Proving that you can never glance away from Gov. Rod Blagojevich and the Illinois Legislature and remain safe from a sneak attack, they have just passed a law requiring Illinois to turn its presidential electoral votes over to the rest of the country.

That’s not how supporters of the National Popular Vote bill would describe the new law, but that’s precisely what they’ve done. Under it, Illinois promises to award its 21 Electoral College votes in the presidential election to the candidate that wins the popular vote nationwide. So, if the voters of Illinois choose a Democrat to be president, but the nation’s popular vote goes to the Republican candidate (perish the thought), the state’s electoral votes will go to the Republican.

Perhaps that scenario seems too remote to Democrats who run the state; but the fact is that it could turn Illinois into a red state from blue.

If this isn’t the most harebrained scheme to ooze out of the governor’s office and the Legislature since free bus rides for seniors, the huge budget deficit, the….Wait, I take that back. This might not be the dumbest thing the Legislature and Blagojevich have done, but it sure is in the running.

In effect, it has made Illinois voters tools of national opinion. It has diminished to zero the importance of Illinois as a political player. It has nullified the majority will of Illinois voters.

The law’s supporters see its impact as just the opposite, claiming that it will increase the influence of Illinois in presidential politics. Here’s their reasoning: Because Illinois is a solidly blue (Democratic) state, the presidential candidates don’t bother bringing their campaign here. By straight jacketing Illinois’s elected members of the Electoral College to vote exactly as the popular vote goes, it will force the candidates to campaign here.

Spare us. If the reason for this discombobulation is to induce the physical presence of presidential candidates in Illinois, it’s not worth it. It’s as if we’re better off if we can lay our eyes (usually from afar) on the physical presence of a politician making the same stump speech we can hear on his web site or elsewhere. It’s as if we couldn’t figure out where a candidate stands, unless we stand in his company. Come, let his touch the hem of his garment.

This nonsense sprang from the national debate over whether the Electoral College or the popular vote should elect the president. That debate, in turn, was fueled by the 2000 election, in which Al Gore won the popular vote, but lost to George W. Bush in the Electoral College. (Gore’s not the first.) The Electoral College is established by the difficult-to-amend U.S. Constitution, so popular vote advocates have come up with a shortcut. Using the their constitutional power to allocate their electoral votes as they see fit, the states would promise to award their votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The law would take effect in participating states only when it is enacted in identical form by enough states to generate the electoral votes (270 out of a total of 538) needed to pick a president.

This, of course, dilutes the importance of each state, and effectively corrodes the notion of federalism, crafted by the Founding Fathers, as it relates to electing the president. Federalism was long and carefully debated more than two centuries ago, and the present system (as once amended) is the result: the number of electors in each state equals the number of congressional districts plus two.

The equation gives smaller states some more influence, which was the Founders’ intent, in the belief that each state has a degree of sovereignty, regardless of its size. In contrast, the National Popular Vote bill will give larger states having populous urban centers a larger voice.

Promoters of “change” for the sake of change will hail this as “progress.” Blagojevich, in signing the bill, said it guarantees that “every voter has an equal voice in electing our nation’s leaders,” which isn’t quite true in that not every voter has an equal voice in choosing congressional leaders and judges. But, if you’re for a pure democracy, maybe we should elect everyone. It is, after all, the populist position, one easily adopted by demagogues who have no care for the subtleties (“nuances,” if you prefer) and complexities of the balance of power built into our Constitution. This isn’t an obsolete concept; it is especially relevant as we become increasingly diverse and the need to balance the nation’s increasing cultural, economic and social differences becomes more critical and to guard against the tyranny of the majority.

Maybe this is the direction that we, as a nation, want to go. But it is a major change, and the Constitution requires that major changes be approved by supermajorities. This isn’t what’s happening. National Public Vote confesses, in fact, it brags, that it intends to install this major change without bothering with such niceties as the Constitution. It’s time for the rest of the nation—including the sheep in the Illinois Legislature—to catch on. It’s not too late to rescind this dreadful decision.

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Dennis Byrne is a member of the Chicago Daily Observer editorial board.