This past Monday the New York Times ran an editorial calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. It made the usual self-serving and historically illiterate arguments against the constitutional system for electing a president. I'm not going to go into them because this post isn't about the Electoral College.
What struck me was the last line in the editorial: " For most reasonable people, it’s hard to understand why the loser of the popular vote should wind up running the country." I actually agree with "most reasonable people" on this point. However, I don't see why the winner of the popular vote should wind up "running the country" either.
The powers and duties of the president are described in the Constitution, chiefly in Article II. Search high and wide and you will not find "running the country" anywhere in there. The president is the head of the executive branch of the federal government, one of three separate and co-equal branches. He is not, or at least he shouldn't be, head of the country.
That so money people, including the New York Times editorial board, think the president does run the country, is the result of the progressive takeover of the government in the 1930's and of a complete failure in civics education in the United States.
Progressives, like their ideological distant cousins in the European fascist movements, believe that progress depends on organizing and mobilizing society under the direction of a strong leader. These being the United States of America, our version of fuhrerprinzip didn't descend to the depths of brutality that occurred in Germany or Italy but it was still a dramatic departure from the limited government established by the Constitution resulting in a gross violation of the rights of American citizens.
Nowadays remarks like those that closed the Times editorial pass almost without notice. It is also far too common to hear journalists and pundits refer to the president as our "commander in chief." If you are a member of the armed services, the president is your commander in chief. If you are an ordinary civilian, he is your employee and that is how you should treat him.
Saturday, December 24, 2016
Saturday, December 17, 2016
Faithless Electors
The presidential election is the day after tomorrow. We may have thought we already went through this last month. But as most people know, the actual winners on November 8 did not include Donald Trump. Instead, they were 538 mostly anonymous people who were chosen as electors. It is they who will vote on Monday and will, most probably, choose the next president.
Although they are known collectively as the "Electoral College," they never actually meet in one place. In accordance with constitutional requirements, the electors from each state meet in their respective state capitals. The candidate with the most votes becomes president, providing he receives a majority. If no one gets 270 votes the House of Representatives selects from the top three vote-getters.
The electors are usually an afterthought as they tend to be party loyalists who reliably cast their votes for their party's designated candidate. This year, however, they are receiving far more attention than usual for two reasons. One is that this year the majority of electors are pledged to the candidate who got the second greatest number of popular votes. This is not unprecedented. In fact it has happened several times before, most recently in 2000. but even that election did not result in the paroxysms and doomsaying that have occasioned Donald Trump's presumptive election to the White House. That's because Trump is a uniquely controversial and polarizing candidate.
Partisans of the losing candidate, Hillary Clinton, have imagined that the electoral college gives them a second shot at defeating Donald Trump by convincing Republican electors, theoretically committed to voting for Trump, to vote for someone else. If 37 Republican electors vote for a different candidate, say Mitt Romney, they deny Trump a majority and throw the election to the House. Even if such an unlikely turn of events took place, Trump would almost certainly still be elected. If Clinton's followers want to install her at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they would need to convince those 37 electors to cast their votes for her. The likelihood of that taking place is small to the point of non-existent.
Unconfirmed reports have been circulating of electors' toying with the idea of freelancing their votes. Most of these electors are nameless and, in fact, include more Clinton electors than Trump electors. One potential "faithless elector" who has chosen to come forward is Chris Suprun, a Texas elector who may or may not have exaggerated his role as a 9/11 first responder. Suprun has become the focal point of a debate over how much autonomy electors have in discharging their constitutional function.
Most states have enacted laws that purport to impose legal sanctions on electors that vote for someone other than their pledged candidate. Internet comment sections are swelling with outraged yahoos demanding imprisonment for faithless electors and attainting them as traitors.
While the laws binding electors exist, no elector has ever been penalized or replaced even though 108 of them have gone rogue. No faithless elector or any combination of them has ever changed an election result so no state has bothered to take legal action and thus these laws have never been fully vetted by the courts.
My own opinion is that laws binding electors are unconstitutional. I'm open to arguments to the contrary but it seems to me that an elector is a constitutional officer and no state government can constrain his performance any more that it can that of a representative or senator.
Although they are known collectively as the "Electoral College," they never actually meet in one place. In accordance with constitutional requirements, the electors from each state meet in their respective state capitals. The candidate with the most votes becomes president, providing he receives a majority. If no one gets 270 votes the House of Representatives selects from the top three vote-getters.
The electors are usually an afterthought as they tend to be party loyalists who reliably cast their votes for their party's designated candidate. This year, however, they are receiving far more attention than usual for two reasons. One is that this year the majority of electors are pledged to the candidate who got the second greatest number of popular votes. This is not unprecedented. In fact it has happened several times before, most recently in 2000. but even that election did not result in the paroxysms and doomsaying that have occasioned Donald Trump's presumptive election to the White House. That's because Trump is a uniquely controversial and polarizing candidate.
Partisans of the losing candidate, Hillary Clinton, have imagined that the electoral college gives them a second shot at defeating Donald Trump by convincing Republican electors, theoretically committed to voting for Trump, to vote for someone else. If 37 Republican electors vote for a different candidate, say Mitt Romney, they deny Trump a majority and throw the election to the House. Even if such an unlikely turn of events took place, Trump would almost certainly still be elected. If Clinton's followers want to install her at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they would need to convince those 37 electors to cast their votes for her. The likelihood of that taking place is small to the point of non-existent.
Unconfirmed reports have been circulating of electors' toying with the idea of freelancing their votes. Most of these electors are nameless and, in fact, include more Clinton electors than Trump electors. One potential "faithless elector" who has chosen to come forward is Chris Suprun, a Texas elector who may or may not have exaggerated his role as a 9/11 first responder. Suprun has become the focal point of a debate over how much autonomy electors have in discharging their constitutional function.
Most states have enacted laws that purport to impose legal sanctions on electors that vote for someone other than their pledged candidate. Internet comment sections are swelling with outraged yahoos demanding imprisonment for faithless electors and attainting them as traitors.
While the laws binding electors exist, no elector has ever been penalized or replaced even though 108 of them have gone rogue. No faithless elector or any combination of them has ever changed an election result so no state has bothered to take legal action and thus these laws have never been fully vetted by the courts.
My own opinion is that laws binding electors are unconstitutional. I'm open to arguments to the contrary but it seems to me that an elector is a constitutional officer and no state government can constrain his performance any more that it can that of a representative or senator.
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Russia Wants to Make America Great Again
Some thoughts on the Russian hacking of Democrat e-mails:
1. I'm not sure whether the CIA assessment is true or not. I wouldn't put it past Putin's government to attempt such an operation. But intelligence is an inherently murky field. Very rarely is there a "smoking gun" or direct evidence that leads to an unassailable conclusion. Usually there are only inferences based on evidence of uncertain provenance and reliability. And I wouldn't put it past Obama to manipulate intelligence for political purposes either. That said, for purposes of this post I will assume it's true that persons connected to Russian intelligence services, in concert with nominally independent actors like Wikileaks, hacked the computers and e-mail accounts of Democrat officials and leaked the contents of those e-mails to the press with the goal of weakening Hillary Clinton and boosting Donald Trump's chances in the recent presidential election.
2. The Trump campaign's official statement was juvenile and historically wrong: "These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It's now time to move on and 'Make America Great Again,' " The United States' intelligence community's assessment of Iraq's WMD program, which, by the way, was consistent with the estimates of every other major intelligence agency in the world, is irrelevant to the present issue. The implication of the Trump team's statement is that the CIA should close its doors since it can never again produce reliable intelligence untainted by its errors from fifteen years ago.
The Trump people's assessment of their man's showing in the electoral college is problematic to the point of being deceptive. Trump's unofficial vote count in the electoral college is 306. The vote won't be official until the electors actually meet on December 19 and one Texas elector has announced that he will cast his vote for an as yet unnamed alternative. 2016 is the 58th presidential election since the ratification of the Constitution. Technically Trump's vote total puts him in 22nd place among among all elected presidents. But of course the electoral college didn't even have 306 electors until 1872, when it expanded to 352. If you look at the elections since the electoral college was fixed at its present membership of 538, Trump's total is 10th out of 14, well below the median. If you go back as far as 1900, there are still only 8 out of 30 candidates who did worse than Trump.
3. Julian Assange's denials of Russian involvement are meaningless. From everything we know of him he is a man of uncommonly low character and completely untrustworthy. His statement might be true, but it would be pure coincidence.
4. Put in its most favorable light, what the Russians did amounts to one-sided investigative journalism, similar to what we've come to expect from the major news networks in the United States.
5. The e-mails were illegally obtained but none of the parties involved have disputed their authenticity. The information disclosed is apparently accurate. It is also embarrassing to the individuals involved, revealing them to be dissembling and hypocritical. This was useful information for voters to have so in that sense the Russians provided a service. For the sake of balance they should have hacked Republican e-mails as well, but I doubt that the private e-mails would have been any more damaging than the very public tweets that regularly spewed forth from Trump Tower.
6. The press is carrying the charges of Russian support for a Republican candidate uncritically. Similar allegations that the Soviet Union favored Democrat candidates were deemed to be McCarthyism and heralds of looming fascism.
7. The Obama administration did not disappoint in seeking to use the CIA assessment to advance an unrelated policy agenda. Specifically, according to the Chicago Tribune, "the White House wanted congressional leaders to sign off on a bipartisan statement urging state and local officials to take federal help in protecting their voting-registration and balloting machines from Russian cyber-intrusions." This, despite the fact that no evidence of Russian interference with the actual voting was produced.
8. The Democrats have finally found a reason to complain about Obama's timidity in responding to hostile foreign actions against the United States.
1. I'm not sure whether the CIA assessment is true or not. I wouldn't put it past Putin's government to attempt such an operation. But intelligence is an inherently murky field. Very rarely is there a "smoking gun" or direct evidence that leads to an unassailable conclusion. Usually there are only inferences based on evidence of uncertain provenance and reliability. And I wouldn't put it past Obama to manipulate intelligence for political purposes either. That said, for purposes of this post I will assume it's true that persons connected to Russian intelligence services, in concert with nominally independent actors like Wikileaks, hacked the computers and e-mail accounts of Democrat officials and leaked the contents of those e-mails to the press with the goal of weakening Hillary Clinton and boosting Donald Trump's chances in the recent presidential election.
2. The Trump campaign's official statement was juvenile and historically wrong: "These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It's now time to move on and 'Make America Great Again,' " The United States' intelligence community's assessment of Iraq's WMD program, which, by the way, was consistent with the estimates of every other major intelligence agency in the world, is irrelevant to the present issue. The implication of the Trump team's statement is that the CIA should close its doors since it can never again produce reliable intelligence untainted by its errors from fifteen years ago.
The Trump people's assessment of their man's showing in the electoral college is problematic to the point of being deceptive. Trump's unofficial vote count in the electoral college is 306. The vote won't be official until the electors actually meet on December 19 and one Texas elector has announced that he will cast his vote for an as yet unnamed alternative. 2016 is the 58th presidential election since the ratification of the Constitution. Technically Trump's vote total puts him in 22nd place among among all elected presidents. But of course the electoral college didn't even have 306 electors until 1872, when it expanded to 352. If you look at the elections since the electoral college was fixed at its present membership of 538, Trump's total is 10th out of 14, well below the median. If you go back as far as 1900, there are still only 8 out of 30 candidates who did worse than Trump.
3. Julian Assange's denials of Russian involvement are meaningless. From everything we know of him he is a man of uncommonly low character and completely untrustworthy. His statement might be true, but it would be pure coincidence.
4. Put in its most favorable light, what the Russians did amounts to one-sided investigative journalism, similar to what we've come to expect from the major news networks in the United States.
5. The e-mails were illegally obtained but none of the parties involved have disputed their authenticity. The information disclosed is apparently accurate. It is also embarrassing to the individuals involved, revealing them to be dissembling and hypocritical. This was useful information for voters to have so in that sense the Russians provided a service. For the sake of balance they should have hacked Republican e-mails as well, but I doubt that the private e-mails would have been any more damaging than the very public tweets that regularly spewed forth from Trump Tower.
6. The press is carrying the charges of Russian support for a Republican candidate uncritically. Similar allegations that the Soviet Union favored Democrat candidates were deemed to be McCarthyism and heralds of looming fascism.
7. The Obama administration did not disappoint in seeking to use the CIA assessment to advance an unrelated policy agenda. Specifically, according to the Chicago Tribune, "the White House wanted congressional leaders to sign off on a bipartisan statement urging state and local officials to take federal help in protecting their voting-registration and balloting machines from Russian cyber-intrusions." This, despite the fact that no evidence of Russian interference with the actual voting was produced.
8. The Democrats have finally found a reason to complain about Obama's timidity in responding to hostile foreign actions against the United States.
Sunday, December 4, 2016
It's Time to Deselect Selective Service
Barack Obama has announced that he is now in favor of requiring women to register for selective service the same as men. This fits right in with his impulse to subject common sense, experience and evidence to his rigid progressive ideology. It proceeds logically from his decision to remove all restrictions on women's serving in combat roles. Obama clearly has no respect for Chesterton's rule on fences:
But I'm not really writing today about the role of women or gays in the military. Ironically, I'm actually interested in tearing down a fence, the selective service system itself.
Up until the Civil War, compulsory military service in the United States was limited to the militia. Most every man of military age was deemed by law to be a member of the militia and subject to call-up in times of emergency (There were also instances of impressment for naval service during the War of Independence.) The Civil War was the first American war fought after the industrial revolution made raising and maintaining large armies practical. With the high casualty rates of the war, both sides eventually felt the need to resort to conscription to supply the soldiers necessary to continue the war.
Conscription was again used in World War I when only 73,000 men responded to Woodrow Wilson's call for one million volunteers. Woodrow Wilson created the West's first propaganda ministry, the Committee on Public Information. But even that organization was not equal to the task of convincing American men to volunteer for the daily slaughter then taking place in France.
Conscription was re-introduced in 1940 for the run-up to World War II. After that war ended, though, conscription stayed. The war had destroyed the Axis powers but it established a potentially more dangerous enemy in the Soviet Union and the subject states it had inherited from Germany. Actual conscriptions spiked in the early 50's for Korea and in the 60's for Vietnam but no one has been drafted in the United States since 1973. The Military Selective Service Act authorizes the President to require registration. In 1975 Gerald Ford ended the registration requirement.
Jimmy Carter reinstated it in 1980 following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The invasion, and the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran the previous year had exposed Carter's dangerous naivete about the world and he was flailing about for some kind of response to stave off the total collapse of his presidency. His reinstatement of registration was a symbolic gesture, much like his boycott of the 1980 Olympics.
Conscription is a grave imposition upon liberty, often upon life itself, certainly upon the pursuit of happiness. It always has been but it has, on occasion, been a necessary imposition. It is not necessary now. It may never be necessary again, but who knows what the future holds.
Conscription is not unnecessary because the world is no longer dangerous; it certainly is. It is unnecessary because the United States no longer fight wars using mass armies of draftees. The United States' method of waging war requires dedicated, motivated, intelligent volunteers. It requires the use of advanced technological equipment and weapons. It places huge responsibilities on small units and their leaders.s
The United States military is a volunteer force built around a highly professional core of career officers and NCO's. These leaders need the willing volunteers I described above to give their talents maximum effect. They should not be babysitting reluctant draftees putting their time in until discharge.
The typical recruit in 1863 needed to know the nine steps to load and fire a flintlock rifle as well as the regimental drill used to maneuver around a battlefield. Once he mastered those skills he functioned as a cog in a well-oiled machine directed by his commanding officer. His NCO's and junior officers were there mainly to relay commands from the colonel and to make sure the men in their companies were performing as required. Very little independent judgment was required.
Today's infantryman is more than just a trigger puller standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a mass of his fellows, all within sight and earshot of the colors and the commanding officer. He often patrols as part of a small unit, a platoon or maybe a squad. He needs to understand the overall objectives of the higher echelons so that he can take proper action when required to exercise initiative. It is folly to expect this kind of performance from unwilling draftees.
Today the only real purpose for the Selective Service System is to keep a few hundred timeservers drawing a federal paycheck with federal benefits until they qualify for their federal retirement. It's time for them to find real jobs.
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.The fact is there are differences between men and women, physical obviously but also psychological, that make women on the whole less suitable for the rigors of modern combat. In addition to the limitations of women as individual, throwing young men and women together in combat units is asking for trouble for it will inevitably result in sexual attraction, which is poison to unit cohesion. Sexual attraction, by its nature is exclusive and selfish. Effective combat units demand that all members think of the unit and the mission first, without singling certain members out for special consideration. This, by the way, is the same reality that makes admission of practicing homosexuals into the military a risky experiment. None of this is sexist or homophobic. It's just reality and human nature. If your overriding consideration is maintaining an effective military force that will fight and win its country's wars, you will give these cautions due respect. If your goal is to advance a progressive sophomoric fantasy of what human society should look like if it were directed from the faculty lounge, you ignore the evidence of history and experience and tear that fence down.
But I'm not really writing today about the role of women or gays in the military. Ironically, I'm actually interested in tearing down a fence, the selective service system itself.
Up until the Civil War, compulsory military service in the United States was limited to the militia. Most every man of military age was deemed by law to be a member of the militia and subject to call-up in times of emergency (There were also instances of impressment for naval service during the War of Independence.) The Civil War was the first American war fought after the industrial revolution made raising and maintaining large armies practical. With the high casualty rates of the war, both sides eventually felt the need to resort to conscription to supply the soldiers necessary to continue the war.
Conscription was again used in World War I when only 73,000 men responded to Woodrow Wilson's call for one million volunteers. Woodrow Wilson created the West's first propaganda ministry, the Committee on Public Information. But even that organization was not equal to the task of convincing American men to volunteer for the daily slaughter then taking place in France.
Conscription was re-introduced in 1940 for the run-up to World War II. After that war ended, though, conscription stayed. The war had destroyed the Axis powers but it established a potentially more dangerous enemy in the Soviet Union and the subject states it had inherited from Germany. Actual conscriptions spiked in the early 50's for Korea and in the 60's for Vietnam but no one has been drafted in the United States since 1973. The Military Selective Service Act authorizes the President to require registration. In 1975 Gerald Ford ended the registration requirement.
Jimmy Carter reinstated it in 1980 following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The invasion, and the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran the previous year had exposed Carter's dangerous naivete about the world and he was flailing about for some kind of response to stave off the total collapse of his presidency. His reinstatement of registration was a symbolic gesture, much like his boycott of the 1980 Olympics.
Conscription is a grave imposition upon liberty, often upon life itself, certainly upon the pursuit of happiness. It always has been but it has, on occasion, been a necessary imposition. It is not necessary now. It may never be necessary again, but who knows what the future holds.
Conscription is not unnecessary because the world is no longer dangerous; it certainly is. It is unnecessary because the United States no longer fight wars using mass armies of draftees. The United States' method of waging war requires dedicated, motivated, intelligent volunteers. It requires the use of advanced technological equipment and weapons. It places huge responsibilities on small units and their leaders.s
The United States military is a volunteer force built around a highly professional core of career officers and NCO's. These leaders need the willing volunteers I described above to give their talents maximum effect. They should not be babysitting reluctant draftees putting their time in until discharge.
The typical recruit in 1863 needed to know the nine steps to load and fire a flintlock rifle as well as the regimental drill used to maneuver around a battlefield. Once he mastered those skills he functioned as a cog in a well-oiled machine directed by his commanding officer. His NCO's and junior officers were there mainly to relay commands from the colonel and to make sure the men in their companies were performing as required. Very little independent judgment was required.
Today's infantryman is more than just a trigger puller standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a mass of his fellows, all within sight and earshot of the colors and the commanding officer. He often patrols as part of a small unit, a platoon or maybe a squad. He needs to understand the overall objectives of the higher echelons so that he can take proper action when required to exercise initiative. It is folly to expect this kind of performance from unwilling draftees.
Today the only real purpose for the Selective Service System is to keep a few hundred timeservers drawing a federal paycheck with federal benefits until they qualify for their federal retirement. It's time for them to find real jobs.
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