Restore the Federal Republic

I support the Electoral College—not as an inconvenient relic that must be tolerated, but as a necessary part of our federal system.

However, I do not believe the Electoral College presently functions as it was intended. Today, the Electors are generally treated as little more than ceremonial deliverymen for the statewide popular vote. In most States, they are legally required to vote for a particular candidate and may face removal, penalties or other consequences if they exercise independent judgment.

If that is all Electors are permitted to do, there is little reason to have Electors at all. A computer could perform the same arithmetic.

I would therefore support a Constitutional Amendment eliminating the popular election of the President, prohibiting States from binding their Electors and protecting Electors from punishment or reprisal for the votes they cast.

I would also support repeal of the Seventeenth Amendment, returning the selection of United States Senators to the State legislatures.

These changes would not deprive the People of representation. They would restore the different forms of representation built into our federal republic.

The House Represents the People

The People are represented in Congress by the House of Representatives.

Representatives are elected directly by the voters of congressional districts. Their terms are short so that they remain responsive to public opinion. The House was intended to be the part of the federal government closest to the People.

That remains entirely appropriate.

But the federal government was never designed so that every office would represent the People in precisely the same way. If every branch represents the same constituency, receives its authority through the same mechanism and responds to the same political pressures, then the apparent separation between those branches becomes much less meaningful.

Different institutions were intended to represent different interests.

The Senate Represents the States

The United States is not merely one large nation divided into convenient administrative districts. It is a union of sovereign States, each possessing its own government, laws and constitutional authority.

Those States were originally represented in Congress by the Senate.

Before ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, Senators were selected by their State legislatures. This gave the State governments a direct institutional voice within the federal government. Senators were not simply a second set of nationally elected legislators serving longer terms. They were the States’ representatives in Washington.

The Seventeenth Amendment changed that. Senators are now elected directly by the voters, just as Representatives are. The constituencies differ in size and the terms differ in length, but both chambers now derive their authority from essentially the same source.

That destroyed an important part of the constitutional balance.

When Congress considers legislation that expands federal authority at the expense of the States, who within Congress formally represents the State governments? The answer is: no one.

Repealing the Seventeenth Amendment would restore the Senate’s original purpose. The House would continue to represent the People, while the Senate would once again represent the States as political entities.

That is not less representative government. It is representation of both essential components of the federal republic.

The President Represents the United States

The President occupies a different position.

The President is not supposed to be the personal representative of a national majority. He is the chief executive of the United States and represents the United States in its dealings with other nations.

The office is federal—not national in the purely majoritarian sense.

For that reason, the President should be chosen through the States, acting through the Electoral College. The People already possess their direct representation in the House. The States possess—or should possess—their representation in the Senate. The President should derive his authority from the constitutional union of those States.

The modern presidential campaign, however, is conducted as though the United States holds one enormous national election. News organizations total the popular vote across all fifty States, even though that total has no constitutional significance. Candidates claim a “mandate” based upon it. Critics describe a President who wins the Electoral College but not the national popular vote as somehow illegitimate.

But there is no national popular election for President. There are separate elections conducted under the laws of the individual States. Adding those results together afterward may be interesting, but it does not create a constitutional election that never occurred.

Rather than continuing this pretense, I would eliminate the presidential popular vote altogether.

Electors Must Be Free to Deliberate

The Electoral College should also be permitted to function as an actual deliberative body.

An Elector should not be a rubber stamp. If an Elector is legally prohibited from exercising judgment, then the title is meaningless. He is not an Elector at all; he is merely a mechanism through which someone else’s vote is transmitted.

The States should select qualified Electors, but once selected, those Electors must be free to evaluate the candidates and cast their votes according to their own judgment. No State should be permitted to dictate their votes, remove them for voting “incorrectly,” impose fines upon them or otherwise punish them.

This independence would provide one final constitutional safeguard between the presidency and a momentary wave of popular passion. It would also allow Electors to respond to extraordinary circumstances arising after their selection but before their votes are cast—such as death, incapacity, criminal revelation or some other event demonstrating that a candidate is manifestly unfit for office.

Of course, independent Electors could exercise poor judgment. So can voters, legislators, judges and Presidents. No constitutional arrangement can eliminate human error.

The purpose of the Constitution is not to guarantee that every decision will be correct. Its purpose is to divide authority, balance competing interests and prevent any single political force from controlling the entire system without restraint.

A Federal Republic, Not a National Plebiscite

The modern impulse is to reduce every question to direct majority rule. Whoever receives the most votes should control everything, and any institution standing in the way is denounced as “undemocratic.”

But the United States was not established as an unrestricted democracy. It was established as a constitutional federal republic.

The distinction matters.

The People, the States and the United States are related, but they are not interchangeable. Each has a legitimate place within the constitutional structure:

• The House of Representatives represents the People.

• The Senate represents the States.

• The President represents the United States and is chosen through the States by the Electoral College.

That is an orderly division of political authority. It prevents the federal government from becoming one undifferentiated mass of officials all elected through essentially the same popular process and all claiming the same mandate.

I do not want to abolish the Electoral College. I want to restore it.

I do not want to deprive the People of their representation. I want the People, the States and the Union itself each to receive the representation appropriate to them.

Such changes should be made openly and lawfully through Constitutional Amendments. The Constitution provides a mechanism for correcting its structure, including the repeal of earlier amendments. We used that mechanism to repeal Prohibition. We can use it to reconsider the Seventeenth Amendment and to restore genuine independence to the Electoral College.

The answer to perceived defects in our constitutional republic is not to discard its federal character in favor of national majority rule.

The answer is to restore the balance that made it a federal republic in the first place.

Nuclear Power and the Road to Fusion

I think nuclear power is one of the most promising energy resources available to us, and I find the renewed interest in it encouraging.

Not simply because of what nuclear power can do for us today, but because of what it might eventually become.

There is a tendency to look at a technology as it exists today and assume that this is more or less what it will always look like. Nuclear power plants are enormous, complicated, and expensive, so we tend to imagine that nuclear power will always require enormous, complicated, and expensive facilities.

But that isn't generally how technology develops.

Consider the transistor.

The first practical transistors were relatively large, individually manufactured devices. Today we manufacture microscopic transistors by the billions on a single chip. That didn't happen simply because someone invented the transistor and then waited seventy years. It happened because transistors were useful.

So we used them.

Because we used them, companies invested in them. Engineers improved them. Manufacturing techniques improved. New materials were developed. Costs came down. Reliability went up. Smaller and more efficient transistors made new products possible, and those new products created still more demand for better transistors.

Obviously, a nuclear reactor is not a transistor. I'm not suggesting that nuclear reactors will follow Moore's Law until we have one sitting next to the lawn mower in the backyard.

The point is what happens when we actually use a technology.

If we continue building and operating nuclear power plants, we need nuclear engineers. We need physicists and materials scientists. We need companies capable of manufacturing specialized components. We need universities teaching nuclear science and engineering. We need research into reactor design, materials, radiation resistance, heat transfer, power conversion, and dozens of other related technologies.

And, perhaps most importantly, we have a reason to spend money on all of those things.

If, instead, we decide that nuclear power is something from which we should retreat, that entire technological infrastructure begins to diminish. Fewer reactors mean less demand for nuclear engineers, fewer companies investing in nuclear technology, less manufacturing experience, less research, and eventually less political justification for spending large amounts of money advancing nuclear science.

That brings us to fusion.

Fission does not somehow become fusion. They are fundamentally different nuclear processes, and practical fusion presents an entirely different collection of scientific and engineering problems.

But I think it would be a mistake to believe that our willingness to pursue one has nothing to do with our willingness to pursue the other.

A society actively using nuclear energy, educating nuclear engineers, developing advanced materials, building reactors, maintaining a nuclear manufacturing industry, and investing in nuclear research is much more likely to have both the resources and the political willingness to pursue fusion seriously.

And once practical fusion is achieved, that shouldn't be regarded as the end of the story.

It will be the beginning.

The first commercially practical fusion reactor will almost certainly not represent the ultimate form of fusion power any more than the first transistor represented the ultimate form of electronics.

Once engineers have something that works, they start asking different questions.

Can we make it cheaper?

Can we make it more reliable?

Can we make it more efficient?

Can we make it easier to manufacture?

And, inevitably, can we make it smaller?

Fusion has an extraordinary amount of potential energy available from a relatively small quantity of fuel. The problem isn't finding enough energy in the nuclear reaction. The problem is all of the machinery currently required to create, contain, sustain, and extract useful power from that reaction.

Those are extraordinarily difficult problems.

But they are problems we can work on.

I don't expect anyone to install a fusion reactor in the basement anytime soon. I don't expect a neighborhood fusion reactor to appear next to the community swimming pool in twenty years.

But what about fifty years?

A hundred?

Could advances in superconductors, materials science, plasma control, power conversion, manufacturing, and reactor design eventually produce fusion systems vastly smaller than the experimental machines we build today?

Could we someday reach the point where a fusion power source capable of supplying an entire neighborhood is contained in something approaching the size of a backyard shed?

I don't know.

Perhaps there are physical or economic limitations that will make that impractical. Perhaps fusion will always make more sense as a large, centralized source of power.

But we will never discover what the mature form of a technology looks like if we abandon the technology before it has a chance to mature.

That is why I think continued development of fission power is important even if fusion ultimately becomes the nuclear energy source we really want.

Fission gives us useful energy today. More importantly for the future, it keeps nuclear science alive as an active technology rather than merely an academic subject. It maintains the engineers, researchers, manufacturers, infrastructure, investment, and public familiarity from which the next generation of nuclear technology can grow.

If we want to know what nuclear power might look like fifty or a hundred years from now, the best way to find out isn't to stop building it.

It's to use it.

Flock Cameras: When Observation Becomes Surveillance

 Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems—commonly known by the popular brand name "Flock cameras"—are often presented as little more than high-tech security cameras. That description, however, leaves out the feature that has many Americans concerned.

Think of an ALPR camera as a security camera with a memory. Rather than simply recording video, it identifies every passing vehicle and records information such as the license plate, date, time, location, make, model, color, and often distinguishing characteristics like bumper stickers, roof racks, aftermarket accessories, or visible damage. That information is then stored in a searchable database.

Supporters argue that these systems help solve crimes by giving investigators another tool to locate stolen vehicles or identify suspects. There is no question that ALPR systems have legitimate law enforcement applications.

The constitutional concern is not about targeted investigations. It is about the routine collection and long-term storage of information on millions of innocent Americans who are suspected of no crime.

Imagine that every time you drove down a road, someone wrote down your license plate, described your vehicle, recorded where you were and when you passed, and kept those notes for months or even years. Most people would recognize that as surveillance. ALPR systems simply automate that process on a massive scale.

Some argue that because license plates are visible in public, there is no expectation of privacy. I believe that misses the larger issue. There is a significant difference between a police officer observing a vehicle on a public street at a single moment in time and the government maintaining a permanent database capable of reconstructing a person's movements over weeks, months, or years.

Where you travel can reveal a surprising amount about your life. It may disclose where you worship, which doctors you visit, whether you sought legal counsel, attended a political rally, visited family, or participated in a support group. None of those activities are criminal, yet all become part of a searchable historical record when mass surveillance systems are allowed to operate without meaningful limits.

The Fourth Amendment was adopted to protect citizens from unreasonable government intrusion. Whether ALPR databases ultimately violate that protection is a question courts continue to examine. But I believe the principle is clear: government should not be compiling detailed travel histories of innocent citizens without judicial oversight.

Technology has made mass surveillance easier than ever before. That convenience should not become an excuse to weaken the constitutional safeguards that have protected individual liberty for more than two centuries.

Crime fighting is an important responsibility of government. So is protecting the constitutional rights of the people. We should be able to do both without sacrificing one for the other.