiers, or progress to date of this dangerously antidemocratic initiative. And though its alarming advance would not be in time to influence the result in November 2012 (although we will document other issues for this upcoming election), under a second Obama term its chances for success would be enormously increased. In that case, NPV would forever change the way Americans elect our president, and the American political landscape would be permanently altered in favor of the left.
Aside from this looming danger, though not immediate, of a “National Popular Vote,” we discuss here two threats that are very imminent: a foreign-headquartered company that has already been given contracts to conduct “on-line voting” in some nine hundred U.S. jurisdictions, including for overseas U.S. military personnel; and a mysterious ballot initiative, approved already in all fifty states, to put a third (presumably conservative) candidate on the ballot for November 2012, thus splitting the anti-Obama vote.
“POPULAR VOTE” ACTUALLY VOTER FRAUD
Barry F. Fadem is president of the National Popular Vote, based in California. In June 2008, Fadem disingenuously asked, “Why are all the other elections in this country based on the popular vote except for the most important one, the presidency?”1
Although only Americans who are up on their civics lessons would know the answer, there is a very good one. The vote for president is the only one in which all Americans vote for a national leader (as well as his or her possible successor, the vice president). In framing the U.S. Constitution, the Founding Fathers displayed their characteristic wisdom and subtlety in firmly rejecting a purely popular vote to elect the president, in order to balance the power of the larger states against the smaller. The Electoral College was fashioned as a compromise between an election of the president by direct popular vote and election by Congress.2
William C. Kimberling, deputy director of the Federal Elections Commission, explained in a 1992 paper why a direct popular vote had been rejected by the Founders:
Direct election was rejected not because the Framers of the Constitution doubted public intelligence but rather because they feared that without sufficient information about candidates from outside their State, people would naturally vote for a “favorite son” from their own State or region. At worst, no president would emerge with a popular majority sufficient to govern the whole country. At best, the choice of president would always be decided by the largest, most populous States, with little regard for the smaller ones.3 [Emphasis added]
The same problem would apply to future presidential elections should a national popular vote ever be enacted. For example, in a hypothetical 2012 election scenario, reaching 270 of a possible 538 electoral votes would only require Barack Obama to retake the majority of the states he won in 2008. It is possible that only fourteen states, those with the largest populations, would decide the presidency for voters in all fifty states.4
NPV wants to overturn this compromise in the U.S. Constitution and substitute what they are selling as a logical idea for how a president should be elected—and all with virtually no public knowledge, discussion or debate of what is at stake, let alone a Constitutional amendment. As “Jacquerie” at Gulag Bound observed in October 2011:
This sneaky scheme to upend Constitutional rights and protections of all states and their residents in selecting the nation’s leader is underway as an explicit attempt to defeat the careful Constitutional amendment process with no public knowledge, no voter input, no public referendums and no input from states which object to this measure. All NPVC takes is a portion of current state houses to make it law for all of us—always!
[ … ]
Akin to ObamaCare, if this National Popular Vote Compact is passed—no matter how wrong and corrupt—it would take massive fun
ding and endless delays to drag through the courts in hopes of any reversal.5
While the stated purpose of Fadem’s group is “to implement a nationwide popular election of the president of the United States,”6 what NPV actually aims to pull off is what “Jacquerie” identified as the “ultimate vote fraud.”7 The plan is ingeniously and “intentionally complicated [in order] to keep it obscure until it’s too late to stop it.”8
Innocuously enough, National Popular Vote, or NPV, operates as a 501(c)(4) tax-exempt nonprofit organization committed to promoting social welfare. While the organization’s earnings must go toward charitable, education, or recreational purposes, it can also “lobby, campaign, and otherwise participate in elections so long as the activities are in line with the organization’s purpose and are not the primary activity for the organization.”9
WHO’S BEHIND NPV?
The organization’s chairman and alleged major funder is Dr. John R. Koza. He was the cofounder, chairman, and CEO of Scientific Games Inc., where he coinvented the rub-off instant lottery ticket used by state lotteries. In the 1980s, Koza and attorney Barry Fadem promoted the lotteries “by various states through the citizen-initiative process and state legislative action.” Fadem “specializes in all aspects of campaign and election law, and provides expert consultation in the area of initiatives and referendums.”10
In 2006 Koza and Fadem coauthored the book Every Vote Equal: A State-Based Plan for Electing the President by National Popular Vote with Mark Grueskin, Michael S. Mandell, Robert Richie, and Joseph F. Zimmerman. Koza has “reportedly pledged $12 million” to NPV, previously gave “tens of thousands of dollars to various Democratic Party committees and liberal candidates; he was an Al Gore elector in 2000,” according to Tara Ross and Trent England in the Weekly Standard.11
Another NPV financier is Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex, the nation’s second largest payroll and human resource company. Golisano cofounded the Independence Party of New York in 1994 and ran as the party’s gubernatorial candidate. While Golisano has “also pledged millions to NPV,” he is a registered Republican, “even though he supported John Kerry and gave a cool $1 million to the Democratic National Convention in 2008,” Ross and England wrote in 2011.
NPV’s secretary, Chris Pearson, served in the Vermont House of Representatives in 2006. Prior to that, Pearson was director of the Presidential Election Reform program at FairVote (formerly the Center for Voting and Democracy). Unsurprisingly, NPV is partnered with FairVote, which has received funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. One of Soros’s sons, Jonathan Soros, is a major FairVote supporter.12
Robert Richie has been executive director of FairVote since he co-founded it in 1992.13 Richie is a member of the civil society committee of the George Soros–led Bretton Woods Committee, which seeks to literally remake the world economy.14 FairVote supports “universal voter registration” and a “national popular vote” for president, with “instant runoff voting for single-winner offices,” and a “more transparent and accountable election administration.”15 In an August 2004 article archived on the FairVote website, the organization also stated that its Democracy USA agenda called for the abolition of the Electoral College.16 In fact, in a December 15, 2008, Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Jonathan Soros, a son of George Soros, wrote that it was time to junk the Electoral College.17
Who else supports NPV? Again, several organizations, some purposefully and some unwittingly. Organizational support comes “almost exclusively from left wing groups” such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the League of Women Voters, and the Soros-funded Common Cause and the Demos group (which we describe in detail elsewhere in this book for its heavy influence in framing the policies of Obama and the progressives in Congress). But NPV’s army of lobbyists have also been working with the Republican National Committee, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and “conservative think tanks such as the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation,” as Ross and England reported in August 2011.18
Formal endorsers of the FairVote plan as of July 2010 included the NAACP, the National Institute for Latino Policy, National Latino Congreso, Public Citizen, Sierra Club, and U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).19
NPV MARCHES FORWARD
In 2007, Maryland became the first state to approve a “national popular vote” compact. As a result, in a theoretical winner-take-all contest, Maryland would allocate all of its ten electoral votes to the candidate who won the most votes nationally—even if the same candidate did not win the most votes in Maryland itself.20
By March 2012, eight states—California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, Washington, plus the District of Columbia—had enacted the “national popular vote” into law. Two other states, Colorado and Rhode Island, had passed it in both houses but it had not been enacted. Ten more states had passed it in one house, and ten others had passed it in a committee. Eleven states had held hearings on it, and nine more states had introduced bills.21
“These nine states have provided this dangerous and unconstitutional movement 132 of the 270 electoral votes required to win the presidency,” observed a South Carolina blogger in August 2011. “Once this group has 270 electoral votes, the Electoral College will be rendered moot, the Constitution will be undermined and the U.S. president will be elected based on popular vote.”22
There is, however, one hitch in the NPV plan: in order for a “national popular vote” to predominate, the full 270 electoral votes must be based on identical legislation (the “interstate compact”) passed by each state. A candidate would still need 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.
WHAT IS THE “INTERSTATE COMPACT”?
Its advocates claim that the “national popular vote” movement is a direct result of the 2000 presidential election. George W. Bush won the Electoral College vote and Al Gore won the popular vote. The progressive left was so infuriated that it went in search of a solution to ensure such a circumstance could not happen again.
It is also claimed that the National Public Vote Compact originated when two East Indian–American law professors, brothers Akhil Reed Amar and Vikram David Amar, responded to a March 2001 proposal23 by Robert W. Bennett of Northwestern University Law School for a direct popular election of the president without amending the Constitution.24 In their article, the Amar brothers wrote:
Imagine this: Americans could pick the President by direct national election, in 2004 and beyond, without formally amending our Constitution.
A small number of key states—eleven, to be precise—would suffice to put a direct election system into effect. Alternatively, an even smaller number of key persons—four, to be exact—could approximate the same result, with a little help from their friends.” [The four “key persons” would be the two presidential and two vice presidential candidates, who would commit themselves beforehand to winners-take-all results.]
If the eleven biggest states were to pass our law, an odd theoretical possibility would arise: A candidate could win the presidency, by winning the national popular vote, even if he or she lost in every one of these big states! (Imagine a scenario where the candidate narrowly loses in each of these states, but wins big most other places.) Should this theoretical possibility deter big states from passing our law?
The Amar brothers noted some flaws in their proposal—one of which hinged on cooperating versus non-cooperating states:
These questions suggest an even more mind-boggling prospect: our national-vote system need not piggyback on the laws and machinery of non-cooperating states at all! Let these non-cooperating states hold their own elections, but so long as they amount to less than 270 electors, these elections would be sideshows. The cooperating states could define their own rules for a uniform “National Presidential Vote” system.
They then suggested they were just being creative while pursuing a “thought experiment”:
Some will doubtless dismiss all this as mere a
cademic daydreaming, but the daydreams are useful in illustrating how much constitutional creativity is possible within the existing constitutional framework, short of formal amendment.
It appears that Akhil Amar had been working out his national direct vote theories in articles he wrote well before Election 2000. Professor Bennett cited two separate articles Amar wrote in 1994 and 1995.25
Amar had suggested that a majority of American voters could now require Congress to convene a constitutional convention by submitting a petition to that effect “and that an amendment could be lawfully ratified by a simple majority of the American electorate.”26
Bennett countered that Amar’s argument, though skillful, could not be supported by the Constitution. He wrote:
But there is not a word in the Constitution that would support such a procedure. As suggested in the text, moreover, such a procedure is thoroughly at odds with the most fundamental assumptions of our constitutional order, including importantly the role of the states. For instance, qualification to vote in federal elections was originally and remains to a degree within the discretion of the states.
Bennett included Amendment XVII of the Constitution, “so that there are not even uniform national qualifications that would seem necessary to give coherence to the notion of a ‘simple’ national majority.”
