URLs du Jour

2022-07-18

  • Getting Congress to do its job now, so it can do its job later. Is it too much to ask an assembly of power-hungry blowhards and grifters to fix an obviously creaky and loophole-ridden old law that threatens our country's system of governent? Andy Craig at Cato has an impressive report on How to Pick a President: A Guide to Electoral Count Act Reform. [Footnotes elided.]

    The attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election took advantage of long‐neglected ambiguities in the process of translating votes cast at the polls into the declaration of a formal winner. It was a stress test of our electoral architecture: the patchwork of historical practices, informal norms, and ambiguous laws that govern how the United States chooses its chief executive every four years. While the election result was ultimately confirmed despite the defeated incumbent’s efforts, the crisis revealed severe flaws that can no longer be safely ignored. Understandably, there has been growing bipartisan support in Congress for shoring up presidential election procedures.

    At the heart of the matter is the Electoral Count Act (ECA). Passed in 1887, the Electoral Count Act was Congress’s response to our closest call with a disputed presidential election, the notorious Hayes‐Tilden dispute of 1876 and the renewed civil war it very nearly sparked. As Congress correctly recognized in 1887, the ad hoc Electoral Commission that was created to resolve the 1876 election was a deeply problematic precedent that should not be repeated. This well‐intentioned but poorly drafted statute governs how electoral votes are cast, certified, sent to Congress, and counted, and how any objections to the results are handled.

    The ECA is, simply put, a mess. It is a tangle of woefully unclear drafting, apparent contradictions, and constitutional infirmities, leaving too much room for partisan actors to undo the choice of the American people. The stakes are too high for us to rely on the current ECA for future elections. Congress must go back to the drawing board and get it right this time.

    I'm no legislative guru or Constitutional scholar, but Craig's proposal seems well thought out. It respects the Constitution, anticipates roadbumps, deals with possible disasters, removes ambiguity. (In contrast, those 1887 legislators might have been drunk.)

    It would be preferable to get the ECA reform done before the midterm elections, before it becomes even more of a political football than it is. Unfortunately, … well, you know: Congress. And Biden.


  • He did not shoot the deputy, either. Kevin D. Williamson clears one of the most vilified senators: Joe Manchin Didn’t Kill the Democrats’ Climate Agenda.

    President Joe Manchin has handed down a climate-bill veto — or so you would think from reading the newspapers.

    Contrary to what his fellow Democrats insist, Senator Manchin has not single-handedly derailed climate-change legislation or anything else — except for Democrats’ attempts to govern as though Republicans did not exist.

    “It seems odd that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity” undead Clinton hack John Podesta proclaimed with his habitual fine sense of restraint and nuance. It emphatically is not the case that humanity is now doomed because Podesta’s green-business friends and benefactors are going to be deprived of subsidies and favors paid for by U.S. taxpayers, nor is it the case that Senator Manchin is solely responsible for this outcome. The Democrats’ plan is a dead letter because 49 senators support it and 51 senators oppose it.

    In our age of very stupid tribal politics, compromise is an idea that has fallen into discredit. Where once we had admirable collaborators, now we have detestable collaborationists. It is the same thing, of course — finding common ground with those icky cootie-bearing miscreants in the other party — but where once it was seen as a necessary part of democratic life, now it’s understood as a moral betrayal. This is, of course, idiotic, and it is not even an exclusively partisan kind of idiocy: Democrats here are being frustrated not only by their inability to work with Republicans but also by their failure to bring all of the relevant Democrats on board.

    One more KDW observation:

    It is really quite something to see Democrats raking Joe Manchin over the coals for his supposed environmental apostasy while President Joe Biden is on his elbows and knees in Riyadh begging the ghastly and murderous Saudi crown prince to ramp up oil drilling in his kingdom — where local environmental standards governing energy production are rather lower than they are in Pennsylvania.

    I'm fine with having no "climate" bill; it would inevitably be chock-full of awfulness that would make us all worse off. So I'm actually kind of glad about lack of compromise.


  • Uh oh. I still haven't decided whether to renew my print subscription to WIRED. Yes, it's full of woke claptrap, environmental Marxism, and navel-gazing hipsters. That can be tedious. But every so often they put out something excellent, like this from Matt Ribel: Here Comes the Sun—to End Civilization. The problem, nicely described:

    To a photon, the sun is like a crowded nightclub. It’s 27 million degrees inside and packed with excited bodies—helium atoms fusing, nuclei colliding, positrons sneaking off with neutrinos. When the photon heads for the exit, the journey there will take, on average, 100,000 years. (There’s no quick way to jostle past 10 septillion dancers, even if you do move at the speed of light.) Once at the surface, the photon might set off solo into the night. Or, if it emerges in the wrong place at the wrong time, it might find itself stuck inside a coronal mass ejection, a mob of charged particles with the power to upend civilizations.

    Nice writing! But (as an ex-physics guy) I could quibble: is the photon that gets emitted from the solar surface really the same photon that started out in the interior 100,00 years ago? It's not like photons have nametags to distinguish one from another.

    I think that article might be readable by non-subscribers. Craig goes on to describe the 1859 Carrington Event, which caused problems in an era that wasn't particularly tech-dependent. Here's the bit that especially caught my eye:

    Modeling how the grid would fail during another Carrington-class storm is no easy task. The features of individual transformers—age, configuration, location—are typically considered trade secrets. Metatech, an engineering firm frequently contracted by the US government, offers one of the more dire estimates. It finds that a severe storm, on par with events in 1859 or 1921, could destroy 365 high-voltage transformers across the country—about one-fifth of those in operation. States along the East Coast could see transformer failure rates ranging from 24 percent (Maine) to 97 percent (New Hampshire). Grid failure on this scale would leave at least 130 million people in the dark. But the exact number of fried transformers may matter less than their location. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported findings from an unreleased Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report on grid security: If just nine transformers were to blow out in the wrong places, it found, the country could experience coast-to-coast outages for months.

    Wha?! I hope someone at Eversource reads this. I know electricity rates are high, but I wouldn't mind kicking in a few extra bucks per month to get those creaky transformers fixed.


  • I'm not really a Trekkie, but… I've been watching Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, and enjoying it pretty much. But I especially enjoyed the season one final episode, because … well, no spoilers here, but if you want to know, this Gizmodo article will provide: How Strange New Worlds Recreated Star Trek's Greatest Episode. (I'm not even going to excerpt it.)

    Oh, OK, small spoiler: that original-series episode was "Balance of Terror". And I was so impressed with the Strange New World "recreation" that I watched it. (Obligatory "I'm old" data: I first watched it as a geeky fifteen-year-old in 1966.)

    With apologies to the Gizmodo writer: it's not "Star Trek's Greatest Episode". It's preachy. It rips off a bunch of World War II submarine movies. (I kept waiting for Kirk to say "Up periscope!") "City on the Edge of Forever" was better. "Amok Time" was better. "The Trouble with Tribbles" was better. "The Menagerie" was better. (And, by the way, you'll want to watch that one before you watch any episode of Strange New Worlds.)