1. The faithless-elector decision is, its legal merits aside, a healthy development for the fall elections. States can, of course, allow faithless electors, but long tradition has taught Americans & their candidates to assume that the winner of a state's vote gets its electors.
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2. Legally, the decision is...debatable, but an ordinary reading of the plain language of Article II & the Court's prior precedents all pointed in the direction of giving the state legislatures control over the electors.
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3. Notable that the Court - yet again - does not cite Bush v Gore, but its treatment of the faithless elector laws is consistent with the broad reading of Article II legislative power that was the basis for the conservatives' concurrence in Bush v Gore.
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4. The electoral college has, frankly, departed from its original design, but its value as presently practiced comes from its two centuries of tradition in choosing the American head of state - the oldest continuously elected head of state on earth.
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5. And some of the reasons why the electoral college still works are part of its original design - they're just not completely coextensive.
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6. One state - South Carolina - had electors directly appointed by the state legislature all the way to the Civil War. Which would cause a national uproar today, but is consistent with broad legislative control.
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7. (Of course, that is not to say that South Carolina in 1860 did not cause a national uproar, but that's a different thing)
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8. There is much to be said for the Court's view that post-1787 tradition is at least partly incorporated in the electoral college by the passage of the Twelfth Amendment in 1804pic.twitter.com/skgBgNNMSH
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9. Where the Court is on more unsettled ground is the remedy - i.e., what states can do to enforce the ban on faithless electors. But the Constitution being silent on that, the combination of delegation to state legislatures w/residual state power carries some weight.
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Replying to @baseballcrank
I haven't seen anyone remark that this puts a death nail in the National Popular vote compact.
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