Because of the way the last few presidential elections have turned out calls for abolishing the Electoral College have once again become popular. Unfortunately in the discussion of the Electoral College I rarely, if ever, hear a proper defense of the institution or of its historical reasons for being.
Even if those justices are right that the law as written is probably neither fair nor what Congress really intended, why does it not frighten ‘liberals’ to hand the authority to make that determination — and to re-write the law — to five appointed officials (a court majority) with lifetime tenure? Wouldn’t we all be better served if the Court instead pointed out the contradiction in the law to our elected representatives in Congress and allowed the legislative process to address it? Isn’t that how democratic government is supposed to work?
And if it did, wouldn’t the prospect of new Supreme Court appointments be a lot less terrifying for those on the losing side of the election — whichever side that might be?
Since I spent many years working within large bureaucracies – the United States Air Force and Abbot Laboratories – and participated in endless rounds of reorganization and “quality improvement” programs in vain attempts to make those bureaucracies “efficient” and “effective”, I have some insight into how such bureaucratic organizations – and our intelligence services fit that description – fail.
For that reason, and because I am outside the political fray and therefore somewhat more dispassionate than our elected representatives, I prepared a proposal for restructuring the intelligence services that I believe balances the conflicting demands we place on them. I admit I have no experience in intelligence collection or analysis, and so my thinking is based strictly on my observations of our political culture, my experience with large bureaucratic organizations, and my imagination about how intelligence works. Further, I am not arrogant enough to believe that my proposal is optimum or even very good. But it seems to me better than what I’ve heard so far coming from Washington, and I hope it might provide some useful insights to improve the other schemes that are being debated.
I listened to the debates in the 2004 presidential election hoping to hear that one of the candidates was not as pathetic as they appeared. I was disappointed.
During the “debate” on national security issues in particular not only was neither candidate personally reassuring, but there seemed to be almost no substance to the actual argument. That was particularly frustrating because the talking heads of the media, and all the news stories the following day, kept referring to the “substantive” discussion. I wondered if I’d somehow tuned in to the Cliff Notes version of the debate, or perhaps the “Debate for Dummies” channel.