Soylent Green is Arkansans (and They Voted for It!)

HB 1339, the political hack employment act, would lock Arkansas' electors into voting for President whoever won the national popular vote, regardless of the vote in this state. The House just voted to pass this madness.

Word is that legislators are getting wined and dined on this one by national interests like never before. Why? I suspect it is because the way Presidential elections are done now means that most of the money is spent in maybe ten key swing states. TV and radio stations in non-swing states want a piece of that action. Political hacks who get hired to run political campaigns (yeah, three fingers pointing back at me on that one) around the nation want in on the action too. A popular vote win would spread campaign dollars out. I believe that is the real reason for the push behind this bill.

Advocates say that polls favor it, but that is only because the people are being misinformed about it by the same big media that stands to benefit from the measure. I say again something you know in your heart but is hard to keep in one's head just because they are out there so much- you simply cannot trust the mainstream media to tell you the truth. It is irrational to listen to what they have to say as if it were true because there are too many known instances where they slant it.

One man, one vote still applies the way we do it now, it just applies on a state by state basis. In order to make it apply uniformly, you would not only need to adopt this bill, you would also need to dissolve the US Senate where each state gets two senators regardless of size. I remind you that these two measures- the selection of the President and the selection of Senators, were tilted to slightly favor smaller states because it was a pre-condition for them to join into a United States in the first place. This bill is tantamount to changing the agreement by which they consented to form the U.S. without their consent. Smaller states, of which we are one, will get steam-rolled.

Under this bill, a candidate who won overwhelmingly in California and New York but lost narrowly in 48 other states including this one would get all of Arkansas' electoral votes. Even if one of their campaign promises was to use Arkansas as the radioactive waste dump for the whole nation. Even if they promised to use Arkansans as a food source for California and New York they would get all of Arkansas' electoral votes.

The UNITED STATES is just that, a collection of states who ceded some authority to a central government by mutual consent. Change the weighted influence of the smaller states, and you change the agreement by which the UNITED STATES was formed.