November 2010

Glenn Beck's latest rant against philanthropist George Soros included an attack on the American Constitution Society (ACS), in which Beck claimed ACS has received more than $14 million from Mr. Soros and that we use this money to work "in the shadows" to change the Constitution. Beck's conspiracy-laden world is indeed a scary one. There are only three things wrong with his charges: he can't add, he can't read, and he can't stop himself from talking nonsense. Here are the facts:

Beck can't add. While the American Constitution Society is grateful for the generous support the Soros-funded Open Society Institute has given to support ACS's work, Beck's accounting of the amount of that support is wildly inaccurate. His invention of these numbers should be a first warning to anyone listening to him.

Beck can't read. As "evidence" of ACS's mission, Beck highlights language from ACS's Constitutional Interpretation and Change Issue Group web page -- which he displayed on screen during his show. However, the language he purports to cite as evidence of ACS's goal of changing the Constitution does not exist and has never existed on that web page or any other page on the ACS site. What that page does say is the following:

As noted by one of the driving forces behind the proposed law, the National Popular Vote Inc., Massachusetts and New York made significant strides on behalf of the law this year. Late this summer, Gov. Deval Patrick signed a National Popular Vote bill into law, making the state the sixth to enact the law and giving the National Popular Vote movement 27 percent of the electoral votes needed to make it the law of the land. (The National Popular Vote would become effective if states holding a majority of electoral votes, 270, enact it.)Upon signing the bill, Gov. Patrick said, "Voter participation in all 50 states is critical to the strength of our democracy and the national popular voter movement will bring more voters into the fold and ensure that every vote counts."

New York state lawmakers also made major progress toward enacting the provision. The New York Senate overwhelmingly passed the National Popular Vote bill, which is now pending in the 150-member New York Assembly, where the bill has 80 sponsors. The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg said the state senate's action revealed that lawmakers' "interests coincide not only with those of all their constituents, regardless of party, but also with an elementary tenet of democracy: that elections should be decided by counting up the votes of citizens, with every individual vote being of equal vote."

The New York Times also got behind the National Vote bill, saying in an editorial that the "Electoral College was established by the nation's founders in part to appease slave-owning states. It is based indirectly on population, and slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person. Each state now gets as many electoral votes as it has representatives in Congress. The results can be what we all saw in 2000, where the votes of one state, Florida, decided the election despite the fact that Mr. Gore was the nation's choice by more than a half-million votes."

In addition, earlier this month the District of Columbia Mayor Adrian Fenty signed the National Popular Vote bill. In reporting on Fenty's action, Reuters cited recent polling that "points to overwhelming majorities of voters" in Idaho, Nebraska, South Dakota, Kentucky and several other states "favor the National Vote plan over current winner-take-all rules (i.e. awarding all of a state's electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular voters in each state)."