I do not normally comment on matters political, because I often see merit on both sides of the argument and prefer not to engage in discussions which often pivot around binary, party-defined solutions to complex problems. However, the current state of affairs has gone beyond bipartisan strife. I am very concerned with the state of the presidency and unity in The United States of America, as I’m sure everyone else is. The whole election process left all parties involved wounded, sour, and hell-bent at proving their positions. I don’t care who you voted for, what is your partisan bent, or how much you like or dislike presidents past or elect. What I do care about is that you wish for this country to remain a republic wherein the power lies with the people, the citizens who uphold the edicts of our constitution and whose primary aim is to make out of The United States an inclusive government for all the people. As citizens, we need to rise above our quibble over the left and the right, because it’s a distraction we cannot afford, and one which is being heavily exploited. Whole societies have been brought to ruins over excessive consolidations of power and foreign corruption. The same can happen here at home, but we have the power to stall the defining events, if we have the foresight to recognize it. There has been a profound amount of blaming, theory crafting, and questionable trafficking of information during this election in ways that have undermined everyone’s trust and potentially defaced the integrity of our election process. What needs to happen is that we need to remove ourselves from the agendas of the parties and consider what brought us here: the electoral college and controversial candidates.
Regardless of who you are or from what party you hail, any mention of a foreign power attempting to influence the current of governmental power in your country should be a cause for undeniable, strident alarm. Individuals have been debating over the nature of electors’ duty and the ethics of attempting to influence and/or inform them. There is a famous essay, Federalist 68 (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp ) which addresses many issues being discussed. First, the electors are not supposed to be voting based on group affiliations or under duress of political or public reprisal, but rather voting “as the electors, chosen in each State…to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.” So, the electors are designed to be as detached as possible to be voting without pressures. Removing external pressure is more difficult in the age of digital information, to be sure. A major arguing point for this divide and vote approach was to guard against foreign powers or special external groups from directly influencing the true voting body in this process: “Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?” At this junction I would like to bring the attention back to some facts of the current reality. Russia has been implicated in the hacking and leaking scandals that harrowed this election process, something which has been confirmed by intelligence agencies in the United States and has been acknowledged by the current president. This is a serious accusation, and one which our current president elect has attempted to dismiss. It is important to note that during the presidential race, Donald Trump publicly addressed a camera and said “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing…I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” In case you want to watch the video to see how this remark was delivered in context, here is a source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-clinton-emails.html. Now, encouraging a foreign power to exploit a rival candidate during an election process is something that could be construed as not serving the best interest of the country, or potentially treasonous, if we’re going to be direct about the gravitas of such a boast in a candidate. In more recent weeks, Trump has been trying to play down the Russian interference scenario, even claiming the CIA and FBI are helping Hilary Clinton make excuses. Furthermore, the president has selected for the position of Secretary of State, the third most powerful executive position and key voice in foreign affairs, Rex Tillerson, a CEO of an oil company which has direct and extensive connections with Russia and its current president, Vladmir Putin. Tillerson himself earned a Russian Order of Friendship award for his role in negotiating a business arrangement between ExxonMobil and the government-owned Russian oil company Rosneft, which is headed by one of Putin’s closest allies, one Igor Sechin. In and of itself, this award is not significant, but it does demonstrate a potential for conflict of interest, and it the worst type of conflict of interest to have when it involves close association to people holding executive power in the foreign entity which is accused of intentionally meddling in the US election process. A prudent concern would be why the meddling in the first place and to what end, to say nothing of determining whether or not it’s still occurring. What I’m saying is that you should raise your eyebrow to the fact the president elect, having previously encouraged Russia to hack e-mails of a rival candidate on public TV, who now denies Russia’s influence, is calling the CIA and FBI’s judgement of interference “ridiculous” while at same time selecting for the highest cabinet position a man with objective interests in Russia https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/18/leak-rex-tillerson-director-bahamas-based-us-russian-oil-company. Questioning the public statement of domestic intelligence agencies as a president elect also sends a mixed message about the stability and likelihood of productive cooperation between the highest branches of government. If the president of the United States has small faith in his intelligence branch, is willing to make light of foreign infiltration, and is ready seat a wealthy businessman with a paucity of government experience and a plethora of ties to the very foreign government accused of election tampering, then the election process has gone awry.
I will make small mention of the president elect’s tendency to misrepresent facts and distract people by inflating trivial matters on twitter, or his selection of other cabinet positions which consist almost entirely of superlatively wealthy like-minded, specialized business-people, because I would like to focus on the electoral college and its intention as a safeguard for the republic. In addition to protection against foreign meddling, the electoral college was to ensure that “The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The next part of this document is even more important, for it addresses the notion that someone can rise to high office through demagoguery and shameless intrigue, and that the electoral college is supposed to prevent this ascendance, since such skills do not serve high office: “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.” I believe it’s important to focus on “low intrigue” and the “little arts of popularity,” as this addresses specifically some highlights of this election race in totality. I will leave it to the reader to exercise their critical thinking skills to draw their own correlations between these phrases and our most recent election race, for many minds together are more powerful than my single one here. For my own reflections, I considered twitter and the fact that I know more about who our president elect dislikes and why, on a daily basis, than I do about his specific policies or intentions to address public concerns. I even know why the president elect believes he didn’t win the popular vote: voter fraud on the order of what would need be more nearly 3 million votes, which has no evidence and has not prompted our president elect to investigate the voting process (http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/27/politics/donald-trump-voter-fraud-popular-vote). The conclusion of this brief discussion of this Federalist No. 68 with respect to electors is that we should not be discouraging our electors from voting against their outside party affiliations, and that we need to appreciate that, at a fundamental level, no electors should fear reprisal for voting with a critical mind and honest reflection. Indeed, there is another Federalist statement explaining that this whole setup is one intended to foment deliberation: “…. the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”A key premise for the electors is that they should enter upon the vote in frame of deliberation. Insofar as deliberation is important, I find that requests for more details about Russian hacking are prudent, albeit I understand why such a briefing may not be realistically possible before the vote, given the nature of potential sources and classified information.
I would assume by now that someone who had the attention to read this would criticize my focus on Donald Trump, rather than Hilary Clinton. This is discussion about the spirit behind our laws and electoral process which directly address the type of candidate this electoral process was designed to elect as well as the type of candidate that it is designed to forestall, should there be significant concerns about the affiliations, interests, and suitability of the candidate chosen by the "people." The fact of the matter is Donald Trump is the president elect, not Hilary Clinton. The concerns and attendant realities of that fact are to what we should be directing our attention, since that is what will guide our government, which in turn will define our existence as a nation and inform our role on an international stage of increasing tension and uncertainty. Hilary Clinton has been a favorite distraction, but she has been rendered less significant by her loss, so it’s now time for us all to consider who’s about to be commander-in-chief of a country that is currently one of the most powerful in the world. We should all consider the values Hamilton might have had in mind when he said the presidency should only fall to men who are “to an eminent degree, endowed with the requisite qualifications.” We need to consider what it means to have a president who dismisses the importance of foreign interference, who, ignoring conflicts of interest even in matters of foreign corruption, chooses cabinet picks chiefly on business acumen rather than public service record, who uses private social media as a way to express his thoughts both personal and political, and who has been unwilling to decisively distance himself from potential personal conflicts of interest prior to inauguration. If the president elect has difficulty being a gracious winner, I do not expect that he will be honorable loser if he runs again and does not succeed, or is otherwise forced to step down from power. We’ve already seen one governmental official, a governor from North Carolina, undermine the power of those who elected him in a partisan bid to make less effective his successor (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/16/505872501/north-carolina-governor-signs-law-limiting-power-of-his-successor). I fear what a self-righteous and self-important chief of the nation might be able to accomplish if left unchecked by the people and its government, even in the event that he is cast out of his supreme role. We need to assume the responsibility for whom we elect and understand that we are standing behind a person, not a party, and that as individual persons we should hold our president to supreme standards of moral and political rectitude.
Regardless of who you are or from what party you hail, any mention of a foreign power attempting to influence the current of governmental power in your country should be a cause for undeniable, strident alarm. Individuals have been debating over the nature of electors’ duty and the ethics of attempting to influence and/or inform them. There is a famous essay, Federalist 68 (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed68.asp ) which addresses many issues being discussed. First, the electors are not supposed to be voting based on group affiliations or under duress of political or public reprisal, but rather voting “as the electors, chosen in each State…to assemble and vote in the State in which they are chosen, this detached and divided situation will expose them much less to heats and ferments, which might be communicated from them to the people, than if they were all to be convened at one time, in one place.” So, the electors are designed to be as detached as possible to be voting without pressures. Removing external pressure is more difficult in the age of digital information, to be sure. A major arguing point for this divide and vote approach was to guard against foreign powers or special external groups from directly influencing the true voting body in this process: “Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?” At this junction I would like to bring the attention back to some facts of the current reality. Russia has been implicated in the hacking and leaking scandals that harrowed this election process, something which has been confirmed by intelligence agencies in the United States and has been acknowledged by the current president. This is a serious accusation, and one which our current president elect has attempted to dismiss. It is important to note that during the presidential race, Donald Trump publicly addressed a camera and said “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing…I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.” In case you want to watch the video to see how this remark was delivered in context, here is a source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-clinton-emails.html. Now, encouraging a foreign power to exploit a rival candidate during an election process is something that could be construed as not serving the best interest of the country, or potentially treasonous, if we’re going to be direct about the gravitas of such a boast in a candidate. In more recent weeks, Trump has been trying to play down the Russian interference scenario, even claiming the CIA and FBI are helping Hilary Clinton make excuses. Furthermore, the president has selected for the position of Secretary of State, the third most powerful executive position and key voice in foreign affairs, Rex Tillerson, a CEO of an oil company which has direct and extensive connections with Russia and its current president, Vladmir Putin. Tillerson himself earned a Russian Order of Friendship award for his role in negotiating a business arrangement between ExxonMobil and the government-owned Russian oil company Rosneft, which is headed by one of Putin’s closest allies, one Igor Sechin. In and of itself, this award is not significant, but it does demonstrate a potential for conflict of interest, and it the worst type of conflict of interest to have when it involves close association to people holding executive power in the foreign entity which is accused of intentionally meddling in the US election process. A prudent concern would be why the meddling in the first place and to what end, to say nothing of determining whether or not it’s still occurring. What I’m saying is that you should raise your eyebrow to the fact the president elect, having previously encouraged Russia to hack e-mails of a rival candidate on public TV, who now denies Russia’s influence, is calling the CIA and FBI’s judgement of interference “ridiculous” while at same time selecting for the highest cabinet position a man with objective interests in Russia https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/18/leak-rex-tillerson-director-bahamas-based-us-russian-oil-company. Questioning the public statement of domestic intelligence agencies as a president elect also sends a mixed message about the stability and likelihood of productive cooperation between the highest branches of government. If the president of the United States has small faith in his intelligence branch, is willing to make light of foreign infiltration, and is ready seat a wealthy businessman with a paucity of government experience and a plethora of ties to the very foreign government accused of election tampering, then the election process has gone awry.
I will make small mention of the president elect’s tendency to misrepresent facts and distract people by inflating trivial matters on twitter, or his selection of other cabinet positions which consist almost entirely of superlatively wealthy like-minded, specialized business-people, because I would like to focus on the electoral college and its intention as a safeguard for the republic. In addition to protection against foreign meddling, the electoral college was to ensure that “The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” The next part of this document is even more important, for it addresses the notion that someone can rise to high office through demagoguery and shameless intrigue, and that the electoral college is supposed to prevent this ascendance, since such skills do not serve high office: “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.” I believe it’s important to focus on “low intrigue” and the “little arts of popularity,” as this addresses specifically some highlights of this election race in totality. I will leave it to the reader to exercise their critical thinking skills to draw their own correlations between these phrases and our most recent election race, for many minds together are more powerful than my single one here. For my own reflections, I considered twitter and the fact that I know more about who our president elect dislikes and why, on a daily basis, than I do about his specific policies or intentions to address public concerns. I even know why the president elect believes he didn’t win the popular vote: voter fraud on the order of what would need be more nearly 3 million votes, which has no evidence and has not prompted our president elect to investigate the voting process (http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/27/politics/donald-trump-voter-fraud-popular-vote). The conclusion of this brief discussion of this Federalist No. 68 with respect to electors is that we should not be discouraging our electors from voting against their outside party affiliations, and that we need to appreciate that, at a fundamental level, no electors should fear reprisal for voting with a critical mind and honest reflection. Indeed, there is another Federalist statement explaining that this whole setup is one intended to foment deliberation: “…. the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.”A key premise for the electors is that they should enter upon the vote in frame of deliberation. Insofar as deliberation is important, I find that requests for more details about Russian hacking are prudent, albeit I understand why such a briefing may not be realistically possible before the vote, given the nature of potential sources and classified information.
I would assume by now that someone who had the attention to read this would criticize my focus on Donald Trump, rather than Hilary Clinton. This is discussion about the spirit behind our laws and electoral process which directly address the type of candidate this electoral process was designed to elect as well as the type of candidate that it is designed to forestall, should there be significant concerns about the affiliations, interests, and suitability of the candidate chosen by the "people." The fact of the matter is Donald Trump is the president elect, not Hilary Clinton. The concerns and attendant realities of that fact are to what we should be directing our attention, since that is what will guide our government, which in turn will define our existence as a nation and inform our role on an international stage of increasing tension and uncertainty. Hilary Clinton has been a favorite distraction, but she has been rendered less significant by her loss, so it’s now time for us all to consider who’s about to be commander-in-chief of a country that is currently one of the most powerful in the world. We should all consider the values Hamilton might have had in mind when he said the presidency should only fall to men who are “to an eminent degree, endowed with the requisite qualifications.” We need to consider what it means to have a president who dismisses the importance of foreign interference, who, ignoring conflicts of interest even in matters of foreign corruption, chooses cabinet picks chiefly on business acumen rather than public service record, who uses private social media as a way to express his thoughts both personal and political, and who has been unwilling to decisively distance himself from potential personal conflicts of interest prior to inauguration. If the president elect has difficulty being a gracious winner, I do not expect that he will be honorable loser if he runs again and does not succeed, or is otherwise forced to step down from power. We’ve already seen one governmental official, a governor from North Carolina, undermine the power of those who elected him in a partisan bid to make less effective his successor (http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/16/505872501/north-carolina-governor-signs-law-limiting-power-of-his-successor). I fear what a self-righteous and self-important chief of the nation might be able to accomplish if left unchecked by the people and its government, even in the event that he is cast out of his supreme role. We need to assume the responsibility for whom we elect and understand that we are standing behind a person, not a party, and that as individual persons we should hold our president to supreme standards of moral and political rectitude.
