As we celebrate the ultimate sacrifices of hundreds of thousands of Americans who died in the defense of liberty, perhaps it is fitting that we pause for a moment of silence to contemplate the imminent loss of the Constitution which they had sworn to uphold.

Some would say that the Constitution has already been twisted beyond recognition by activist judges, congressional chicanery and tyrannical presidents, but I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt here, and affirm that the genius of the Founders still holds our nation together despite the best efforts of our worst citizens to draw us apart.

You can all provide your own examples of laws that have been passed by the Congress, affirmed by the courts and executed by the president, which on their face would be self-evidently unconstitutional were it possible for such decisions to be based on the plain words of the Constitution rather than the convenience and connivance of our governors. (And no I do not refer to the governors of our states, but rather the governors of our lives — the overseers who tell us what we can and cannot do as supposedly free people.)

But there is one manipulation of the Constitution underway now which is so destructive to our republic that it makes almost everything else which has come before it seem like child’s play. The fact that almost no one has even heard of this plot, which is more than halfway to fruition, makes it even scarier.

So what exactly is it?

Something called the National Popular Vote Plan, a proposal which would neuter the Electoral College and thus provide the final nail in the coffin of the republic. You see, the Founding Fathers carefully crafted a mechanism in the Constitution by which a multitude of interests and stakes would be balanced against each other with the precision of a Swiss clock. Alter or remove any one of the basic provisions of governance, and the balance of power is forever shifted. That happened, for instance, when the 17th Amendment passed by the Progressive movement changed the means of electing senators.

Before the amendment was ratified in 1913, senators were elected by state legislatures, thus ensuring that the interests of the state would be represented in Washington, D.C. Rural states could protect their interest in agrarian reform, for instance, by sending a delegation to Washington that would fight for their states’ interests, not follow the dictates of a national political party. Any senator who did not adequately represent the state’s interests was sent packing. These days, however, senators say whatever they need to say to get elected, then vote however they need to vote in order to curry favor with their party bosses. Ultimately, because senators no longer represent their states’ interests, the national government has grown increasingly powerful and the notion of federalism has faded into obscurity.

The National Popular Vote Plan would trump the damage done by the 17th Amendment by extending the popular vote not just to senators, but now to presidents as well, and this time without even the benefit of being a change brought about by the rigorous amendment process. Instead, the National Popular Vote Plan seeks to lure states holding a majority of the electoral votes into forming an interstate compact by which they would all agree to ignore the will of their own states’ voters and cast all their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote. The clearest signal this sends is that states are meaningless in the United States of America.

Our Founders’ federal plan, on the other hand, called for each state to be able to cast votes for a president based on population. The number of electors for each state was the combined total of senators (two for each state) and representatives (apportioned according to population). Each state could determine its own method of casting electoral votes, and it was the pool of electoral votes that determined the winner of the presidency, not the total number of votes cast by individual citizens for one or another candidate. In fact, the Constitution did not even envision a popular vote at all. Instead, it directed that “each state shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature may direct” the electors who would choose the president. Originally, some states used an election process; some didn’t.

Again, the importance of this cannot be overstated. The Founding Fathers recognized the danger of politicians who could manipulate the affections of the people to gain their power, and created the Electoral College as a cushion that would prevent a demagogue from being swept into office.

But like sophomoric teenagers who yearn to prove how much smarter they are than their parents, mischievous politicians are now hard at work to undermine the work of the Founders. As of April, 10 states and the District of Columbia with 165 combined Electoral College votes have signed on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. That’s more than 61 percent of the 270 votes needed to elect a president.

Numerous other states are also entertaining this notion in their legislatures, and as soon as any combination of states with 270 or more electoral votes join together, those states will be mandated to cast their electoral votes for the winner of the national popular vote.

You may well ask what is wrong with that. Besides the problem of tampering with the delicate balance of our constitutionally mandated government, it must be noted that the United States was not created as a democracy, but as a republic. Direct democracy tends over time to diminish the rights of the minority and to solidify the imperious tendencies of the majority.

The most immediate effect is that presidential candidates (and presidents!) will cater to large urban areas even more than they do currently because that is where they will be able to most effectively spend their money to curry votes. If you want Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, Philadelphia, Miami, San Antonio, Houston and a handful of other big cities picking your president for you, then by all means get on board.

But if you live in the 90 percent of the country that is going to be ignored from that day forward, you might want to slow down and take a serious look at this deceptively innocent proposal. Ultimately, based on demographics alone, it would probably ensure a Democratic president for the next 100 years or so. That might seem like a tempting reason for Democrats to back the proposal, but I would hope most of them could envision the danger of such a situation and steer clear of experimenting with the Constitution and the fundamental institutions of America.