Hopes and Warnings for the Next Four Years

Hopeful Reminder

While the GOP has complete control of the government right now, this control is weak. They lost seats in both the House and Senate in this cycle. The presidency was won by the slimmest of electoral margins, by a madman who the GOP hopes they can control but likely won't be able to, with not even a plurality of voters in support and historically low approval going into office.

Warning for What May Come

This situation means there will be a very strong temptation for the GOP to do whatever is necessary to hold on to power in the coming elections. We've already seen willingness to shed norms in the name of holding on to power over the last decade:

• Abuse of the filibuster to turn a Senate minority into a majority for purposes of legislation and appointments
• Refusing to even hold hearings on a moderate Supreme Court justice nominee that was widely liked for over a year
• Threatening the full faith and credit of the United States in paying its debts over a domestic policy dispute
• Shutting down the government, or threatening to, essentially as an attempted veto override

Each of these actions, in the moment, made some tactical sense from their perspective. However, each one has also chipped away at the foundations of the republic.

Open Letter to the Electors of the Electoral College

I am taking the extraordinary measure of writing to you today because, as an Elector in the Electoral College, you have the great honor of participating in a solemn Constitutional duty. I am sure you appreciate the awesome power you hold in your hands, no matter how much the rest of us typically take your role for granted.

Frankly, I am afraid. I am afraid for our country, our ideals, our future. I have been observing Donald Trump for years, and his words and actions, especially since the start of the current campaign, are deeply, deeply troubling to me. Please understand, this is my own assessment as an attentive, informed citizen, and this isn’t about ideology. If the candidate who won was Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or John Kasich or Jeb Bush, I would not be writing this letter.

I know you have been paying as much attention to the campaign as I have, so I won’t rehash it here. Instead, I will just point to several things to consider:

·         Large number of voters for Donald Trump believe he is unqualified, and are scared or concerned about him

·         Lack of action to atone and unify from unprecedented divisive campaign

·         The rash of reports of bigotry incidents in Donald Trump’s name

·         Selection of a prominent white nationalist and anti-Semite as White House Chief Strategist

·         Threats of legal action against those who speak ill of him, and unusually limited press access

·         Russian interference and secret back-channel communications

·         Unnecessary FBI interjection within weeks and days of the election

One of the reasons the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College was to prevent unqualified individuals from reaching office. I urge you to consider, for yourself, for our country: Do you really, truly trust Donald Trump to be President?

If your answer is a resounding yes—then I wish I had your confidence, and I hope that at least you will use whatever weight you have available to make sure that Donald Trump does not become what many of us fear he could be, and to call on him to be a better leader.

If you hesitated at all, then I strongly urge you to vote differently. While I hope that you might look to the strong recommendations of our newspaper editorial boards, conservative thinkers, economists, and national security experts and vote for Hillary Clinton, I do understand if that is a bridge too far for you. In that case, I would urge you to vote for another individual, anyone, who you believe to be better suited for President—perhaps someone who could be a consensus moderate. If Donald Trump’s electoral votes drop below 270, Congress will pick from the top three candidates that the Electors have voted for.

I am aware that asking you to do this may place you at personal risk. I also understand that succeeding may lead to some chaos. I do not take these things lightly. However, I firmly believe that the future of our country is in peril if Donald Trump is inaugurated in two short months, and your vote may be the only chance to stop it from happening.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I do not envy the decision before you, but I trust you as a fellow American.

Sincerely,

Nicholas C. Bauer, PhD

The Debt Ceiling is Unconstitutional Under Article I

Amid this debate over the debt ceiling, I realized something important: refusing to raise the debt ceiling to account for Congressionally-appropriated funds is nothing less than an unconstitutional abdication of Congress’s power to direct government spending.

Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt

I never really paid attention to the whole Casey Anthony case until today, but this comment from the defense attorney Jose Baez struck me:

We should all take this as an opportunity to learn to realize that you cannot convict someone until they've had their day in court. We have the greatest constitution…If the media and other members of the public do not respect it, it will become meaningless.

This is an unfortunately common problem. The whole point of "beyond reasonable doubt" and "innocent until proven guilty" is to make sure that potentially innocent people aren't railroaded by overzealous prosecution, especially when it is defined by emotions and gut feelings rather than by evidence. Especially when the prosecution usually has the upper hand in getting it's story out to the public.

Casey Anthony and her family are screwed up, there's no question about that. But that doesn't automatically mean she is guilty of all the crimes she was charged with, and the jury decided that there wasn't enough evidence for a guilty verdict on the most serious counts.

We should all be thankful for that: just because society may disapprove of you and considers you to be a horrible person in general, you are still going to be treated more or less fairly by the judge and jury. The system isn't perfect, but isn't the attempt to remove prejudices from the decision something to admire about our legal system?

She may be actually guilty of the crime. We in the public have a right to an opinion on that matter, if we care enough to have one. But please, be sure you know the difference between thinking something is likely true and knowing that something actually is true. Understanding this distinction is what makes the difference between civilized disagreement and a lynch mob.

Rethinking Choice: Human Personhood and the Abortion Debate

Update: It has come to my attention that the timeline I'm describing has an error by a week or two. I don't have time to fix it, but the underlying idea is sound.

One of the most politically important questions of our day is defining the bounds of a human life, and who has control over it. This is in large part because it is so divisive, a treacherous landscape governed mainly by religious and political motivations, rather than by empirical truths, and serves as a distraction from the truly critical issues facing our country. It is therefore imperative that we formulate and proactively support a definition of human life that accounts for both fetal development and the fact that the mother and fetus are a single, integrated system.

The World is Safe For Now: 2012, Harold Camping, and Why the Biblical End of the World Won’t Happen

How worlds ended in Star Wars.

Doomsday. It’s a frightening and captivating idea which has held firm in the imaginations of humans for as long as we’ve been telling each other stories. Indeed, one only needs to look to the big summer movies which routinely threaten humanity/the earth/the universe with every imaginable form of destruction.

Talk of the real end of the world has heightened in the last few years, first with the idea that the Maya supposedly predicted 2012 as the end, and most recently with Harold Camping’s extraordinarily well-publicized biblical ‘calculation’ that the rapture would occur this year. Both of these ideas were ludicrous, and I’ll briefly explain before discussing the biblical end of the world in general.

Celebrating the Death of a Terrorist

The announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death around 10:30 pm on May 1st, 2011 came as a surprise, and some details of the operation were similarly surprising, not the least of which is the fact that he was hiding in plain sight, right in the midst of a Pakistani military town near the capital. His death certainly won’t mean the immediate end of efforts against terrorism, and it may even lead to an initial increase in attempted attacks.

But the details of the operation aren’t really what I want to talk about right now. I want to talk about our reactions to his death. Though I’m certainly not alone in discussing this.