Since it was ratified in 1913, we have been losing states’ rights over time and it is getting faster. Today we see the abuses of the federal government destroying the powers of the state at an alarming rate.

The 17th Amendment must go if we are ever to rein in the abuses of the federal government. The good news is that we do not need a Constitutional amendment to do that. Here’s why…

Article V of the US Constitution spells out the process for amending the Constitution. The last line of Article V seems prophetic in that it spells out that the 17th Amendment could not happen unless 100% of the states agreed. That line reads, “and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”

What this clearly means is that no State (as an entity – that is why it is capitalized) can have its representation in Congress taken from it without consent. Taking that representation away from the state as an entity and placing it with the people of that state clearly takes away any representation in the US Senate for the states. Therefore, it was not passed by all states so some (a total of 12) did not consent.

Some might argue that the 36 that did ratify it would be bound by it. This would violate equal representation, therefore could not stand.

As with all governments, it becomes necessary, from time to time, to reacquaint ourselves with its basic mechanics of operation. The Founding Fathers gave posterity a written constitution to aid in this process. When there are doubts as to its meaning, one must study its original intent to discern proper application, for “the intent of the Lawgiver is the Law.”

Current events in this nation have provoked citizens and scholars to perform this assessment — to “retrace our steps” — in yet another area: the principle of federalism. Simply defined, federalism is ‘a system that combines States retaining sovereignty within a certain sphere with a central body possessing sovereignty within another sphere, and a third sphere where concurrent jurisdiction (exists].’

After years of silence on the matter, a resurgence of interest in federalism became evident. President Reagan’s “New Federalism,” “The Federalist Society,” and a report on federalism issued by the Domestic Policy Council were just some of the manifestations of this increasing concern.

The reason for the current interest is that America is reaping the fruit of centralized government. Contrary to the Founding Fathers’ original vision of separate spheres of jurisdiction between the people, the states, and national government, our current system is now dominated by the national government.

The United States Constitution, as drafted by the Founding Fathers, clearly enumerated the limited powers of the national government. All other powers were reserved to the states or the people. The 10th Amendment affirms this noting: ‘The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.’

The separate spheres of jurisdiction of the national and state governments have gradually been eroded. The national government has increasingly usurped the reserved power of both the people and the states. It has been documented that:’States, once the hub of political activity and the very source of our political tradition, have been reduced — in significant part — to administrative units of the national government ….’

As a result of this erosion process, both the national government and the state governments are crippled in their effectiveness. The national government, having taken on too much power, is unable to properly administer all the areas it has arrogated unto itself. On the other hand, the state governments are impotent in legislating and executing the will of the people because they are subject to unpredictable subjugation by the national government.

Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, proclaims as self evident the proposition that “all men are … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.” When state governments so instituted become impotent, then it is their right and duty to reacquire the appropriate power in order to fulfill the purpose for which they were originally established.

Search the web, and you’re sure to read that America’s first bathtub was installed in 1842—December 20, to be exact. It would be nice if such a mercurial vessel had so neat a beginning—even H.L. Mencken, the newspaperman who concocted this hoax as an uplifting wartime news story, would agree. What is true is that no accessory embodies the metamorphosis of bathing equipment (from moveable furniture to plumbed-in-place fixtures) or helps define the use and look of a bathroom in any era as much as the bathtub.

Antebellum Scrubs

Before indoor plumbing, bathtubs—like chamber pots and washbowls—were moveable accessories: large but relatively light containers that bathers pulled out of storage for temporary use. The typical mid-19th-century bathtub was a product of the tinsmith’s craft, a shell of sheet copper or zinc.

“Late 1800’s Zinc and Cast Iron Bath Tub With Oak Trim”

In progressive houses equipped with early water-heating devices, a large bathtub might be site-made of sheet lead and anchored in a coffin-like wooden box.

Later, there were ingenious (though ultimately impractical) hideaway alternatives, like the portable canvas tub (similar to a pot-bellied cot), or the Mosely folding bath tub—an armoire-like contraption with a hinged door that pulled down like a Murphy bed to reveal a bathing saucer.

The Mosely Folding Bath Tub pulled down like a Murphy bed.

However, for decades, the bathtub most Americans knew best was the one available in a 1909 hardware catalog: a tinware plunge bath with wood-covered bottom painted in Japan green (a type of pre-1940 enamel paint).

As running water became more common in the latter 19th century, bathtubs became more prevalent and less portable. Though copper was still used for wood-enclosed tubs as late as the 1910s, it more commonly appeared as a liner for steel-cased tubs, rimmed in oak or cherry, that stood on bronzed iron legs.

This wood-encased period galvanized tin tub is in Astoria, Oregon’s 1885 Flavel House museum.

Cast iron—the all-purpose material of the Victorian era—had been poured into sinks and lavatories since the late 1850s, and by 1867 the famous J.L. Mott Iron Works was finding a ferrous niche in the bathtub market as well.

However, the big catch with all of these conveniences was corrosion. Copper and zinc discolored readily around water and soap, and the seams of sheet metal were hard to keep clean at all. Iron and steel, of course, rusted eventually, even under the most meticulous coat of paint.

Glaze Crusades

A china-like glaze seemed to be the ideal, obvious solution, but producing a vitreous skin on an object the scale of a tub was not so simple. Though cast iron sinks were porcelain enameled, iron bathtubs were a far more complex shape, and when filled with hot water, they could expand more than the coating, risking delamination.

In the 1850s, British artisans cracked the tub-coating code by taking a different tack: all-ceramic tubs with a glazed surface. Because the tubs were both fragile and heavy, they were iffy for export, but the idea found a market on English shores, and by the 1890s, solid porcelain tubs were being fired up by manufacturers like Trenton Potteries.

An ordinary-style tub—sloped at the head, flat and plumbed at the foot—was the most common, and affordable, early porcelain model.

The solid porcelain tub scratched many itches. Besides satisfying the need for a seamless, smooth, washable surface that wouldn’t rust, it provided a continuous, roll-over edge around the perimeter of the basin. Indeed, one of the subtle attractions of the porcelain tub was its sensuous, smooth curves and zaftig proportions. Whether it stood on bulbous ceramic legs or muscular sides that ran to the floor (thereby eliminating unsanitary hidden spaces), the porcelain tub was a study in robust modeling. Ads from the 1910s asked, “Why shouldn’t the bathtub be part of the architecture of the house?”

Seemingly the ultra-modern bathing, solid porcelain had its downside. For one thing, such tubs were dauntingly heavy and equally pricey. In 1909, prices ran from $180 for a 4 1/2′-long model to $255 for a massive 6 1/2-footer—this at a time when a steel-cased footed tub could be had for around $25. Plus, some bathers felt the pottery mass absorbed too much heat from the water, making it expensive to use.

High-Tech Tubs

Drawbacks aside, the solid porcelain tub remained the Cadillac of the bath industry into the 1920s and the hallmark of a high-end bathroom. Indeed, before 1910, bathrooms in and of themselves were often status symbols. In an era when houses with running water and waste piping were new and modern, a single bathroom with lavatory, flushing toilet, and fixed tub was a sign of progressive thinking and an essential step in the march toward better hygiene. What’s more, the bathrooms of the wealthy were not so much places of daily cleanup and dressing, but therapeutic laboratories akin to personal spas. The shower we now associate with a daily spritz was frequently a stand-alone cage of multiple sprays designed for skin or kidney stimulation, while tubs were dispersed around the room for soaking one or more parts of the body.

Roman tubs with nearly vertical, sloping round ends were thought to look more balanced and elegant in bathrooms, and usually came with faucets mounted on a long side.

As multiple-fixture, high-tech bathrooms started to evaporate after World War I (along with the large houses that made them possible), the new paradigm for up-to-date ablution became the porcelain-enameled, cast-iron, footed tub—the ubiquitous clawfoot type still at work for thousands of bathers today.

The Cast-Iron Tub

The J.L. Mott Iron Works was among the first to solve the porcelain-on-iron puzzle in the late 1880s with better techniques for preparing the iron and firing the coating, and when production improvements reduced costs in the 1920s, the cast-iron tub soon took over the bathroom. The typical tub style was the ordinary, a round-bottomed trough with a sloping head and a vertical foot holding water inlets and outlets. The other common style was the Roman, with flat sides and bottom, and identical (nearly vertical) sloping, rounded ends.

Antique Cast Iron Tub

Fancy, upscale lavatories could include both a sitz (at left) and foot bath (at right) to complement the bathtub and state-of-the-art ribcage shower, per a 1912 Standard Sanitary catalog.

The Built-In Tub

For a new century increasingly on the alert for germs, the only thing better than a tiled-in recess tub was one shipped this way straight from the factory. Casting one-piece tubs with a rim that extended down to the floor in an apron wasn’t easy, but by 1911, the Kohler Company, followed swiftly by its competitors, introduced the built-in tub—still a bathroom standard today. Made with one enclosed side (or one side and an end), the built-in tub was not only efficient in its own right, but as a 5′-long model that spanned the walls of the typical 5′ square bathroom, it became the cornerstone of the modern, functional Jazz Age bathroom trinity: wall-hung lavatory, water closet, and tub-and-shower combo.

Color Craze

Like Henry Ford, who promised auto buyers any color they wanted so long as it was black, sanitary ware manufacturers were at first color-blind to anything but white. White was not only the color of sanitation, making it easy to spot grime and therefore clean, it was also the optimal color to produce reliably from item to item.

Just like with the auto industry, however, all that began to change in the late 1920s. Once the bathroom reached a plateau as an efficient, hygienic cleansing hospital, it began to be viewed as a vehicle for design and household beauty, and around 1929, color came into the bathroom in a big way.

This inviting bathroom suite, featuring tan vitrolite walls and colorful Spring Green fixtures—including a separate, petite dental sink—appeared in a 1939 Kohler brochure.

Pigmenting the vitreous finish in fixtures—at first in light pastels, then in deeper hues like royal blue, Ming green, and Chinese red—brought color to the bathroom in solid swaths far more dramatic and permanent than any paint or tile.

Always key bathroom players by dint of their sheer size and function, bathtubs became ever more pivotal when they moved away from white. As color put a design spin on fixtures in the 1930s and ’40s, they began to look—once again—like furniture, with lavatories resembling tables and toilets approximating chairs. In this light, tubs might stand in for beds, especially when detailed with the rectangular outlines popular in the Art Moderne era and in velvety colors of rich maroon or black. It was a long way from the tin tub that had been hauled out of a closet only a generation or two before.

On the 20th of April, 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie successfully isolated a brand new element: radium, after years of hard work. At the time, it was believed that this new material might have all kinds of beneficial properties. So radium was swiftly incorporated into many products, ranging from makeup to ceramics to health tonics and jewelry. What wasn’t understood at this time was that radium was, in fact, quite deadly. A year before the publishing of her book “Radioactivity,” Marie died. Before her death, she had become aware of the great perils of radiation, which is also what took her life.

By the time Marie died, radium had taken the globe by storm. Radiation was something that wasn’t well understood at the time but had positive associations. It was branded under names such as “cure for the living dead” and “perpetual sushine. And perpetual is exactly what it turned out to be!

As the world descended into World War One, another use for radium came to the forefront: when infused into paint, it would make that paint glow in the dark. This made it an ideal material for coating watch faces, control panels, and instrument dials. Radium provided much-needed illumination for soldiers in the field without relying on other bulky equipment. From 1917 the demand for radium-coated dials skyrocketed, which was good news for the United States Radium Corporation. The company had been in the business of extracting and processing uranium for a few years. Now it expanded to mixing and applying radium-infused paint, a substance which they called“undark.”

Women using radium paint on alarm clock at a factory in 1932 | Picture Credits: Daily Herald Archive

It was no surprise that many local people were employed as dial painters. The dial painters would be supplied with radium paint and freshly stamped dials and had to use paintbrushes to strategically apply radium to the dial parts that needed to glow. Precision was required, so workers were instructed to lick the tips of their brushes in between each application to bring the bristles to a fine point.

For precision, the girls would soften the brush between their lips, thereby ingesting radium in the process | Photo Credits: Nontoxic Prints

The United States Radium Corporation workers had access to radium for free. They used it to paint their teeth and nails to give them a pleasant glow before heading out to dances in the evenings. Years passed. Hundreds of thousands of dials were painted and shipped out. The war eventually came to an end, much to the relief of the general population. But all was not well for the ex-workers of the United States Radium Corporation.

The original site of the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation in Orange, NJ Richard Harbus

Slowly, one by one, dial painters were falling ill. As the 1910s became the 1920s, hundreds of women who had worked as dial painters started noticing pain in their teeth and jaws. Many were having to visit their dentists regularly and were losing teeth with every visit. They were constantly exhausted, and in some cases, it was found that their jawbones were riddled with holes, reduced to a brittle hollow honeycomb. Despite this alarming wave of sickness, few were able to persuade anyone to take their ailments seriously. These female workers came to be known as the ‘Radium Girls.’

Radium Jaw, a certain sign of death in victims | Photo Credits: All That Is Interesting

When 22-year-old Molly Maggia passed away after experiencing years of pain in her jaw and teeth, her condition was described as syphilis. The complaints of many other women were glossed over with the same explanation, despite symptoms that pointed towards something more sinister. It was 1925 before any of the workers came to understand the devastating effect radium had on their bodies.

The 19-year-old woman started working at the Radium Luminous Materials Corp. in Orange, NJ, in 1917, and at first reveled in her job. It was lucrative — plus painting glow-in-the-dark radium on soldiers’ wristwatch faces meant she and her young female co-workers were helping in the war effort.

Grace Fryer had once been a dial painter. Now her body was quite literally falling apart. The bones of her spine crumbled and required a metal brace. Tumors and abscesses sprouted in her jaw, and she was in constant pain. The radium she had ingested while working had riddled her with cancer and weakened her bones. It would soon end her life.

Furious, Grace and four of her colleagues moved to sue their ex-employer. For two years, however, no lawyer would take them seriously, despite their steadily worsening conditions. In 1928, the suit was finally filed. By this time, the demand for radium was declining, as people woke up to the dangers of radiation. Sales of radium-infused products fell further when newspapers around the world printed details of Grace’s story.

Grace Fryer, the first victim to take the radium industry to court | Photo Credits: Buzzfeed

The Radium Girls weren’t just sick; they were literally radioactive. The body of Mollie Maggia was exhumed in 1927 in the hope that her bones would give the remaining victims the evidence they needed to win their cases. Reportedly, when her coffin was lifted off the ground, her body glowed because of radiation. It wasn’t entirely surprising, considering her bones were found to be highly radioactive.

By the end of 1928, the case had been settled in favor of the female workers. They were awarded some compensation, although it was only a fraction of what they had initially demanded. Their medical bills were covered, and they were able to live out their final days with some measure of dignity. Many more suits followed from workers not just at the United States Radium Corporation but at several companies that had handled radium in the years after its discovery. Workers came to testify on their death beds. While Grace Fryer and her colleagues are remembered for leading the fight against injustice, there were thousands of more workers whose fates varied enormously.

Bedside Hearings of radium girls were common since they were too ill to come to the court. | Photo Credits: RSNA

Though many of the radium girls suffered greatly and died before their time, their deaths were not in vain. Many of these victims volunteered for tests and medical examinations, allowing us to understand for the first time how radiation affects the human body. This persuaded scientists to take extraordinary precautions in later experiments with nuclear weapons, potentially saving thousands of lives.

In addition to this enormous service to later generations, the case pushed forward by the radium girls was the first incident in which an employer was forced to take responsibility for the health and safety of its employees. This was a revolutionary concept in 1928.

The sacrifice and courage of the Radium Girls deserve to be applauded. Their case led to the introduction of life-saving regulations for workers all over the world and the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the United States. The fearless champions continue to shine through history.

Few if any residents in Orange, NJ today know the history of the former plant site. Quietly tucked into a tree-lined residential neighborhood, it has been renamed High & Alden Street Park and features a playground — perhaps a fitting tribute to the young lives lost.

“I think it’s a good idea they [made it a park],’’ resident Robin Laurent, 40, recently told The Post after learning of its past. “It’s good for the people in the neighborhood and the people of Orange.’’

The playground that now stands on the site

References: https://nypost.com/2017/03/22/skin-glowing-from-radium-ghost-girls-died-for-a-greater-cause/

View at Medium.com

https://agnostic.com/post/620923/the-radium-girls-the-dark-story-of-americas-shining-women-in-the-1920s-a-group-of-factory-wor

Carved into the southeastern face of Mount Rushmore in South Dakota’s Black Hills National Forest are four gigantic sculptures depicting the faces of U.S. Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

The 60-foot high faces were shaped from the granite rock face between 1927 and 1941, and represent one of the world’s largest pieces of sculpture, as well as one of America’s most popular tourist attractions. To many Native Americans, however, Mount Rushmore represents a desecration of lands considered sacred by the Lakota Sioux, the original residents of the Black Hills region who were displaced by white settlers and gold miners in the late 19th century.

The Loss of a Sacred Land

In the Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868 by Sioux tribes and General William T. Sherman, the U.S. government promised the Sioux “undisturbed use and occupation” of territory including the Black Hills, in what is now South Dakota. But the discovery of gold in the region soon led U.S. prospectors to flock there en masse, and the U.S. government began forcing the Sioux to relinquish their claims on the Black Hills.

Warriors like Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse led a concerted Sioux resistance (including the latter’s famous defeat of Gen. George Armstrong Custer in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876), which federal troops eventually crushed in a brutal massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Ever since then, Sioux activists have protested the U.S. confiscation of their ancestral lands and demanded their return. The Black Hills (or Paha Sapa in Lakota) are particularly important to them, as the region is central to many Sioux religious traditions.

(Battle of Little Bighorn

The Birth of Mount Rushmore

Mount Rushmore, located just north of what is now Custer State Park in theBlack Hills National Forest, was named for the New York lawyer Charles E. Rushmore, who traveled to the Black Hills in 1885 to inspect mining claims in the region. When Rushmore asked a local man the name of a nearby mountain, he reportedly replied that it never had a name before, but from now on would be known as Rushmore Peak (later Rushmore Mountain or Mount Rushmore).

Seeking to attract tourism to the Black Hills in the early 1920s, South Dakota’s state historian Doane Robinson came up with the idea to sculpt “the Needles” (several giant natural granite pillars) into the shape of historic heroes of the West. He suggested Red Cloud, the Sioux chief who signed the Fort Laramie treaty, as a potential subject.

The Needles, South Dakota

In August 1924, after the original sculptor he contacted was unavailable, Robinson contacted Gutzon Borglum, an American sculptor of Danish descent who was then working on carving an image of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee into the face of Georgia’s Stone Mountain. Robinson had a history of disputes with those who commissioned the Lee project, and they fired Borglum, who left the sculpture unfinished. During his work at Stone Mountain, Borglum associated with members of the newly revived Ku Klux Klan, although it’s unclear whether he actually joined the white supremacist group.

Stone Mountain Carving

Borglum convinced Robinson that the sculpture in South Dakota should depict George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, as that would give it national, and not just local, significance. He would later add Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt to the list, in recognition of their contributions to the birth of democracy and the growth of the United States.

Sculpting the Presidents at Mount Rushmore

During a second visit to the Black Hills in August 1925, Borglum identified Mount Rushmore as the desired site of the sculpture. Local Native Americans and environmentalists voiced their opposition to the project, deeming it a desecration of Sioux heritage as well as the natural landscape. But Robinson worked tirelessly to raise funding for the sculpture, aided by Rapid City Mayor John Boland and Senator Peter Norbeck, among others. After President Calvin Coolidge traveled to the Black Hills for his summer vacation, the sculptor convinced the president to deliver an official dedication speech at Mount Rushmore on August 10, 1927; carving began that October.

In 1929, during the last days of his presidency, Coolidge signed legislation appropriating $250,000 in federal funds for the Rushmore project and creating the Mount Rushmore National Memorial Commission to oversee its completion. Boland was made the president of the commission’s executive committee, though Robinson (to his immense disappointment) was excluded.

To carve the four presidential heads into the face of Mount Rushmore, Borglum utilized new methods involving dynamite and pneumatic hammers to blast through a large amount of rock quickly, in addition to the more traditional tools of drills and chisels. Some 400 workers removed around 450,000 tons of rock from Mount Rushmore, which still remains in a heap near the base of the mountain. Though it was arduous and dangerous work, no lives were lost during the completion of the carved heads.

Mount Rushmore Depictions

On July 4, 1930, a dedication ceremony was held for the head of Washington. After workers found the stone in the original site to be too weak, they moved Jefferson’s head from the right of Washington’s to the left; the head was dedicated in August 1936, in a ceremony attended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In September 1937, Lincoln’s head was dedicated, while the fourth and final head–that of FDR’s fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt–was dedicated in July 1939. Gutzon Borglum died in March 1941, and it was left to his son Lincoln to complete the final details of Mount Rushmore in time for its dedication ceremony on October 31 of that year.

Mount Rushmore National Memorial, sometimes called the “Shrine of Democracy,” has become one of the most iconic images of America and an international tourist attraction. In 1959, it gained even more attention as the site of a climactic chase scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “North by Northwest.” (In fact, South Dakota did not allow filming on Mount Rushmore itself, and Hitchcock had a large-scale model of the mountain built in a Hollywood studio.)

In 1991, Mount Rushmore celebrated its 50th anniversary after undergoing a $40 million restoration project. The National Park Service, which maintains Mount Rushmore, records upwards of 2 million visitors every year. Meanwhile, many Sioux activists have called for the monument to be taken down, even as they continue to protest what they view as illegal U.S. possession of their ancestral lands.

Crazy Horse Memorial

Another sculpture was also carved in the Black Hills – that of Crazy Horse.

A Lakota Sioux warrior, a famed artist, his family and a canvas composed of granite are the elements that comprise the legendary past, present and future of the Crazy Horse Memorial.

Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski began the world’s largest mountain carving in 1948. Members of his family and their supporters are continuing his artistic intent to create a massive statue that will be 641 feet long and 563 feet high. To give that some perspective, the heads at Mount Rushmore National Memorial are each 60 feet high. Workers completed the carved 87½-foot-tall Crazy Horse face in 1998, and have since focused on thinning the remaining mountain to form the 219-foot-high horse’s head.

Crazy Horse Memorial hosts between 1 and 1½ million visitors a year. The number of foreign travelers, particularly group tours from Asia, is increasing.

The Indian Museum of North America, and the adjoining Welcome Center and Native American Educational and Cultural Center, feature more than 12,000 contemporary and historic items, from pre-Colombian to contemporary times. The new Mountain Museum wing helps explain the work behind the scenes, augmenting the introductory “Dynamite & Dreams” movie at the Welcome Center.

Crazy Horse Memorial is open every day, from 8 a.m. to dark during the summer season. Memorial Day weekend through the end of September, the storytelling continues each night at dark with the “Legends in Light” laser-light show projected on the mountain carving.

(Compiled from the writings of Dr. Bob Livingston)

There is much interest by the left-wing in the elimination of the EC; indeed, three attempts have been made through the years, with the first serious challenge in 1969/70 by Birch Bahy, a young Democrat Senator from Indiana, who was also responsible for the introduction of the 25th Amendment after the assassination of JFK. He failed to overturn the EC, thankfully. Of course, the leftists claimed this was due to racism.

Bayh reintroduced an Electoral College amendment five more times over the next decade. The only time it came up for a full Senate vote was in 1979, when it got 51 votes, well shy of the 67-vote supermajority needed to pass a constitutional amendment.

https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-nearly-abolished-thurmond

There is also currently a pact among 13 states and DC called the “National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC)” that bears watching.

“The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. States and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome.[2][3] As of November 2020, it has been adopted by fifteen states and the District of Columbia. These states have 196 electoral votes, which is 36% of the Electoral College and 73% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

The Founding Fathers feared two things above all else: a democracy and an overly powerful executive. The Electoral College was designed to prevent both. For a good, very detailed history of the Electoral College and its evolution over the years, read “Origins of the Electoral College,” by Randall G. Holcombe.

Link: https://mises.org/library/origins-electoral-college

Without the Electoral College a presidential candidate would merely have to win a big majority of the population in the five or six of the most populace states to carry the election – say California, New York, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida. As it is, Democrats hold a decisive advantage in the Electoral College math because they advocate for socialism. Minorities love socialism, and minorities tend to congregate in the urban areas. As a result, Democrats can win only about 20-30 percent of the counties of the America and still win the election, even with the Electoral College.

Look at the map below. It shows the counties won by Hillary Clinton (blue) and Donald Trump (red). Had Clinton been elected a vast swatch of Middle America – geographically speaking — would have been on the losing end of the election.

The globalist elites want to erase all borders in their move toward one world government, and the globalist elites love democracy as much as minorities love it. That’s because the principle of government is that political power is maximized by forcibly leveling every individual to the same status of conformity, collectivism, ecumenicalism and serfdom.

But it must be done in such a way that the people who are being reduced never see it coming. That’s why it’s done with gradualism and by “the vote.” If we aren’t careful, we will vote for our own slavery.

References:

b. https://personalliberty.com/anti-trump-crowd-clamors-slavery/a. https://personalliberty.com/need-electoral-college/