Tag: constitution

On the nature of reality

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

I hate that I have to write this. I hate every fucking second of it.

I don’t have the tools, emotionally or intellectually, to deal with a world where things like video and photography are not, in any way, helpful in determining what is real or not. Combine that with a political apparatus that is primed to lie at every given opportunity regardless of whether lying makes any sense and I exist in a world where a former Speaker of the House just released a photo and a statement to prove he was still alive and I still have legitimately no idea whether he is still alive or not.

Well, okay, that’s not quite true. I have opinions, I suppose. I have no rational basis for those opinions, unfortunately. No actual evidence. Just … fucking vibes, I guess, and I don’t really want to live in a world like that.

So, just in case you’ve been under a rock or you’re reading this in 2032, Mitch McConnell went into the hospital in early June and completely vanished from the public eye. It is July 14, as I’m writing this, and he just resurfaced yesterday (Christ, was that only yesterday??) with a statement and a picture where he is rather conspicuously sitting with a copy of the sports section of yesterday’s Washington Post.

The statement has literally no value at all in determining reality. Statements from politicians are routinely written by staff members and are just as likely to contain lies as anything else they say. It’s genuinely meaningless. It also doesn’t really match up with what we’d already learned, or at least thought we had– weren’t there recordings of the 911 dispatch? Reports that they’d administered CPR to someone on site? Any real explanation of why they waited a month to give the public any information at all about McConnell’s condition other than “he’s fine”? Even if he’s completely telling the truth, and wrote the whole statement, pneumonia in someone that elderly is not trivial. That’s not “doing fine,” and hospital-induced pneumonia tends to be a lot harder to eradicate than other kinds.

(Remember Herman Cain? He was doing fine too, until he was dead.)

No, even if the statement is real, it’s wildly insufficient, and part of the problem is that now I want to know more about where the 911 information came from, because if that was made up, we still have a large problem.

And then there’s the picture.

Now, to be clear, I think a lot of complaints about the picture, most of which have been uttered with the entire chest of the utterer, are bullshit. To wit:

“Why is he in street clothes? Why isn’t he hooked up to an IV?” He literally said in the statement he was in rehab. You get to wear regular clothes in rehab.

“Where’s the fingernail on the middle finger of his right hand?” Probably attached to the third knuckle of his finger, which is curled underneath his hand.

“His wife’s in China!” You sure about that? Show me where you have access to her schedule. I have no idea whether any part of the story about her “fleeing” to China three days after he went into the hospital is true or not, for the record, and I wouldn’t know how to look up any part of it if I wanted to look into it.

“The Washington Post doesn’t even have a sports section any more!” Yes the fuck they do. I genuinely saw someone alleging that, along with several claims that it was from some other date, or a different newspaper.

“The pillow is floating in the air behind him!” You can literally see part of the chair behind the pillow, idiot. Top left corner, level with his mouth.

The one complaint I’ve seen that makes sense to me is that he looks healthier in that picture than he has in months, and honestly I can’t argue with that one. There have also been some people pointing out that his hair looks less white than it has lately, which I also can’t dispute. But one way or another a still photo is not enough to dispel a month of complete absence from the public eye that only ended when another Republican senator died. I’ve seen this guy go to la-la land on camera enough times that as far as I know somebody’s waving a stuffed unicorn around behind the camera and they got a smile out of him. It’s simply not enough evidence, which disgusts me.

And of course, with all that comes tons and tons of different versions of the photo that we know have been faked with varying degrees of obviousness and varying levels of intent. Some of them are clearly people clowning; other people appear to be faking the picture better, like a few that I’ve seen that have added some hallucinating AI text into the newspaper. There’s a whole rant here about how people will yell “IT’S AI” at literally anything nowadays; it’s rapidly becoming a phrase that very well might not mean anything more than “I don’t like that.” There is lots of talk that the photo matches one that his staff released in 2023, just with the newspaper changed, but I’ve not seen any sourcing to that claim, nor could I really believe it if I did.

What’s the solution? In the short term, I want a Goddamned press conference, or at least an interview recorded on video. He doesn’t have to put on a suit and parade out behind a podium. Drop a laptop in front of him and have a few reporters ask him some questions over Zoom, I don’t care. And of course that would be something that could be faked too, so pick a couple of reporters with decent reputations. I don’t need hard-hitting questions. Thirty seconds of the fucker telling us what happened in such a way that makes me think he’s alive and he’s mentally capable of doing his job. A whole lot of people won’t believe it anyway, but I think it’d be good enough for me, and right now this photo isn’t enough.

And we need to put an age cap on Congress, too. Not term limits. An age cap. You shouldn’t be allowed to pass laws that fuck up a future you won’t be alive to see. But that’s a whole different post.

In which I explain as far as I know

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

To be clear, I hope he dies, and I don’t care who knows it, and the notion that he might die alone and gasping for breath from a disease that he refused to do anything to prevent is so karmically beautiful that I almost don’t know what to do about it.

A few years ago, I was trying to not be that kind of person; I have given up that fight. It’s lost. I hope he dies. He’s a terrible person and he’s responsible for hundreds of thousands of dead people and the fact that my mother never got a funeral and his painful, solitary death would be one of the very few 2020 events that counted as positive.

That said, it’s a little bit constitutionally complicated, so let’s run through some scenarios.

If he dies before the election: Mike Pence becomes President until at least Jan. 20. It is too late for the Republican Party to put anyone else’s name on the ballots. They are printed and thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people have already voted, and state deadlines have passed. However, continue reading.

If he dies before the election, and loses the election: Mike Pence is still President until Jan. 20, there is likely no Vice President named, and Biden becomes President on January 20.

If he loses the election, then dies: As above. Pence takes office until Jan. 20.

If he dies before the election, and wins the election: This seems unlikely but isn’t impossible, and is where it starts getting complicated. The Republican party is in control of both their nominees and their nomination process, neither of which are specified in the Constitution, since the Constitution knows nothing of political parties. Furthermore, remember, you’re technically not actually voting for President, you’re voting for electors who are bound, sometimes not actually legally, to vote for that person later. There would, no doubt, be a quick party convention where someone– presumably Pence– would be nominated for President, along with a different VP. The Party would then inform their electors in the states they won to vote for whoever the person they chose was. This would have the potential to get really, really interesting if the Republicans find out they can’t coalesce around a single candidate, but that goes beyond my knowledge of the procedures involved. This would skirt some state laws that require electors to vote for the person that won the popular vote in that state, but I don’t see actual prosecutions being likely in this case, although that little wrinkle has potential to make this even more complicated if, say, there’s a state that he won that somehow has a Democratic legislature and governor.

If he wins the election, then dies before the electors have voted and the votes are officially certified by the House: The Electoral College votes on December 14, over a month after the election, and then there’s over a month between the Electoral College voting and the actual inauguration. This is where it gets really interesting. Pence still takes office for at least a little while, but I don’t know if things still work the same way as they would if he wasn’t alive for the election. I think they probably do, so long as the electors have not voted yet, the party can still scramble to pull an actual ticket together, and it wouldn’t automatically be Pence.

If he wins the election, the votes are certified, and then he dies: Pence becomes President, and remains President for the second term, as far as I know. For all I know, it ends up in the Supreme Court, because holy shit is there no precedent for this, but I don’t see it coming out any other way.

Not a lawyer, blah blah blah. If you see anything I’ve blatantly gotten wrong, let me know.

On fixing American democracy

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

(Note: this is as close as I’m going to come, I think, to a post about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, mostly because I still can’t think clearly about it. Check my Instagram for a minor tribute to her that I did, though.)

I turned eighteen in July of 1994, which means that my first presidential vote was for Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996. Since I have been old enough to vote– and I am 44– there has been only one election where the Republican candidate for President got a majority of the popular vote. For some reason, though, there have been twelve years in that time where I had Republican presidents– because in two other elections, the winner of the popular vote did not win the Electoral college. And I’m not going to do the math to figure out the exact numbers, but during those years where I’ve been able to vote there has– I will use the word frequently— been situations where the balance of the Senate and the House did not reflect the number of votes received by the elected officials of that party as well.

The Republicans have been given a head start in our democracy for my entire adult life. The Republican agenda does not enjoy popular nationwide support, but their power in our government is aided by the Electoral College and a Constitution that says every state must have exactly two senators– a compromise that might have made sense in 1789 but no longer really does when California literally has nearly seventy times as many people as Wyoming but only eighteen times as many electoral votes.

The following things need to happen:

  1. Washington DC must be granted statehood as soon as humanly possible. Right now residents of our nation’s capital have literally no representation in Congress, and DC has around 200,000 more residents than Wyoming does. This isn’t fair. It needs to be fixed.
  2. Puerto Rico, with a population of 3.2 million, more than 20 states, has a more complicated statehood picture, which I admit I’m far from an expert on– my understanding is that there was a recent statehood referendum that won, but which many opponents claimed was a poor representation of the actual mood of the island. I don’t know if that’s a legitimate argument or not. I just don’t. I will phrase it this way, then: Puerto Rico should be granted the option of statehood, and hopefully we can have a cleaner referendum in the near future to see if they prefer statehood or independence. Either way, they’ve been a territory for far too long.

You may be pointing out in your head right now that this does not precisely solve the problem of the Electoral College, and furthermore does not really reflect the enormous advantage smaller rural states have in the Senate, allowing them to potentially block legislation desired by overwhelming majorities of Americans. This is true, and I don’t see a way to overcome that roadblock short of setting a ceiling for a state’s population and carving a few of the bigger states up, which doesn’t seem super likely. But we can limit the antidemocratic effects of the Electoral College without a Constitutional amendment.

How? By increasing the size of the House.

The Constitution does not specify how many seats the House needs to have, only that the number of citizens per seat should be no less than 30,000. I think we can all agree that a House with nearly eleven thousand members is untenable for a variety of reasons. But there is nothing in the Constitution that requires the number of House members to be 435. It used to be fairly routine to expand or change the number of House members– 21 times between 1790 and 1920, which is the last time it happened.

Which, okay, a lot of those were because we added new states. True! But I feel like a hundred years was a nice long run for 435 members and maybe expanding to, oh, twice that might be nice.

(Be aware, because people seem to think this is a good argument for some reason, that I don’t give one thin damn how many desks there are in the House chamber. That’s a building. We can renovate the motherfucker. We can build a whole damn new one if we want.)

And doubling the size of the House would, in turn, double the number of available Electoral votes, which– again– wouldn’t fix the problem, but would bring the vote of a Californian closer to being fairly counted than it is now.

Now, understand that there is an argument to be made that if California has seventy times as many people as Wyoming then it deserves seventy times as much representation. It’s probably even the cleanest argument, honestly, because everything else boils down to well, California needs to have closer to a truly representative vote … but not that much closer. But even if we just doubled the size of the House– and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have 8-900 voting members in an organization representing three hundred and twenty-five million people– we would in turn close that distance and the vote of a Californian would be closer to counting as much as it should. It’s not going to be perfect, because of the Senate, and we can’t fix the Senate (or at least I’m not aware of a way) without Constitutional amendments, which is outside the scope of what I’m talking about right now.

Our democracy, such as it is, and believe me part of me wants to put that word in quotation marks right now, needs to be more representative than it is right now. This won’t fix it, but it’s a place to start.

Quick politics/policy question

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized6 Comments

secret-service-obama
Clones! The secret service is using clones!

This feels a bit more like a Twitter thing than a blog post, but it’s a bit too complicated for Twitter to handle, so you get it instead.

John Kerry broke his leg while cycling in France today, and it got me wondering: What level of bodyguarding/security do we provide people like upper-level Cabinet members and members of Congress when they go overseas?  The article mentions Kerry’s motorcade but doesn’t give any indication of who was in it.  Does the Secret Service handle stuff like that, or do they just work with the President and VP?

Yes I know I could Google this.  I’d rather ask y’all; somebody out there knows.

Later today: Saleswanking!