Thread by @twoodiac

The U.S. Constitution clearly stands for the proposition that a state’s national representatives are *directly* chosen by the state’s voters, and not indirectly by the state’s legislatures.

This is clearly embodied in the Seventeenth Amendment. 1/12 tinyurl.com/pa4asw5

The Seventeenth Amendment restates the first paragraph of Article I, section 3 of the Constitution and provides for the election of senators by replacing the phrase “chosen by the Legislature thereof” with “elected by the people thereof.” 2/12

The U.S. Constitution stands even more clearly for the proposition that the electors that are sent to the Electoral College are sent there by a majority of the voters in each state, not by the state legislatures. 3/12

This raises an insuperable *constitutional* obstacle to those who seek to preserve minority Republican (and increasingly fascist-minded) rule in the United States by having national elections decided by state legislatures. 4/12

“Republicans are promoting an ‘independent state legislature’ doctrine, which holds that statehouses have ‘plenary,’ or exclusive, control of the rules for choosing presidential electors.” 5/12 tinyurl.com/y5su23f7

Another problem faced by these would-be institutional insurrectionists is that vote counting isn’t the contentious and subjective “it’s all in the mind of the beholder” matter that it would have to be for a scheme of this sort to succeed. 6/12

This was seen clearly in the recent faux-audit in AZ. The auditors tried but failed to come up with a different vote count. A marked ballot is a marked ballot, and *no* voter fraud was found.

(No presidential election has ever been decided by “hanging chads.”) 7/12

So: the Seventeenth Amendment and the Constitution more generally command that federal courts would *have* to strike down any attempt by a state legislature to substitute its political preferences for those of its voters. 8/12

To succeed in its aim, a state legislature would have to *prove* in court that the electoral count by its state election board was inaccurate and invalid, 9/12

and the experience of the Maricopa County election board in AZ (and common sense) shows that different numbers cannot simply be wished into existence. 10/12

So I am not alarmed that the scenario outlined in the Atlantic article might actually happen. But it *is* alarming that so many on the right like the idea and are toying with it. 11/12

That is a sign of inveterate hostility to the constitutional order if things don’t go their way that will inevitably undermine American democracy if it continues, even if this particular strategy doesn’t succeed. 12/12

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