Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger has just signed HB 965, thrusting the Commonwealth into the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC). The move, spotlighted this week by National Conservative, Jack Danger, and others on X, brings Democratic-led jurisdictions to 222 electoral votes, only 48 short of the 270 needed to trigger the scheme. Once activated, every state in the pact will hand all its electoral votes to the national popular-vote winner, regardless of how its own citizens voted. No constitutional amendment. No congressional approval. Just an interstate agreement that renders the Electoral College a hollow shell.
Nothing New
This is not reform. It is the latest chapter in a 200-year Democratic project to strip power from the states and concentrate it in party machines. The Founders designed a republic, not a pure democracy. Only the House of Representatives was to be elected directly by the people. The Senate was chosen by state legislatures. The presidency was entrusted to an Electoral College of “good and wise men” selected by those same legislatures — two layers of insulation from raw popular passion and factional intrigue. The states, not the parties, were to control the federal layer in a country explicitly named the United STATES of America.
That design lasted barely a generation. In the 1820s, political parties — nowhere mentioned in the Constitution — demanded the right to nominate presidential candidates and dictate how electors would vote. Historian Charles A. Beard described the coup in stark terms:
In a short time the spirit of democracy, while playing havoc with the old order in state government, made its way upward into the federal system. The framers of the Constitution … had committed the choice of presidential electors to the discretion of the state legislatures. The legislatures, in turn, greedy of power, early adopted the practice of choosing the electors themselves; but they did not enjoy it long undisturbed. Democracy, thundering at their doors, demanded that they surrender the privilege to the people.… The fanciful idea of an electoral college of “good and wise men,” selected without passion or partisanship by state legislatures acting as deliberative bodies, was exploded for all time; the election of the nation’s chief magistrate was committed to the tempestuous methods of democracy.
Beard, a political liberal, cheered the change. Most Americans today do not. The parties quickly became vehicles for the wealthy and powerful — an oligarchical class that discovered it could select the president more reliably than scattered state legislatures ever could. Power drained from the states to national party machines. The federal government grew unchecked. The very checks and balances the Founders embedded in the Electoral College vanished.
Erasing States’ Rights
Virginia’s entry into the NPVIC is the logical endpoint of that erosion. Democrats know that state legislatures still retain constitutional authority to appoint electors and reclaim leverage over the presidency. The Compact is the preemptive strike: Lock in popular-vote rule now, before red-state legislatures wake up and reassert the original federalist design. It is not about “one person, one vote.” It is about ensuring that California and New York can override Virginia, Texas, or Florida forever.
Spanberger’s simultaneous move to strip tax-exempt status from the United Daughters of the Confederacy and similar groups reveals the broader cultural project: erase any lingering memory of state sovereignty and states’-rights traditions. The Constitution is being hollowed out piece by piece — first by parties in the 1820s, and now by interstate compacts in the 2020s. The goal is the same: remove the last structural barriers between the people and an unaccountable national ruling class. Unless the states reassert their plenary power under Article II, the republic the Founders bequeathed us will cease to exist in anything but name.
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