The Supreme Court released another decision today, one that could have led to upending the entire process of American presidential elections. Thankfully, the court decided (6-3) not to go down such a dangerous path. Instead, checks and balances will remain at the state level when it comes to elections. The alternative would have been to open the doors to exactly what Donald Trump wanted to see happen after the 2020 presidential election -- partisans in state legislatures overturning the will of the voters of their states and just unilaterally declaring a winner. This is what Trump wanted Mike Pence to facilitate. What the Supreme Court just did was to slam the door on any speculation that such a thing could actually happen.

At the heart of the case, Moore v. Harper, was a radical concept called "the Independent State Legislature Theory." This stems from one clause in the Constitution which states: "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof." In practice, this has meant that state legislatures have set up elections laws, created elections departments and officials, and empowered them to conduct elections. It also means that any of this can be challenged in court, just like any other law subject to judicial review.

The proponents of the I.S.L.T., however, read it as an absolute -- only the state's legislature can decide any of it, including even the outcome. The legislature should be free to draw any congressional district boundaries it likes, and the courts and the governor should just butt out of all of these decisions, period. Taking this to the extreme, if the legislature didn't approve of the way the public had voted (in a presidential election, say), they could just meet and declare a winner, votes be damned. And then since the Constitution says that the legislature has the final word, Congress would just have to accept this outcome (again, this is precisely what Trump wanted Pence to set into motion).

It is hard to even imagine a more undemocratic outcome. Partisans can gerrymander state senate and assembly districts to assure their own power in the statehouse, and when they do cement this power it simply doesn't matter how the voters vote, since the legislature can just declare the state for their party's presidential candidate. Calling this the death of American democracy does not seem overblown, in fact.

The case the Supreme Court heard didn't delve into all of this. It was merely the first major test of the I.S.L.T. as a legal theory at the high court. It involved gerrymandered redistricting which happened after the 2020 Census in North Carolina. Republicans drew outrageously gerrymandered districts, and a liberal state supreme court rejected them. Since the case was decided, however, the conservatives won a majority on the state supreme court and reversed the decision, allowing the Republicans to have their gerrymandered districts. So the case which actually appeared before the Supreme Court was already moot. They could have very easily just punted on it and waited for another case to come around which tested the I.S.L.T. But instead, they tackled the issue directly, even though their ruling didn't change any outcome in North Carolina.

The theory of the case was that the state supreme court simply did not have the power to review or even question the legislature's actions, since the Constitution doesn't mention anything about judicial review in that clause. This is a fairly ridiculous thing to argue, but that didn't stop them from making the attempt.

If the Supreme Court had agreed, by some "original intent" pretzel logic, then it would have made state legislatures not just "independent" but actually "supreme." Their word would not just be the final one but the only one. It would have called into question the governor and the executive branch's role in the elections process as well, while leaving no option for anyone to challenge anything in the state's courts.

As I said, thankfully the Supreme Court did not choose this path. The people should decide elections, not state legislators. Votes should matter. Unfair laws should be challenged in court. The Constitution, as has long been said, is not a suicide pact. No presidential election should hinge on which party controls which legislatures across the country.

While liberals are breathing an enormous sigh of relief at the outcome of this case (as well they should), there is one thing they should also realize. Because there is a movement to institute an oddly similar scheme at the state level across the country which has slowly been moving forward.

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an attempt to do an "end-run" around the Electoral College. Rather than getting a constitutional amendment passed which clearly states: "The winner of the presidential election shall be the person who wins the largest number of votes across the entire country," instead the states could all band together and enter into a compact which stated that all of their electors will be pledged to whichever candidate won the national popular vote -- no matter how their own state had actually voted.

This is one of those ideas which certainly sounds interesting at first glance, but is likely not going to work out very smoothly. Sixteen states have passed the N.P.V. compact through their state governments. Here is a list of these states, in the order they joined the compact:

Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawai'i, Washington, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, Vermont, California, Rhode Island, New York, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, New Mexico, Oregon, and (most recently, signed into law just last month) Minnesota.

Notice anything? Those are all pretty blue states. Only a few of them could even be considered competitive in a normal presidential race. And there are zero red states in that list.

Republicans are not big fans of the National Popular Vote idea, for a very obvious reason. Only one Republican has actually won a national popular vote in a presidential race since 1988 -- George W. Bush, in 2004 (as he was riding high as a wartime president). In every other race for the past 35 years, the Republican candidate has not won a majority of the popular vote. George W. Bush's first election and Donald Trump's election were carried by a majority of the Electoral College, while both men came in second in the popular vote. So the N.P.V. compact is likely only ever going to help a Democrat become president (at least as things stand now). Which is precisely why blue states have been passing it while red states haven't.

The compact isn't designed to go into effect until enough states sign up for it to guarantee a victory in the Electoral College -- which translates to 270 votes. Currently, with the addition of Minnesota's 10 Electoral College votes, they are up to 205. So there is still a lot of ground to cover before this could ever actually become a reality.

As I said, on the face of it, the compact does make a lot of sense. In an ideal system, the national popular vote should indeed determine who is president. The Electoral College is an outdated system that can allow the loser of the popular vote to become president anyway. But unless such unfairness is changed by amending the Constitution, it could lead to exactly what liberals were so frightened of in the Supreme Court's I.S.L.T. ruling -- the legislature of a state casting the state's electoral votes for a candidate that didn't win that state.

Seeing the political makeup of the states that have already passed the compact, this would likely take place after a Democrat had won the popular vote nationwide, but perhaps not won a battleground state or two -- ones with blue enough state governments that they had passed the N.P.V. compact. This would lead to exactly what liberals feared from the I.S.L.T. -- the swing state's legislature would meet and certify the Electoral College slate for the Democrat, even though the Republican had won the state.

The partisan shoe would be on the other foot, but it's pretty easy to see how Republicans would react to this sort of thing happening. Donald Trump has shown that you don't even need proof or evidence or anything real to claim the election was "rigged" against you. Now just imagine all of them reacting to, say, Michigan declaring its Electoral College votes for the Democrat, even though the Republican had won the popular vote within the state. To say that Republicans would be angry is an understatement. There is a very real possibility it would lead to some sort of replay of January 6th, either at the state level or the national level. Except that this time, they'd actually have a valid reason to be enraged.

America has a strange system of electing presidents. There is not just the Electoral College but also the fact that in almost every state it is "winner takes all" in the Electoral College (rather than awarding the electors proportionately). None of this is strictly democratic. But it's what we've got at the moment. Both the I.S.L.T. and the N.P.V. Interstate Compact would empower state legislatures to essentially ignore the will of the voters and do whatever they thought was the right thing instead. You can't really intellectually condemn one without condemning the other, since the outcome is so similar (and undemocratic). If a state's legislature ever did try to throw the vote of its state to a candidate who didn't win the state, it would cause a constitutional crisis.

The Supreme Court ruling today reaffirms the checks and balances which are in place to contain the worst impulses of partisan actors. The I.S.L.T. should be considered a dead legal theory at this point, discredited and invalidated by the highest court in the land. American democracy isn't perfect, but throwing giant monkey wrenches into it isn't going to make it better. Seeing an American state ignore the will of its own voters in a presidential contest would enrage people, and rightly so. But this is true whether the legal reasoning behind such a move comes from the left or the right.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant