<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><span></span></div><div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">Courtesy of today's (November 25, 2012) Spokesman-Review.</div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; "><br></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">-------------------------------------</div><div><p style="overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "></p><h1 style="overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; clear: both; "><font size="3"><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Eye on Boise: Lawmaker shares far-fetched idea to elect Romney</span></font></h1><p></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">BOISE – A state senator from north-central Idaho is touting a scheme that’s been circulating on tea party blogs, calling for states that supported Mitt Romney to refuse to participate in the Electoral College in a move backers believe would change the election result.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll, R-Cottonwood, sent an article out on Twitter headed, “A ‘last chance’ to have Mitt Romney as President in January (it’s still not too late).”</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Constitutional scholar David Adler, director of the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University, said the plan is not “totally constitutional,” as touted in the article, but is instead “a radical, revolutionary proposal that has no basis in federal law or the architecture of the Constitution.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Adler dubbed it “really a strange and bizarre fantasy.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Nuxoll said, “Well, I guess that’s one lawyer.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Nuxoll said she received the article by email and decided to share it on Twitter. “I post for people to see and think about things and reflect about things,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s realistic.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The article, by Judson Phillips, a former Shelby County, Tenn., assistant district attorney and founder of Tea Party Nation, posits that if 17 of the 24 states that Romney carried refuse to participate in the Electoral College, the college would have no quorum, throwing the presidential pick to the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">The problem with that, Adler said, is that it’s based on a misreading of the 12th Amendment, which notes when no candidate receives a majority in the Electoral College, the decision moves to the House, where each state would have one vote and a quorum of two-thirds of the states would be required. “The two-thirds reference in the 12th Amendment is a reference not to the Electoral College but rather to the establishment of a quorum in the House of Representatives,” he said.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">To win in the Electoral College, a presidential candidate needs only to get at least 270 electoral votes, Adler said. No quorum is required.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">“The author touted by Sen. Nuxoll is confusing the Electoral College with the House of Representatives,” Adler said.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">“It is possible that a president might be elected without reports from some states. George Washington was elected to his first term in 1789 despite the fact that some states were not able to file a report of their electoral votes, owing to a major snowstorm.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He added, “President Obama’s comfortable margin of victory would preserve his election even if some states were unable to report their election results.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Nuxoll said she’s not actively working to get Idaho to skip the Electoral College vote. “It would have to be a coordinated effort among states,” she said. “So it couldn’t be just Idaho.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">She said, “I think it is very, very sad that we elected our current president, because he is definitely not following (the) Constitution. He is depriving us of our freedoms by all the agencies, and so … what I’m thinking is the states are going to have to stand up for our individual rights and for our collective rights.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Nuxoll won a second Senate term on Nov. 6 with 64 percent of the vote in Idaho’s new legislative District 7, defeating independent Jon Cantamessa.</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">Adler said, “As for the bizarre premise, perhaps worthy of a screenplay or novel that promoted conspiracy theories, that Idaho or a group of states might try to wrest victory by refusing to report electoral results, any such effort would violate federal law.”</span></p><p style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; overflow: visible !important; margin: 0px 0px 21px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; "><span style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);">He added, “Congress would have every right to count the votes from the recalcitrant states. Clearly, such a project would ignore the aims and values of the framers, represent a gross usurpation of power and, in its efforts to disenfranchise voters, depict an utter contempt for the right of Idahoans to participate in the selection of the president.”</span></p></div><div style="-webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; ">-------------------------------------<br><br><div>Seeya round town, Moscow, because . . .</div><div><br></div><div>"Moscow Cares"</div><div><a href="http://www.MoscowCares.com">http://www.MoscowCares.com</a></div><div> </div><div><div>Tom Hansen</div><div>Moscow, Idaho</div><div> </div></div></div></div></div></body></html>