At Least It's Not Your State Senator Proposing The End of Democracy

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by: Colorado Pols

Arizona Sen. Anthony Kern (R).

The latest in our long-running “At Least They’re Not Your Legislator” series, Arizona Public Radio’s Bree Burkitt reports on a measure that Republican state Sen. Anthony Kern has introduced that would, if somehow approved by what would need to be extremely masochistic voters, allow the Arizona legislature to appoint presidential electors without worrying about pesky inconveniences like the popular vote:

Currently, the candidate who wins the popular vote gets Arizona’s electors.

They then cast their votes on the same day in December alongside all the other electors across the country.

Senate Concurrent Resolution 1014 would override that process entirely.

Instead, the Arizona legislature would have the sole authority to appoint the presidential electors — regardless of which candidate actually received the most votes. [Pols emphasis]

Sen. Anthony Kern was one of the slate of fake electors chosen by Arizona Republicans to substitute for the state’s real electors as part of the failed plot to swing the state’s election in 2020, and was reportedly in the crowd outside the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. It can be deduced from both of these facts that to Sen. Kern, the rules of our democratic process are just speedbumps when they prevent Republicans from winning. Such a brazen assault on the authority of voters to decide elections seems unthinkable, but considering that’s what Donald Trump’s rejection of the outcome of the election was all about, it’s really not. Former CU scholar and Trump (and Colorado GOP) attorney John Eastman promoted the crackpot “independent state legislature” theory to argue that legislatures had the power to defy the results of elections if they felt like it in 2020.

Is just a rude shock when they spell it out so plainly. Their solution is to give politicians the power to ignore the voters in presidential elections.

You don’t want to live in a state (or nation) where that’s the law of the land.

7 thoughts on “At Least It’s Not Your State Senator Proposing The End of Democracy”

bullshit! says:

January 30, 2024 at 10:58 am

Scary looking mofo.

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2Jung2Die says:

January 30, 2024 at 11:31 am

This is a completely reprehensible resolution to propose, in my opinion, but I've gotta believe it's perfectly cool and legal under the antiquated and anachronistic U.S. Constitution and the Electoral College. It's up to state governments to decide the process for becoming electors, and if electors aren't legally bound to the popular vote or something, they can basically vote for anyone, even people who aren't on the Presidential ballot. This could be the great Ron Paul for President resurgence we've all been waiting for!

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1. JohnInDenver says:
  
  January 30, 2024 at 1:51 pm
  
  deleted … rewritten below
  
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harrydoby says:

January 30, 2024 at 2:56 pm

I recall in high school civics class learning about tyrannical dictatorships run by religious nut cases, and how much we should aspire to achieve that perfect style of government! Oh wait, it was English Lit, reading George Orwell's 1984!

But I suspect Red state schools might have that mixed up as well.

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Lauren Boebert is a Worthless POS says:

January 30, 2024 at 3:00 pm

This is certainly not an endorsement of this crackpot idea, but …..

Does everyone recall their early US history, and how members of the Electoral College were selected prior to 1828?

In the early days, the electoral literally were selected by the state legislatures. It was considered to be representative goverment on the assumption – a very faulty assumption prior to the reapportionment cases in the 1960's – that the legislatures were directly elected by the voters and therefore they represented the will of the voters.

And let’s not forget that these people have made a fetish of the “intent of the framers” non-sense when it comes to constitutional law.

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JohnInDenver says:

January 30, 2024 at 3:02 pm

In the odd "can't use this as a precedent" decision,

the Supreme Court in Bush v. Gore (2000) appeared to endorse their power to do so by denying that citizens have a constitutional right to vote in presidential elections. As the majority put it, “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for Electors for the President of the United States. . .” When it comes to presidential elections, the voters are at the mercy of the state legislatures.

However, those state legislature also have constraints when it comes to selecting Presidential electors.

In Chiafalo [Chiafalo v. Washington , 2020], however, the Supreme Court unanimously resolved that history had overtaken the Framers’ design. Nine justices agreed that even if the Framers had assumed that “electors” would be free to cast a vote however they chose, an emerging presumption of democratic control had displaced that original design. Whatever they originally expected, the court held, there was nothing in their words that constrained the power of the state to ensure that it was the choice of the people that would ultimately decide how the electors would vote. Elector discretion had been displaced by democracy. “Here,” as Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the closing line of her opinion, “[w]e the people rule.”…

If the electors have lost their superpowers to an emerging democratic consensus, then legislatures must have lost them as well. It would be a complete perversion of the Framers’ design to remove the constitutional discretion of electors but accept a constitutionally unconstrained power in the state legislatures.

Allowing the legislature to choose electors without a popular vote falls for the same reason as the National Popular Vote Compact fails — in both, the decision denies the notion of a popular vote.

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1. 2Jung2Die says:
  
  January 30, 2024 at 5:36 pm
  
  Maybe this is just meant as clarification…
  
  Chiafalo, and a fairly similar case in Colorado, were "faithless elector" challenges. Both states have laws instructing electors how to vote, based on the popular vote. In Colorado, an elector wanted to vote for John Kasich, but the courts disallowed this vote and Colorado replaced the elector. The state laws were upheld as legitimate.
  
  The Arizona guy wants to change state law, and as much as I hate what he's trying to do, I don't believe the U.S. Constitution has any say that would prevent it. Hopefully other legislators or public pressure will put the kibosh on his resolution, because it's really nothing but an extremely serious power grab.
  
  Today, there are still several states that let electors vote for, let's say Taylor Swift, if that's what they want to do. If there's no state law about the popular vote, electors don't have to vote based on the popular vote, at least per the Constitution.
  
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