Regarding last week's cover story, "What President Trump could mean for the looming climate change crisis" reader "Just Sayin'" wrote:
We may argue about the existence of global warming.
However, not being wasteful at every opportunity might be advantageous to our entire society. Using less fuel and lowering our "green" (ironic label, no?) footprint might pay off for all of us. Lowering demand lowers cost, and lowers the likelihood of environmental damage.
Will we leave more toxic mess for our children, or a place as good or better than we knew? You decide: Live like wasteful pigs or leave the world better than we found it. Regardless of climate change.
In his column "The voters rejected Trump," Jack Lessenberry wrote about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a group of states that vow to cast all their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote. A number of readers commented. Mark Kennedy writes by email:
If this weren't an "end around" the amendment process, its proponents would come right out and abolish as an obsolete intermediary measure the constitutional requirement for the state legislatures to actually appoint real live human beings as electors. They'd make the vote automatic. Instead, they will continue to invest all manner of legal harassment against electors who vote their conscience. And what would that do, down the road, once that spirit were to spread through the constitutional fabric of the nation? We're already facing an idiot who wants to imprison and strip flag burners of citizenship.
Some things under the Constitution are too important to be decided by a simple majority. Amendments. Impeachments. What about jury trials? If the NPVIC pushers can get away with it come the Electoral College, some other idiots can get away with it come the First Amendment.
The end game? A national megalith at the expense of the several states. This vast nation has many regional interests. The disposition of Great Lakes water? The three coastal regions under global warming? Pipelines through North Dakota? Nuke missile threats from North Korea against Hawaii and the West Coast? If the winner of the general election, say, were backing measures to forcibly remove citizens from the coastal regions, the NPVIC would nonetheless require the Electors in those states to cast their votes for the idiot.
Let's see now... 48 percent for Clinton times a 58 percent voter turnout ... 27.84 percent of the electorate is no mandate at all. Factor in the probable growth of third party movements, and the problem will only worsen unless we destroy what has caused the problem in the first place, rule by secular churches, i.e., political parties, which an embrace of the Electoral College will do.
The underlying question is in who even gets on the ballot. Under the Electoral College, it's elected representatives who are performing that function, not unelected party hacks, who to win must erect artificial differences from the other parties to capture votes. Rule by political parties instead of by representatives of geopolitically based districts is an automatic invitation to perpetual disunity — that was the real issue at work during the Revolution. The pushers of the NPVIC are nothing but a bunch of reincarnated lobsterbacks.
