Congress

Biden and Trump on Policy

Earlier this year I put together a list of most important policies that the U.S. federal government could implement which are actually discussed by candidates. The list takes into account impact both broad and deep. Also as part of my election year discussions, I’ve covered issues with our current electoral system and then, given those problems, whether it makes sense to spend time researching and voting in elections where you’re only one of many thousands or millions of voters. I conclude that in close elections where there are large differences between the major party candidates, it often makes sense to vote for one of the two candidates.

This post will take a look at this year’s presidential candidates based on their policies. I’m putting aside non-policy issues, like competence, corruption, and impact on democratic norms as I intend to cover them in my next blog post. I also think a policy-specific approach is useful to cut through tribal identities and focus on actual impacts in the real world. Extending the discussion from my last essay, I will be comparing Trump and Biden to see if there are large expected differences in their policy. As stated in that post, swing state voters should probably vote for one of these candidates since their expected value of voting would be high.

This post will be aimed slightly right of center since my policy analysis shows Trump doing very poorly compared to Biden. Based on purely policy grounds, I think swing state voters should vote for Biden, even if they are conservative. I will be taking inspiration from my previous post about important policies. If you want more background on why I think these policies are most important, I suggest skimming it first.

Great Power Relations

This is a newer issue that I wanted to focus on after reading The Precipice and its discussion of existential risk. I recommend that post, but in summary: an existential event is uniquely terrible because not only are there no humans left on earth, but any future human civilization ceases to exist. We are doing very little today to assess these risks or to plan and coordinate how we might deal with existential risks. Toby Ord estimates a 1 in 6 chance of human extinction this century. Even if that’s high, Metaculus suggests a 2% risk which is still completely intolerable when discussing the future of humanity.

Presidential politics isn’t really discussing existential risk directly, but the presidency has an outsized impact on great power relations, particularly between the U.S., China, and Russia, and catastrophic relations between them could significantly heighten existential risk. Indeed Toby Ord specifically discusses great power relations as a major risk factor in his book, and Trump’s own Defense Department notes the heightened nuclear landscape we find ourselves in their 2018 Nuclear Posture Review (Brookings Institute discussion). China and the U.S. have essentially incompatible views of liberalism, freedom, and human rights, and the world is better off with an America that promotes those ideas and thwarts China’s authoritarian ideology without resulting in dangerous tensions.

Ultimately, Joe Biden represents a pretty standard American foreign policy when it comes to dealing with China and Russia: working within the broad liberal world order to promote democracy, markets, and human rights. For example, he has committed to extending the New START treaty with Russia that limits the numbers of nuclear warheads each country can have. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is erratic, dismissive of allies, pointedly materialistic, unconcerned with human rights, and has no long term strategy. This has not yielded a particularly less threatening or less risky world.

On calls with foreign leaders, Trump seems unprepared and more focused on his own accomplishments rather than on specific policy objectives. As China continues to rise in global importance, Trump has spent a lot of his time alienating liberal allies, and waging a trade war with the EU. This has resulted in European leaders, like Emmanuel Macron, noting that America is no longer a reliable ally against rising authoritarian regimes. Pew Research surveyed citizens of 13 developed countries and found lower confidence in Donald Trump to do the right thing than Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. Regardless of truth, perception that the U.S. cannot be relied on will lead to a more dangerous world and worse geopolitical outcomes as allies are forced to make do without us.

Conventional wisdom might suggest Trump was especially tough on China, but in reality he emphasized the exact wrong points at the expense of actual geopolitical power. He started a trade war, harming the U.S., which ultimately resulted in extracting Chinese promises to purchase additional American exports. While undertaking these trade negotiations, Trump refrained from criticizing China’s curtailing of the rights of seven and a half million residents of Hong Kong, and allegedly even encouraged Xi Jinping to construct Uyghur re-education camps. Chinese negotiators have stated they prefer Trump’s reelection because his goals are so transparently materialistic, and those goals are in areas where the CCP can compromise, unlike other American administrations’ focus on human rights. Trump also abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a Pacific based broad trade agreement meant to specifically improve trading relations between the U.S. and major Chinese trading partners, isolating China. Biden is also not great on trade, but has emphasized that he will push China on human rights, not soybean purchases.

I’ve also mentioned in the past that a huge advantage the U.S. has over China is our ability to take in new immigrants and turn them into Americans, and this is doubly true for skilled Chinese immigrants who often attend American universities. Yet the Trump administration has attacked legal immigration (even more so during the pandemic), making it harder for America to exercise an important asset in any long term disagreements with China.

Comparatively, Joe Biden is simply not that extreme. He’s been a fairly middle-of-the-road Democrat since the Bronze Age. Of course, that does means he’s voted for the Iraq War and was part of the Obama administrations’ intervention in Libya, but Donald Trump also supported the Iraq War, although he only wanted to go into Libya “if we take the oil” (?). Donald Trump has notably strengthened relationships with Israel, but Israel has little sway over China and Russia. Meanwhile, traditional important allies have been shunned.

Donald Trump is dangerous. A cold war with China is not inevitable, and a military arms race with modern technology, AI, and advanced genetics added on top of nuclear weapons is a recipe for absolute disaster. Even a small percentage increase in this risk through mismanagement could be worth millions of lives. The U.S. needs to work with our allies to confront China where necessary and work with the Chinese government to improve transparency and understanding between our two nations, while promoting human rights. Being President of the United States should perfectly position someone to make the case for freedom, free markets, and democracy against an authoritarian regime, but Trump has failed to do so, and his bad policy here should disqualify conservatives from backing him.

COVID-19 and Catastrophic Risk

This is an expansion of risk assessment from the Great Power Relations section and from the discussion in May. Catastrophic risk management is underfunded and underprioritized. We should be preparing for the next pandemic, the next earthquake, and so on. Neither candidate has really called for comprehensive congressional action on establishing better risk management, so let’s focus on COVID-19, which remains a key issue.

Donald Trump emphasized his private sector CEO skills as a key asset contrasting himself with the political establishment, and his approach to governing has radically differed from prior presidents. Therefore, when a crisis arose that required management and leadership skills, I think it’s fair to expect Donald Trump to outperform the average. His administration did not:

The U.S. has worse per capita deaths than a wide cross section of developed countries including Italy, France, and the broad EU. Germany, Canada, and Japan have rates several times lower. The U.S. rate is similar to the U.K. but is on a much higher trajectory, similar to Mexico. At best, we’re average, at worst, we are the most advanced country to still have out of control cases.

Trump revamped his National Security Council, including removing several people who were part of pandemic preparedness, altering the pandemic response policy set up under Obama. John Bolton claimed this was a cost-saving measure and allowed for better implementation of policy. Whatever the case, there’s no one to blame except Trump; he reorganized his bureaucracy in the way he wanted, and this was the policy result we got. He is also ultimately in charge of the FDA and CDC and as we discussed in April, those agencies had colossal failures. Moreover, Trump publicly discussed how COVID was not a problem, saying in February the number of cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” Meanwhile, he was telling reporter Carl Bernstein that this virus was extremely serious and deadly in February, and that he had purposefully played it down to avoid a panic. Regardless of morality, this is simply bad policy and cost American lives.

Trump should absolutely get credit for shutting down travel from China earlier than many people wanted. However, instead of acknowledging that any policy could only delay and not prevent a full outbreak, Trump then spent all of February downplaying the virus like it wasn’t a threat. Instead, given his apparent understanding of the challenge, he should have been issuing government guarantees to purchase masks, creating guidelines for how to reduce spread, encouraging indoor sporting events and concerts to consider cancelling, and more. We know much more about this virus now than we did in March. Delaying the peak from April to June or July could have saved literally thousands of lives.

Even after all this, as cases climbed in the south in the summer, Trump maintained that things were not getting worse, and seemed to make fun of people wearing masks. He even held an indoor rally in the middle of the summer.

As of September 28, the CDC estimates 208,000 – 274,000 excess deaths in the U.S. since February 1, with Metaculus estimating between 220,000 and 360,000 U.S. deaths from COVID this year. This is an unmitigated catastrophe. Not every death can be attributed to Trump’s policies, but we have plenty of evidence that his policies could be considerably better. Other developed countries have death rates a fraction of ours, and Trump has constantly made poor decisions, downplayed the virus compared to the flu, encouraged supporters not to wear masks. At this point, even small policy shifts that reduced the death toll by 10% would have saved 20,000 lives. Conservatives must hold the president accountable for failing to protect American lives.

Congressional vs Executive Power

The functionality of the U.S. government as a system for creating and executing policy affects every other policy. In particular is the glaring problems of congressional mismanagement and executive overreach. Unfortunately, both Trump and Biden have poor records, although Trump may be worse.

Conservatives ought to be concerned about the power of the executive and the reduced role Congress has played in policy-making. Moving away from a consensus building model in Congress to a winner-take-all super executive elected every four years to do anything they want is a bad idea for many reasons. For one this increases the stakes at every election and thus increased polarization. It also means more power concentrated more centrally, which conservatives should be quite skeptical of, and at least many were under Obama. And finally, there are specific things that conservatives want the government to do, like maintain a strong national defense. If we continue to pile responsibilities on the President without involving Congress or actual legislation, then our national defense relies solely on the whims of one person, who you might not trust.

I’ve criticized the Obama administration significantly on executive overreach, and Joe Biden was part of that administration. Obama invented the concept of unauthorized drone wars, complete with secret kill lists, including American citizens. Yet, Gene Healy details how Trump has essentially expanded on Obama’s work in every way, including civilian casualties, all under the guise of the 2001 Authorization of Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of 9/11, even nine years after Osama Bin Laden’s death. He also bombed Syria under a separate claim of pure executive war powers which has no constitutional basis, and this year unilaterally targeted a member of the Iranian government (and a bad person) without any congressional authority. This is an unprecedented use of presidential authority to wage war, and blatant disregard of the constitution. In an absolutely insane reversal, Trump vetoed the war powers resolution passed by congress to reign in his authority. No constitutional conservative can defend this action.

Healy does note that many of the more aggressive uses of Trump’s executive power can’t be categorized as “new” power grabs; Congress had largely ceded those powers to the president even if no other president had actually used them. For example, the Supreme Court upheld a later iteration of Trump’s travel ban (although earlier ones were ruled unconstitutional), and although “there’s ample ground for disputing the Court’s decision”, Congress allowed the president to interpret national security powers quite broadly.

However, on trade, Trump clearly expanded executive authority by lying about Canadian steel imports being a national security threat. This broad interpretation of the law was again unprecedented and means that tariff levels are likely solely controllable by the president, which is an absurd constitutional farce; Congress should have the sole ability to pass tax law. Trump also declared a national emergency in order to fund his border wall after Congress repeatedly refused to allocate money (partially struck down in court). Trump needed to lead on these issues, make broad appeals to the political center, and put pressure on Congress — which Republicans controlled for two years! Instead, he failed and fell back on executive orders which fly in the face of conservative small government beliefs.

For his part, Biden has not offered to fund a border wall through executive authority, so I guess point to him. On the other hand, Biden indicated he thought FEMA should be leveraged (and presumably a national emergency declared) to fund K-12 schools due to coronavirus challenges. Again, to be consistent, school funding from the federal government really ought to come from Congress, not executive authority.

Alright, now let’s touch on impeachment. If you want my full thoughts, read this post here. In summary, regardless of legality, Trump held up Congressionally authorized funds for political purposes, trying to get dirt on his enemies. From the perspective of concerns about executive power, this is wrong, and conservatives should be terrified of progressives getting into office and doing exactly what Trump did. We need to deescalate using the state as a political weapon; Trump is not deescalating.

When asked about them, Biden has repudiated some of the powers that Trump has seized, and has criticized Trump for taking them. I’m pretty skeptical here. Obama was loose with his executive authority, and Biden was in the room when that happened. Presidential power seems to just stack, so I’d be surprised if Biden really pulled back on authority after what Trump has done.

Of course, no one is talking about what I actually wrote about in May, which was a resurgent Congress, not just a presidency that maybe didn’t quite expand executive authority as much as before. So I think overall the most important long term affects on congressional and executive power are worse with Trump, but they’re not night and day. Something like Trump gets an F and Biden gets a D.

Liberalizing Immigration

Conservatives and I may be far apart on this issue, but I think there is some common ground. The United States has perhaps the longest and most well known history of immigration of any nation on earth, and we all agree some immigration will continue to occur. Given that immigration will continue, we can also agree that an improved system is needed; current immigration rules favor family migration instead of merit and skill. We should change our immigration system to focus more on skilled immigrants, or on retaining students who pay to be educated at the best institutions and then seek to work in the most technologically advanced and dynamic large economy in the world.

Improving our immigration system to be more merit based would be a huge boon to our free market system, to our national security, to our global influence, and of course, would result in more Americans. We want the smartest people in the world to move here and innovate on the cutting edge. If we shut our doors, those people will go to other countries, and we will lose a massive advantage we have over places like China, which, as self declared ethno-states, simply cannot attract diverse talent from across the world.

Yet Donald Trump has slashed legal immigration and made it significantly harder for skilled immigrants to enter the country, or even apply for green cards. Both green card and temporary visa applications decreased 17% each between 2016 and 2019 while rules for granting green cards were narrowed. He even banned any new H-1B visas, which focus on high skilled, high earning immigrants (who are great for innovation) for the rest of this year through executive order. Given pandemic related issues are likely to continue into next year, I wouldn’t be surprised if this continued past December.

Given these extraordinary actions, particularly during the pandemic, I would estimate a Trump second term could see a million fewer legal immigrants than a Biden term. This would have long term negative effects on the U.S. economy, not to mention on those immigrants who literally want to be Americans. Trump has also shown no ability to work with Congress on reforming the immigration system, instead working through executive unilateral action.

Biden has planned to reverse most of Trump’s immigration policies. I’ve emphasized the horrific impact on high skilled immigration, but Biden focuses on more liberal talking points, particularly about children of illegal immigrants and refugees. Trump has absolutely crushed the number of refugees the U.S. has taken, thwarting a long standing Cold War era policy. While conservatives may be skeptical of the benefits of refugees (recent data shows they contribute positively to the economy), the geopolitical benefits of being a destination for refugees are clearly all positive. No refugee is picking Russia over the U.S., for example. Unfortunately, Trump has crippled that rhetorical win.

Finally on illegal immigration, I think it’s undeniable that Trump is harder on illegal immigration than Biden would be. However, I must stress that concerns about illegal immigration are often overblown by conservatives. Although caution is warranted, it’s likely that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native born Americans. Moreover, Trump has focused on things like building a border wall (which he claimed Mexico would pay for) which the OIG found did not utilize a “sound, well-documented methodology” for where the wall would actually be built. Also, many illegal immigrants cross the border at regular checkpoints and simply overstay their visa. Additionally, the administration spent lots of effort noticeably separating young children from their parents at the border rather than on improving the infrastructure in place for immigration courts, which would actually improve the rate at which the government could deport immigrants.

Trump’s policy of harsher, haphazard (and quite frankly idiotic) illegal immigration enforcement at the cost of harming legal immigration and thwarting the American economy’s ability to integrate foreign skilled labor is simply not worth the trade off.

Housing Policy

Deregulating housing policy, especially in “blue” cities like New York and San Francisco is a key measure needed to help grow the American economy. Housing is one of the largest expenses most Americans have, yet it wasn’t always the case. Restrictive zoning has made housing exceedingly unaffordable, and conservatives ought to defend the right of property owners to do what they want on their own property. Trump actually supported deregulation ideas early on in his presidency, and then this year abruptly switched tactics to favor stronger regulation. This is anti-free market and anti economic growth. These large cities have made it harder to build new housing, which causes housing costs to rise, homelessness to increase, and the young and poor to be priced out of good opportunities. Mobility is down across the country, companies are struggling to attract employees to these high cost areas, and many are leaving. Trump is supporting this.

Network effects mean more concentrated, dense cities are much better. For example, recreating the networks that made Silicon Valley in other places is quite difficult, but as regulations make it harder to live in the Bay Area, we are forced to rebuild the aspects of the Bay Area in other places, which wastes time and energy. The same applies to every expensive U.S. city, including Boston, DC, LA, and Miami. The costs involved are astronomical, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars in lost economic productivity over years.

Biden’s housing policy is actually remarkably thoughtful and deregulatory. He proposes improving the already existing federal rental housing assistance for low income families so that all who qualify can obtain it (right now it gives out money to families until a set amount is given out instead of to all who qualify). Then he pairs that with requirements on federal housing money where municipalities must reduce zoning rules that block new housing. Obviously it’s difficult to know to what extent these policies will be exactly implemented, but if a policy even close to what Biden has proposed were to be passed, it would be a solid boon to economic growth. Moreover, it stands a good chance as it’s moderate and compromising where Trump’s housing policy.…isn’t.

Additional Issues

These issues are either where the candidates differ little, or conservatives don’t often prioritize so I’ve kept them short. Nonetheless, Biden retains an edge on these issues.

Climate Change

Many conservatives are skeptical of climate change. I found a view articulated by Russ Roberts, host of EconTalk, to be illuminating. Like nuclear war or pandemics, climate change is a risk with unknown probability. Rather than binary choice of preparing for it or not, our climate policy should weight the various catastrophic effects with the probabilities. Even if conservatives find the most dire climate predictions unlikely, some action is likely warranted under standard economic theory; negative externalities like pollution ought to be taxed. And as we’ve seen this year, it’s bad policy to shirk preparations until the catastrophe is already upon you.

Carbon taxes with offsetting tax cuts seem pretty straightforward. The Paris Climate agreement also seemed like an easy win, with countries setting their own targets. Trump’s withdrawal from this agreement seems to involve no policy calculation whatsoever since the agreement wasn’t binding anyway.

Biden’s plan is a bit aggressive for my take. It goes beyond taxing externalities and into specific government spending. Of course, Donald Trump has spent boatloads of money and would likely continue that trend. Biden spending money on green energy doesn’t seem any worse than Trump spending money on…everything. Donald Trump’s plan to do nothing about climate change seems more negative.

Fed Independence

This hasn’t turned out to be much of an issue as the Fed has been extremely active this year and we have yet to see inflation rise. Nonetheless, Donald Trump’s continued insistence that the Fed cut interest rates even as the economy was well below 5% unemployment was clearly political rather than based on any actual economic theory. This should be condemned as bad policy. Central banking should remain independent and not subject to the whims of populist rulers unless you want to be Venezuela.

Trade

Trade can have large positive impacts on the world, although trade barriers had been pretty low. The highest impact policies would be to use trade to improve relations with liberal countries and tie economic success of the U.S. to a broad liberal coalition to counter China. This is what the TPP and TTIP were, both abandoned by Trump. This is bad, free market conservatives should oppose Trump here, but Biden is not particularly free trade either.

Criminal Justice and the War on Drugs

I listed this as a large and important issue in May. However, the extent to which Trump and Biden differ on drug legalization is small. Both have expressed some interest in decriminalizing marijuana. I’m slightly more inclined to believe Biden as he has stayed with the median of the democratic party, which has largely embraced the issue, meanwhile Trump has been president for four years and done little. In overall criminal justice, democrats have as slight edge. Biden has expressed moderate views in the face of radical segments of his party, calling for reform, but also opposing calls to defund the police. Trump’s rhetoric has been rather aggressively anti-reform, but his actual policy actions seem to be small.

Counterpoints

Taxes

Joe Biden wants higher taxes than Trump. I’m against this. But I remain more positive on Biden than on Trump because of the relative weight of issue impacts. Joe Biden is not suggesting a systemic reinvention of taxation where billionaires are banned, but rather a higher level of taxation than before. I don’t know the exact details, but I would guess this would cost the American economy hundreds of billions, possibly a trillion dollars over four years. That’s pretty bad, but in a moment I’ll do a cost-benefit analysis and see how it compares.

Healthcare

I think conservatives have a strong case that Trump is better than Biden on healthcare policy, given conservative policy preferences. However, the differences are small. Trump had the opportunity to overhaul the healthcare system with a united Republican government in 2017. He provided no leadership and accomplished nothing except the repeal of the individual mandate on people who did not purchase insurance; that’s fine, but the problems in American healthcare are systemic and remain.

Joe Biden would not institute the aggressive Medicare-for-all plans of Bernie Sanders, but instead wants to create a public option. This is not a free market approach, but could actually be a good starting point to disentangle healthcare from employment. A Republican compromise that added a public option for people to buy while also reducing the mandates on what coverage employers have to provide to employees could get more people covered while also reducing reliance on employment for healthcare (which never made any sense anyway and distorts the labor market). Nonetheless, Trump could obviously try and make headway on such a system without the public option and without Biden as president, but he hasn’t. He’s mostly ignored this issue for several years.

Overall, for conservatives, I think the options are either doing nothing with a currently broken system, or see slightly worse reforms that tend to go in the wrong direction, but won’t be the end of the world. Compared to the vast differences in foreign policy, COVID-19 management, immigration, and housing policy, this just doesn’t make a dent on the enormous lead Biden has on Trump.

Justices

This is likely Trump’s biggest strength compared to Biden, however, there are some mitigating circumstances. The major one is that there are no conservative justices poised to retire soon. Clarence Thomas is 72, but many justices retire after 80. Another is that Supreme Court justices aren’t nearly as partisan as other members of the government. Many cases are decided unanimously, and many justices commonly rule against their “party” to uphold precedent. When justices do split, it’s not always clear what the lines will be. Gorsuch and Sotomayor are both strong proponents of 4th Amendment protections despite being appointed by different parties. Anthony Kennedy, despite being appointed by Reagan, was part of the majority in Kelo v New London. This ruled that state governments could seize private property and give it to private developers, which, and I can’t emphasize this enough, was outrageous. 45 states eventually passed legislation banning Kelo-like eminent domain seizures.

Which brings up another point: Congress can make laws. Remember all the debate about the Supreme Court ruling whether the President could implement his immigration bans in 2017? None of that would have mattered if Congress had simply clarified the law, and Republicans held both chambers! The level of intensity we have dedicated to Supreme Court appointments is encouraged by Congress’ inaction. We can either respond by pushing harder on court appointments, or we can respond by focusing on Congress!

Finally, judicial issues that often animate the Right aren’t always as clearly dependent on judicial makeup as we think. The rate of abortions per woman or per live birth has been steadily dropping since the early 1980s regardless of court makeup, presidential party, or Congress.

Yes, appointing good justices matters, and Neil Gorsuch is an excellent justice! But we overemphasize the importance in Supreme Court nominations, and compared to the other issues that are costing thousands of American lives, this issue isn’t enough for Trump.

The Big Picture

When it comes down to it, Biden’s tax policy is not what I want, but it’s not going to have a lasting impact on the economy. Future Republican presidents can come in and fix marginal tax rates. Trump’s housing policy will cause long term harm relative to Biden’s. The reduction in cost of living for Americans if we can properly regulate construction of new homes in cities far outweighs any tax cut and brings in network effects on American cities. Cities are the currency of the economy. To see how behind we are, look at Tokyo where in 2018 more housing units were added than in New York, Boston, Houston, and Los Angeles combined. Trump wants that trend to continue, Biden doesn’t.

Add in Trump’s growth-crushing legal immigration policy, and the choice is even more stark.

Healthcare is another area where I don’t endorse Biden’s policy. But as stated, Trump has essentially nothing to offer here despite being president for four years. From a conservative perspective, at worst, Biden could implement a public option. Note however, this leaves private insurance completely intact. There is simply not a systemic risk conservatives should worry about. U.S. healthcare already has tons of government interventions and increasing government spending in healthcare 20% isn’t good, but it’s not going to be the end of America. It will put a strain on federal government finances, but Trump has consistently demonstrated that he does not care about that issue at all.

On the other hand, Trump’s actual policy when it comes to an actual pandemic has literally resulted in 200,000 dead Americans. Again, not all of this is on Trump, but it seems plausible that his downplaying of the virus, his bungling of agency responses, and his actual rallies during the pandemic has resulted in avoidable deaths. We cannot risk another catastrophe.

Finally, there’s the question of justices. To me this seems most comparable to the long term future concerns from the Greater Power Relations section. Both issues are concerning because of their impact on the trajectory of the long term future, but one is simply much higher stakes than the other. How the U.S. manages our relationship with China determines the course of human history in this century. If we screw it up badly, millions of lives are on the line. On the other hand, if Biden is elected, he might replace Stephen Breyer with another liberal leaning justice, and as stated previously, the overall impact here is smaller than most conservatives make it out to be.

I’ve detailed the importance of how we manage geopolitics and the dangers inherent on the global stage today as they impact the long term future. Arms races are extraordinarily dangerous, and in the future humanity’s weapons will only get more powerful. Trump has not managed geopolitics well. When the COVID-19 catastrophe hit, he was again subpar and his policy was not up the task of protecting Americans. Add in his poor economic policy on housing and immigration, throw in even a fleeting concern about climate change, and the evidence against Trump’s policies in favor of Biden’s is overwhelming.

Of course, I haven’t even got to some of the most devastating critiques of Trump, since I specifically tried to avoid discussions outside of policy. However, next post, I do want to cover, if it’s even possible, all of the Trump administration’s vast corruption, gross incompetence, authoritarian acts, and his divisive and polarizing approach to politics. I think much of this “extracurricular” activity matters a great deal even though some Trump supporters may brush it aside as trolling or just politics. But even if I’m wrong, Trump’s policy record is terrible enough on its own.

A Note on the LP Candidate

I didn’t want to take too much away from the more outcome oriented discussion of the Trump and Biden, one of whom is going to win the November election. However, as I noted in my last post, many readers will not be voting in a swing state, and so may be interested in the Libertarian Party candidate Jo Jorgensen.

Her policies do reasonably well on my list of issues (not very surprising on a blog about libertarianism and politics), and since non-swing state voters have essentially no chance to impact the election, libertarian leaning voters could cast their ballot for someone they actually like without worrying about electing the worse major party candidate. Very briefly, she hasn’t impressed on the issues of great power relations and catastrophic risks, two important issues. These tend not be libertarian strengths, so that makes sense, although I maintain they are key to the long term future of the world and the U.S.

On executive power, immigration, trade, criminal justice, and taxes, Jorgensen is reiterating the standard LP positions, which are generally pretty good as far as this libertarian leaning blog is concerned. I am surprised by her lack of discussion of housing deregulation (at least I couldn’t find anything) given it’s such a key issue, as standard libertarian positions should be positive here. On healthcare, I would take more incremental steps than she would. Overall, if you’re libertarian leaning and you don’t live in a swing state, I think voting for Jorgensen or Biden are defensible positions. If you want to learn more about Jorgensen’s positions, check out her ISideWith page and website.

Picture credit: Boeing 787-10 rollout with President Trump by Ryan Johnson licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

A 2020 Policy Platform Proposal

It’s election season so it’s time to start talking electoral politics again. The Trump administration has been particularly successful in ignoring policy discussions in favor of political point scoring. This isn’t too surprising given Trump’s lack of consistent ideology, apart from perhaps opposition to free trade and immigration. Impeachment has also helped focus attention on Trump’s political situation rather than his policies or lack thereof. Don’t get me wrong, I think there is a strong non-policy case against Trump, and I think in particular Congressman Justin Amash has done an excellent job in articulating why Trump’s behavior is concerning.

However, I think there is also a policy-based critique of Trump. In order to properly make that case and compare Trump’s policies to Biden’s or other candidates, we must establish a foundation declaring which problems are most important, and what policies could be used to implement them. Criteria for these policy ideals include some utilitarian calculus, i.e., how to improve the lives of the most people in the largest way. Thus, the first of these policies is actually a meta-policy, a way to improve congressional power to pass laws and run the state. Changing the way we make policy can affect all of our future policy making.

Countering this interest in utilitarian idealism is a preference for some political feasibility; in other words, while I might prefer to emphasize revolutionary changes that significantly improve the country (changing all of our voting systems to approval voting or quadratic voting or switching taxation to be based on land value), I’ve left them off this list because they are not just unpopular, but in fact virtually never discussed. If you find a particular policy interesting, please follow the links in that section for additional policy discussion and details.

Finally, there is uncertainty here, and I’ll mention other policies that didn’t make this list at the end. Trying to filter major talking points out of a broader range of political ideas is difficult. Policies and political philosophies are interconnected, and where I’m drawing boundaries must be arbitrary. Nonetheless, these ideas should form a good basis for uniformly judging candidate policies.

Congressional Power

Any policy platform has to address the fact that our current system for governance, for crafting and enacting policy, is deeply flawed. We have uncompetitive and broken elections, we have bad ways of choosing candidates, and we have too much power in the executive branch. Executive authority compounds our problems by making each election a stark singular choice between polarized sides instead of a well rounded government built on a legislature with many interests represented. I can’t fix all of these in this policy platform, so improving the balance between the president and Congress seems like a good place to start.

The entire budget for the legislative branch, including congressional staff, offices, and congressional agencies like the GAO and CBO, is about $5 billion. Congress is then responsible for oversight and legislative action for the entire $5 trillion federal government. The CBO has a mere 250 person staff, and it can’t even research and score all Congressional bills. This is absolute insanity.

Congress needs to be able to wield its muscle. It should not be relying on executive branch bureaucracies as unbiased experts evaluating their own performance. It should have a better staffed research arm which can oversee all aspects of the massive American bureaucracy. Congressmen also need to have more and more policy-focused positions on their own staff, along with fewer committee assignments. National Affairs has an excellent in depth discussion of the thinking behind this brief overview. Legislators are currently underpaid amateurs who spend half their time outside of Washington focused on other things besides governance. This does not allow for knowledgeable congressional oversight of the federal government.

Cato also has some excellent ideas for strengthening Congress such as having a standing committee to review executive overreaches from statutory law, and forcing votes on major rules as implemented by regulators or bureaucrats. Other ideas include expanding the congressional calendar, making a new Congressional Regulatory Service to oversee the regulations made by independent and executive agencies, and requiring all civil asset forfeitures to be deposited into the Treasury to be spent by Congress, not the executive.

Unfortunately, even despite a recent impeachment trial this is simply not a major political issue in this year’s campaign, and no candidate is running with strengthening Congress as a priority. In fact, there are essentially no meta-policy ideas being floated. Yet ideas are not hard to come by!

Liberalizing Immigration

The U.S. immigration system is terrible (see section 8 here). It is esoteric, slow, and requires a complete overhaul. It should have a focus on a merit-based system rather than nation-of-origin and family ties as it does now. It should be simpler for high-skilled workers to be hired by American companies and it should definitely be easier for young workers, educated at excellent American colleges, to be hired by American companies and remain in the United States where they can pay tax dollars for decades.

Why is this so high up on the list?

This is a matter of national security. China is a growing power, but crucially, it cannot expand its influence or economy through immigration. The Chinese state has largely decided that ethnicity matters, and China is not seeking to create a multicultural amalgamation to improve the world, but rather a nationalist state. The U.S. isn’t restricted in this way; anyone can be an American. Immigrants are also more likely to start businesses and take risks. That means the most creative and ambitious people in the world can come to the United States and contribute to our culture, knowledge, technology, and wealth. Moreover, these remarkable people already want to come here. Increased dynamism and economic growth also makes the rest of our geopolitical challenges easier; it means the national debt is less of a burden, and national defense spending can be higher in absolute terms while costing less of a percentage of GDP.

This is also perhaps the best and simplest way to improve the world quickly. It’s extremely difficult to improve nations with poor institutions, yet people who struggle in developing nations can be immediately more productive if they are transplanted to the U.S. And of course many are quite willing to do so, uprooting their entire lives for a chance at the American Dream. We can pursue limitations on their access to public money, or a simple tax upon immigrating, but nonetheless we should be voting to improve the world in the most altruistic and nationalistic way possible: expanding legal immigration in order to make more Americans!

Federal Incentives to Build More Housing in U.S. Cities

This is a specific policy taken from the Niskanen Center’s Will Wilkinson. Cited on this blog before, he suggests giving federal money to urban areas that add large amounts of new housing stock. Why? Because American cities are absurdly expensive to live in, yet new housing is extremely difficult to develop due to overregulation and zoning laws.

The impact of our poor housing policy is enormous. Economists suggest housing constraints have lowered U.S. GDP by as much as a third over the last 50 years. Think about that. We could be missing a third of GDP because millions of people who wanted to move somewhere for a better job couldn’t find a place to live. It’s clear that the most productive areas in the U.S., especially cities like New York and San Francisco, are prohibitively expensive, keeping out potential new productive workers.

Wilkinson’s suggestion isn’t the only possible policy solution; another is to change zoning to be hyper local, composed by residents of a single street or city block. This would allow experimentation and innovation, instead of immovable local land interests which keep out future non-residents who can’t vote in today’s elections.

While the viable solutions are still up for the debate, the impact is clear: the lack of housing development in U.S. cities due to overregulation may be the single greatest barrier to economic growth, thus earning its inclusion on this short list of policies.

Decriminalization of All Drugs

Ever since Pete Buttigieg announced his support for this policy, I’ve had it circled for inclusion on this list. The War on Drugs has been a colossal failure, has not reduced drug use, and has radically increased prison populations. There have been extraordinary costs to the taxpayer in both civil liberties and assets. Massive application of state force has helped to give a monopoly in funding to the most bloodthirsty and gruesome organized criminal elements in the world, including terrorists. There have even been spillover effects as governments crack down on prescription pain killers, leaving patients in agony.

This policy is wrong morally, practically, and economically. It is not the place of the state to determine what substances informed adults can consume or inject. It is also abundantly clear the state has zero capability to halt the trade or consumption of drugs. Rather, enforcement of drug laws have bolstered a black market where information is asymmetric and scarce, endangering all involved. The only thing the state has succeeded in doing is making organized crime more financially viable. The resulting conflict in Mexico has killed over 150,000 people, making it one of the largest conflicts of the 21st century behind only the Iraq War, Syrian Civil War, and Darfur. It is this monstrous loss of human life as a result of changeable government policy that places this item so high on this list.

And of course it goes without saying that this massive assistance to organized crime is occurring at great financial cost. Estimates for enforcement, prosecution, incarceration, and military interventions are as high as $50 billion a year. State prohibition of private mutually consensual transactions also requires erosion of our rights in ways that frustrate measures of concrete financial cost. The ACLU notes extensive surveillance has been justified under the guise of drug enforcement while increasingly militarized police forces have abused their power to break into homes unannounced or preemptively shoot victims all in the name of stopping transactions among consenting adults. It’s time to end this failed policy.

Catastrophic Risk

It’s clear today that the federal government does not respond well to large disasters. Perhaps too much relies upon the whims of the executive who happens to be in power, but it seems likely that we could institutionalize better responses to catastrophic events. Yes, this includes pandemics, but also major earthquakes, solar flares, artificial intelligence, and even plans for averting nuclear war (for a more detailed analysis, read Toby Ord’s recent book, The Precipice).

This is a highly neglected problem and thus one of the highest impact policies we could undertake (climate change could go here, but it has not been quite as neglected a topic as other risks, so I’ve detailed it later). At the beginning of 2020, I would not have included this in the list of top policies, not because it was low impact, but simply due to the fact that it was not discussed as a major political issue. The failings of the federal government to respond to a deadly virus have pushed catastrophic risks into the mainstream. While the likelihood of any given catastrophe is low, it is the enormous impact of the tail-risk that should concern us; preparing now will mean the difference between devastation and mere hardship.

We should look to create public commissions to investigate our preparedness for various catastrophic events, identify what can be done now for relatively small budgets with larger payoffs when a disaster comes, and then pass legislation that enshrines this knowledge institutionally in ways that do not rely on the whims and competence of whomever happens to be president. It is vital that any commissions include our preparedness for other challenges besides pandemics; preparedness for unexpected events is not selected through democratic pressures, and perhaps this has resulted in our current difficult situation with COVID-19. It would be wise to use this opportunity to prepare not just for the next viral outbreak, but for other unlikely events as well.

Observations on Impeachment

Impeachment is a highly political process. I want to walk through the impeachment process and trial and try to articulate my own thinking.

The Transcript

Let’s start with the phone call on July 26th. Trump released a transcript of himself asking the head of state of another country to investigate a conspiracy theory that Ukraine has a copy of a server of Hilary Clinton’s emails. The intelligence community believes this is Russian propaganda and National Security Council official Fiona Hill testified to this under oath. Trump also brought up a political rival during an official call with the head of state of another country, and asked President Zelensky to investigate them.

There’s a lot to discuss here. Apart from the intelligence community’s views of the Ukrainian server conspiracy theory, I think it reflects poorly on Trump’s…mental state? priorities? that he is still trying to investigate theories around Hillary Clinton’s emails four years after his own election, which he won! It doesn’t seem like he is prioritizing implementation of American policy, but rather stuck in the irrelevant past.

Also of note, Trump brings up Viktor Shokin, who, as far as I can tell was widely believed to be corrupt, yet Trump seems to think his dismissal was unfair. There’s also the discussion of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son. Hunter seems to be a screw up and a bad human being. Yet, as Senator Romney pointed out, there was no evidence that the Bidens’ actions were criminal although certainly morally questionable. In particular, Joe Biden had a conflict of interest, but I don’t think anyone can argue Viktor Shokin should have remained in office…except Trump.

Moreover, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of national security or indeed foreign policy that Joe Biden be investigated by the Ukrainian government even if he were directly implicated in a crime. Instead, I would expect the FBI would just investigate him for wrongdoing. That seems much more effective if you wanted to get to the bottom of it. Moreover, looking at the testimony presented by Trump’s defense, it doesn’t seem like a crime was committed.

Yes, when making a public announcement about Ukrainian prosecutors, the Vice President should acknowledge all conflicts of interest. He didn’t, and that seems bad. While it isn’t a violation of a particular law (the respective law would have to be pretty specific), it reflects pretty poorly. In fact, there are many parallels to Trump’s actions. I’d go so far as to say that it’s inconsistent for one to believe that Joe Biden’s actions are wrong while saying Trump’s are not. They are almost identical.

Both are accused of undertaking policy decisions that they claim are in the national interest while appearing to have personal conflicts. The differences are that (1) Trump is currently in office, while Biden is not, and (2) the House of Representatives seems like the correct place to investigate whether Trump had a conflict of interest, while the Ukrainian government absolutely should not be in charge of investigating Biden. And it definitely shouldn’t be incentivized with U.S. taxpayer funded military aid; it should be done by a law enforcement agency. Finally, I would be remiss not to mention that Trump has an even closer parallel with the Hunter Biden situation: his own children, in particular his son-in-law who was given a prominent position in the west wing. If Hunter Biden’s actions in Ukraine are worth using the office of presidency in such a way, what are we to make of Trump’s own nepotism?

Returning to the call, the Trump defense team pointed out that no quid pro quo was mentioned in this phone call. This is true, and also seems irrelevant. The use of the office of the president to encourage foreign governments to investigate political rivals and conspiracy theories is most certainly an abuse of office, regardless of whether a quid pro quo occurred. Whether this is grounds for removal from office we can address later.

Witnesses and Evidence

More circumstantial evidence for this being a political abuse of office include testimony from several witnesses. Most interesting is from Gordon Sondland who stated that a quid pro quo did exist offering the President of Ukraine a White House visit in exchange for an announcement of investigations into the Bidens. He also stated that John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and Mike Pence were all aware.

Although not a witness, Mick Mulvaney gave a press conference confirming that military aid authorized by Congress was held up in order to get Ukraine to investigate the DNC server.

Also of note is that the White House released the aid to Ukraine on September 11, only days after Congress announces an inquiry into Rudy Giuliani’s involvement in Ukraine and possible interference with US policy. No one has made any attempt to explain what particular evidence of the Ukrainian government fighting corruption came to light on that day which made the White House approve the aid.

Finally, the House asked (not subpoenaed) John Bolton to testify which could have turned the circumstantial evidence into specific testimony against Trump, at least according to the testimony of Gordon Sondland. The Trump administration blocked those witnesses from testifying, citing executive privilege. The Constitution gives the House the sole power of impeachment, not the executive the power to overrule their investigation. The House could definitely have taken this to the courts with an official subpoena, but they decided not to, I suspect because they felt that impeachment was somewhat politically toxic given the President’s support in the Senate. That’s a political calculation. I think the political case against Trump would have been stronger if both the House and the courts sided against the President. They decided not to the and I think the case against Trump for obstruction was weaker because of this procedural choice. Nonetheless, I can’t see any legal argument that would side with the President; if so, the House’s impeachment power is useless. Therefore, the obstruction of Congress charge certainly seems appropriate.

However, I need to take the Democrats down a peg; the stated reason for not taking the subpoena to court was that Trump presented an immediate threat to our democracy because of his election interference attempts. Democratic impeachment managers argued Russia had interfered in the 2016 election and Trump had encouraged this. I find this completely unconvincing. Russia favored a Trump victory over Hilary Clinton, and I’m sure they spent a bunch of money trying to achieve this, but I have never bought into the narrative that Russia can control the outcome of U.S. elections through Facebook ads. It’s ludicrous. Democracy is powerful because it utilizes disparate information from voters; if you think voters have to be shielded from information, even misinformation, then you don’t believe democracy is a force for good in the world. You instead prefer some sort of government where gatekeepers determine what information voters receive and then voters are allowed to vote with that limited information.

Trump’s attempts to use the Ukrainian government to help him win reelection seem to be an abuse of office. But I don’t think he is a threat to a fair election. The biggest threat to a fair election is our entire electoral system.

Senate Trial

Trump maintained that the impeachment inquiry was a “witch hunt” and a “hoax”. Under this view, it’s not surprising that he opposed John Bolton testifying at his Senate trial. Of course, the President’s claims do not address the significant (although circumstantial) evidence gathered against him. Moreover, Bolton supposedly implicates Trump in his new book. The only real explanations for the President’s behavior is either that there was a vast conspiracy, including many witnesses, his own handpicked ambassador to the EU and massive donor Gordon Sondlond, his own handpicked National Security Adviser John Bolton, his own handpicked Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and presumably his own Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (although he wasn’t asked to testify). Or, Trump is guilty of doing some pretty shady stuff that he doesn’t want people to testify to. The President maintained that it is the first scenario. This seems to be quite unlikely given the circumstantial evidence.

But there’s an easy way to check, just have the Senate ask Bolton to testify. Senate Republicans declined to do this. I have a hard time explaining this in a good faith way. Some maintained that the evidence presented by the prosecution was inadequate. Unless Gordon Sondlond and Mick Mulvaney just spontaneously made up the same story despite being integral parts of the Trump’s administration, this seems hard to believe. John Bolton is a well-respected lifelong Republican, serving in the Bush and Trump White Houses. He is a strong opponent of the Obama backed nuclear deal with Iran, a defining Republican foreign policy position in the last election. Any attempt to say Bolton is a left-wing sympathizer is bizarre, and yet virtually no Republicans voted to hear his testimony.

I believe what is actually happening is that there is significant political pressure from Republican voters to end the impeachment process. Even if a Republican Senator believed Trump to be guilty, to stay in office, they must survive a primary challenge from a pro-Trump challenger, which would surely win in a Republican primary against someone who voted against Trump in impeachment. One could easily argue that the Senators are doing the democratic thing by following their voters’ interests, but it would not mean that Trump was innocent of these charges. It would simply shift blame from the Senators to our current democratic system, which is apparently unable to deal with a president who abuses the powers of his office.

Other senators, like Lamar Alexander of Tennessee stated that the prosecution made a compelling case of misbehavior, but that it doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment. We will get to this defense in a minute.

Non Defense Arguments

It’s worth taking a minute to discuss some points I have heard often, but are not actual defenses of President Trump. The first is the critique of hypocrisy, which is pretty common in these partisan times. Hypocrisy is an excellent way to impugn the motives of your political opponents, but it doesn’t address the object-level arguments. The way I’ve heard this phrased is that presidents have been expanding executive authority for decades, and now Democrats are only calling out Trump’s abuses of power because they don’t like his tribal affiliation, which is more than the usual Right-Left divide. In other words, Trump is a jerk to his political enemies and that’s the reason the House impeached him. Reason Editor Nick Gillespie has espoused something like this view, and tied it in with a libertarian point which is that Democrats don’t actually care about executive authority, they just don’t like Trump. This is a double standard other presidents have not been held to.

Closely tied with this critique is that House Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump from the beginning and were just waiting for a chance they could exploit. Note, neither of these related points address whether Trump actually abused his office. I think it’s absolutely true that Democrats have wanted to impeach Trump, but that doesn’t have any bearing on whether or not he did bad enough acts that he should be removed from office. This argument would be equivalent to Al Copone’s lawyers arguing that the prosecution had been wanting to catch him for a long time and so it’s irrelevant that he broke the law. This is not an argument. The only thing that matters is what Trump did, and the evidence isn’t good.

Returning to the abuse of executive power, I fail to see how continued abuse and concentration of executive authority over time means we should continue allowing abuse of authority. This view basically says that if one government official gets away with abuse, then we have no standing to ever challenge their successors abuses again. This makes no sense to me.

I’ve written pretty extensively about the problem with increased executive authority that’s accrued to the president. A thousand wrongs don’t make the next wrong a right. Instead, trying to restore some of the rule of law one piece at a time sounds like a good idea. And we should be using this opportunity to recruit more who didn’t use to care about executive authority into the tent.

Allowing unchecked executive power to own the libs is a dumb strategy.

Finally, there’s a lot of talk about the whistleblower who wrote a letter that helped to start this investigation. According to Republicans, this whistleblower was a partisan who didn’t like Trump. I have to admit, I have no idea how this argument is supposed to work or how it could possibly be relevant, but it seems so common, I have to include it. However the House finds out about presidential abuse, they have the sole authority of impeachment, meaning they can call witnesses and investigate wrongdoing. They’ve done so, and the witnesses have implicated Trump in abusing his office. The whistleblower’s testimony isn’t necessary. Why Rand Paul keeps talking about the whistleblower seems to just be a distraction from the evidence of Trumps wrongdoing.

Defenses

To summarize, apparently Trump sent his personal lawyer to Ukraine with intention to dig up dirt on his political opponent and even met with Ukrainian officials to achieve this end. Trump then used his office and capacity as president to directly bring up his political goals with the Ukrainian president on an official call. Witnesses and Mick Mulvaney say that military aid and a White House visit were conditioned on investigations into a discredited conspiracy theory about the DNC servers (which are not a matter of national security) and also an investigation of his political rival’s son from several years ago (also doesn’t seem to be a matter of massive national security importance).

This seems pretty bad.

I have a low tolerance of abuse of power. I think Obama was horrendous in his abuse of the office of the presidency including when the IRS targeted conservative groups, and when the administration targeted journalists with the Espionage Act. I think these could pretty easily be classified as impeachable. In that light, I don’t see how the evidence against Trump is much different.

We’ve already covered how the disinterest in the Senate on hearing from John Bolton is pretty suspect. But let’s talk about the actual defenses given by the president’s legal team. There are quite a few.

Some seem pretty specific and weak; Ukrainian President Zelensky said he was not pressured to investigate the Bidens or Crowdstrike. Of course, if your entire presidency is based on opposing Russia and you need U.S. help to maintain that stance, and the Senate is entirely controlled by Republicans, why would you risk antagonizing Trump who viciously attacks his own officials if they ever cross him (see Jeff Sessions, Gordon Sondlond was fired). If Trump was removed, it’s certain that Zelensky could quickly make friends with any future Democratic president regardless of his current positions, and so it makes sense that he would offer to support Trump publicly. This public position seems to count for little compared to actual testimony of American witnesses under oath.

More interesting I think was the argument that there could be no impeachment without a statutory crime. This could be promising, but as Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy points out, holding up Congressionally approved funds is a violation of federal law. Moreover, if you had to pass a law specifying every possible way that the president should be constrained then we would have no limits on the presidency.

Returning now to Senator Lamar Alexander, who argued against subpoenaing John Bolton by saying the President acted inappropriately but his actions didn’t rise to the level of impeachment. Supposing what the President did was not impeachable, why would this preclude getting more information from a witness? Senator Alexander didn’t know the extent of Trump’s actions prior to the House investigation and the testimony of witnesses. He says Trump’s actions were inappropriate, then it would seem judicious to get additional information to make sure no further wrongdoing had occurred. The Senator’s position is completely incoherent. Moreover, his beliefs about the world don’t explain what we see happening: Gordon Sondland was fired from his position as ambassador to the EU. If Alexander is correct and Trump did some things wrong but nothing impeachable, why was Sondland fired?

Trump maintains everything was a vast conspiracy. I’ve noted before, this is bizarre and would mean that everyone Trump happens to hand-select for prominent positions in his administration turned on him with the exact same beliefs about how his administration operates, supported by tons of circumstantial evidence, including Trump’s own phone calls. However, if you wanted to maintain such a narrative, you’d fire everyone who was in on this conspiracy, including Gordon Sondland, who testified to the existence of a quid pro. Of course, you might also act this way if you were actually guilty of abusing your office. Perhaps only John Bolton could have told us the difference. One thing that does not explain this evidence is Senator Alexander’s position: “Trump did things but they weren’t that bad”. If so, why purge the administration? If the actions revealed by Sondland weren’t a big deal (and honestly I kind of thought Sondland thought this) then what did he do wrong from Trump’s perspective? I don’t think Senator Alexander can explain this, and thus I think his position makes little internal sense.

Moreover, I think he’s wrong on the object level as well. The actions undertaken by Trump are serious. He held up Congressionally authorized aid for personal political reasons. Separation of powers is a vital part of our limited government. If the executive can simply kidnap funds authorized by Congress, then we have no limits on government power. We are no longer a limited Republic where the rights of individuals and the minority are defended against an overzealous majority. Instead we are simply electing a despot every four years who will terrorize his political enemies. If what Trump did was an acceptable use of the office of the president, can the president just deny funding for things until people do his political bidding? Could Obama have denied highway funding to red states until they agreed to drop lawsuits against Obamacare? Could he have held up funds until Congress authorized his strikes in Libya? If Trump could do the same for Ukrainian aid, I’m not sure what the difference is, or how any of this could be called limited government or separation of powers.

Finally, there is the argument that this matter should be left to the voters. It is, by definition, a very democratic argument. Clearly, of course, such an argument could not always make intuitive sense; if a president decided that he had the power to cancel elections and declare himself permanent dictator, then the voters can no longer give any input. This is the tact the Democratic impeachment managers took. I’ve already stated my skepticism about it.

However, we do not have to go there; the Constitution doesn’t indicate that impeachment can only be used if the president endangers elections. Instead it states that he can be impeached for treason and other high crimes and misdemeanors. It is clear that Congress can remove a president who misbehaves, not just about election endangerment. And this makes sense; the separation of powers in our Constitution means that both the president and Congress can claim separate democratic mandates, even conflicting ones. The president isn’t elected dictator for four years, but given limited powers and told to work in conjunction with Congress to exercise authority. If the president misuses that power, it’s clear Congress has the authority to remove him, even in an election year. To believe otherwise is to believe that there are no limits on presidential authority.

Conclusion

It seems clear to me that congressional Republicans are backing Trump due to political expediency rather than the facts as they appear. Yes, it’s true, we don’t have much in the way of direct testimony of what Trump knew and when. But we have ample circumstantial evidence to warrant taking a closer look. Republicans failed to do so, declining to hear from literal Republican heroes like John Bolton and Mick Mulvaney. I understand the reality of their politics but I don’t understand why Republican voters aren’t concerned about the massive power abuses going on in the White House and what that could mean when the other party gets into power. I’ve searched hard for another explanation for the current state of affairs, even looking at Trump’s own defense team, and I found them entirely unconvincing.

Presidential Power Should Be A Top Election Issue

The midterm elections are a month away, and while I have expressed my feelings on voting and the electoral system generally, I have also made several posts trying to boost specific policy ideas that should be more discussed. In the same vein, I’ve been thinking about which issues are top priority in this election, and whether any of them are actually as high impact as their popularity warrants.

The recent Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process, which I think everyone agrees was pretty circus-like from start to finish regardless of political inclination, seems to have sparked more voter enthusiasm in the midterms. And while I’ll grant that Supreme Court nominations have grown in importance, it doesn’t follow that SCOTUS nominations should be a major issue in this election. The oldest justices are left-leaning, and so unlikely to retire in the next two years. Perhaps if there is a fear that Justices Ginsberg or Breyer (aged 85 and 80 respectively) will be forced into retirement due to medical problems, then this election would matter. But the chances of that seem less than 50%.

There are other issues, like immigration, that are highly impactful and also well discussed. If there was a decisive turnover from Republicans to Democrats in Congress, we’d expect some of that to be realized in immigration policy, but unfortunately not that much. Even if Democrats took both houses, this election is still largely being discussed in terms of being pro-Trump or anti-Trump.

This is a problem. Only one party can control the Presidency. Moreover, there are competing ideologies within parties, with many fiscal conservatives frustrated with George W. Bush, many neoconservatives frustrated with Trump, and yes, even some liberals frustrated with Obama on foreign policy. So really it should be said that only one ideology gets to control the White House as well. If the Presidency controls so much about policy, then this is disastrous for representative democracy. Depending on how ideological or political people are, the majority of people will not feel represented by the President, even if the President wins a majority of votes (something that has only happened 3 times in the last 8 presidential elections, going back 30 years).

The solution is clear, but we have no incentive to achieve it: Congress should be the most powerful branch of government. Its membership is large so as to draw from a wide range of views and geographical areas. When it acts, it must find compromises and alignments of interests, unlike the President which acts as a single unit. That was the design in the original constitution, and technically, if Congress worked to assert its control, it could retake such a position in government. However, congressmen have little incentive to do so; going on the record for votes and standing on specific principles is politically dangerous. Better instead to move questions of policy to the executive branch, and leave Congress to simply grandstand politically, never having to be tied down to specific votes.

For example: Barack Obama unilaterally decided to grant legal status and eligibility for federal benefits to millions of illegal immigrants in the United States. I happen to think this was a good policy idea, but if the President can decide what laws to enforce and make his own laws with executive orders, then Congress is vestigial. President Trump actually took a pretty constitutional position and decided to end the DACA program and told Congress to pass the DREAM Act (would have crystallized the DACA program into law). He gave them six months, and they did not make the deadline, despite such action being pretty popular. This is unbelievable. Maybe too many people were playing politics. Maybe Donald Trump is incompetent in getting the legislation passed (he torpedoed a bipartisan bill), but that shouldn’t matter. Congress should be able to pass a bill that a majority of legislators agree with, but the will didn’t exist. No one wanted to be on the wrong side of the political divide of the Trump era, and so no bipartisanship could materialize, guaranteeing further partisanship in the future.

This cycle also delegitimizes Congress, making people look more often to the Presidency and to the courts. Congress is fundamentally tied to winning elections, so if people see Congress as unhelpful or unpopular, Senators and Representatives have even less incentive to do anything that might frustrate voters. That in turn also makes the courts increasingly important, which likely fuels additional democratic frustration, as the courts are still fairly removed from direct democratic influence. But if they are viewed as partisan extensions of the presidency, that just makes even more things rely on a single election where only a single ideology can win every four years.

I think there may be a way out of this mess if political parties made the midterms about Congressional vs Presidential Authority. It’s not always been true that Congress can only define itself in relation to the President, but it may be a useful way to couch constitutional authority in political terms. Reducing presidential power would be a concrete way to oppose Donald Trump, and perhaps even reach alleged small-government conservatives.

The Cato Institute lays out a platform for a resurgent Congress to run on: requiring votes on executive rule changes that will impose costs of $100 million on the economy (already introduced as the REINS Act), updating the Administrative Procedures Act to require courts to interpret administrative authority de novo or independent of the agency’s claimed interpretation (I’m horrified this isn’t already done), and require all fees and penalties collected by the government to be appropriated and spent by the Congress (right now, fees and profits are then spent by the collecting agency, with little oversight).

We don’t have to limit this approach to libertarian wishlist items. Kevin Kosar in Politico details additional approaches (and adds many more words in National Affairs), including an improvement to the robustness of congressional staffing; the executive has armies of bureaucrats working to provide the best information (and sometimes self-aggrandizing propaganda) to the branch (the Executive Office of the President alone includes some 4000 people). Congress has seen shrinking staffing for its oversight and accountability offices like the GAO. Congress should be the most powerful branch and so it should have access to the data and expert information on how best to oversee the actual implementation of policy the executive branch undertakes. Instead what we often have is Congressional staffers directly trying to research regulatory agencies, who are providing their own oversight information to non-expert politicians who often defer to the self-interested agencies. Kosar’s suggestion of a Congressional Regulation Office is also intriguing.

However, just because there is a way to do this, there is no reason to believe Democrats ever had an intention to follow this path during this midterm election. Nor does it mean Republicans will consider it in 2022 if the tables are reversed. Neither have an incentive to discuss constitutional authority when culture war issues are more likely to encourage their base to turn out. Understanding these public choice incentives doesn’t mean we have to live with them though. There is a nebulous role for real ideas in democracy, and it starts with having a discussion about the state of our politics.

The Broken Electoral System: 2018 Edition

This blog voices a lot of frustrations with the American electoral system, and with election season coming up, it’s worth talking about again. The United States is a republic, but voters tend to significantly overestimate the importance and impact of their votes.

To reiterate some of what I said in 2016, your vote in November is unlikely to matter. Most Congressional elections are not close. There may be uncertainty in other, less well polled elections for lower offices, but there’s also a much higher cost to finding out who the candidates are and what they stand for. I consider myself pretty interested in the political process as I write about it often. Nonetheless, I know almost nothing about my state representative and state senator. I can (and will) look them up, and see where they stood on votes, as I can with my Congressional representatives, but this will also require looking up which state votes were important to the topics I care about, something which I may not be able to find out easily and which I’m sure other people do not have the time to do. Moreover, it’s pretty common at the federal level for legislators to try and avoid going on the record and opt instead for voice votes, and I suspect similar incentives dominate at the state level.

If I can find good information on their voting record which reflecting beliefs I find objectionable, it is not clear that I can find information on their electoral opponents. Party affiliation does help, but not every candidate from a party holds all party positions.

Additionally, even close elections that you can find information on do not necessarily map well onto issues you care about. I care about promoting free trade, liberalizing immigration and/or worker visas, ending the war on drugs, and addressing issues in the criminal justice system. Many politicians only side with me on some issues but not others, yet I only have two options for any election that is actually competitive (and again, most are not).

Moreover, most politicians not only don’t share all my positions on important issues, they have really terrible positions on other issues that weren’t even on my radar. Now I have to worry about Republican politicians looking to deport immigrants through abusive crackdowns of civil liberties. I’m also now concerned about Democratic promises to vastly expand Medicare, already the largest entitlement in the federal budget and contributor to runaway healthcare spending. I freely admit that many people do not feel this way; they feel that the “progressive” or “conservative” positions pair well on a wide range of issues, and they can identify with many others who share an overlapping set of beliefs. In this view, the inability for libertarians to find someone who shares their core issues is a function of libertarians having bad or unpopular ideas and that’s why they have no support.

I disagree for several reasons: one is that many people do not vote at all. They may not think much about politics, or if they do, perhaps they realize, as is my thesis here, that there is very little benefit to voting. It seems quite plausible that they hold ideas that differ from party orthodoxy and don’t see a reason to vote when you can only choose between party orthodoxy. Another is that a plurality of registered voters do not have a party affiliation, something that has only been true in the last ~20 years or so. It’s also true that when surveyed, many Americans express rather moderate views on a variety of issues. Finally, it’s worth noting that there is obvious intra-party tension and factionalism. There are serious groups of Republicans who do not like Trump. There are libertarian critics like Justin Amash and Mark Sanford, neoconservatives like Lindsey Graham and John McCain, as well as just stalwart conservatives like everyone at National Review. It also seems to me that there is some strong disagreement in the Democratic Party between neoliberals and progressives, and so it seems absurd that the political system only allows two parties when there is so much diversity of opinion and no way to express it electorally.

Worse still, our current two-headed system promotes partisanship and tribal extremism instead of nuance. I know several people that, when pressed, don’t really believe that the government would do a great job if we had a Medicare-for-all system or had government paid college. Yet these same people feel that if they don’t embrace these left-wing ideas, their only alternative is to be a fan of Trump, whom they reasonably despise. I’ve also experienced the reverse: conservatives that didn’t like Trump, but clearly preferred his tax policy to Hillary Clinton’s and figured Trump might not be so bad. Many now are so concerned at what they perceive as a “Trump Derangement Syndrome” takeover of the Democratic Party, they have nowhere to go but to embrace Trump. If we had a system that promoted the creation of several different groups and smaller parties, we’d have a much easier time finding a diversity of opinions and ideas.

Unfortunately, our current system also takes issues that many people generally agree are bad and just ignores them. There are policy positions I would consider to be completely disqualifying for any public servant, such as approval of a vast warrantless domestic spying program costing tens of billions of dollars a year or the murder of children through drone strikes by the president with no authorization of war from Congress. Nonetheless, there is no point to disqualify candidates from my support due to these issues because they have been widely ignored by all candidates in the major parties. Complaining about the two party system is the classic archetype of the crazy libertarian going off the rails again, but I hope others are genuinely saddened that our electoral system doesn’t offer a way to utilize our vote to oppose the murder of children by our government.

And for non-competitive elections, there may be competitive primaries, which aren’t really great systems either, as I’ve discussed before. If the primary is deciding the eventual winner of the election, it doesn’t make sense that a plurality of voters of a single party should determine the winner of a general election seat in a primary election where 90% of possible voters didn’t vote at all. For example, in the notable dethroning of high ranking Democrat Joe Crowley in NY-14, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won with less than 16,000 votes, in a district where some 690,000 people live, presumably with some 300,000 possible voters. PredictIt currently gives the Democrat a ~85% chance to win, although the market isn’t very liquid.

In less democratic countries, there is overt voter fraud and intimidation. The United States doesn’t really have that problem. It nonetheless does have odd echoes of a “rigged” electoral system like one you would find in low-trust corrupt authoritarian countries with poor rule of law. For example, having one side consistently win a landslide, non-competitive election (like most congressional seats) seems like something you’d find in a “fake” democracy. Having a “competitive” election between two candidates you didn’t pick and you don’t know well which doesn’t allow you to express dissatisfaction with important government programs sounds like a “fake” democracy too.

I should admit that I don’t love the idea of hyper direct democracy either. Even if voters had a reason to learn about the political system, I’m unsure if they would promote good ideas. In all honesty, I probably side with political elites over average voters on a lot of issues. That doesn’t mean I believe there is no room for reform. I’ve discussed many different possible ways to improve our system, and in fact a few weeks ago I mentioned the important opportunity Approval Voting is getting this year. Yet none of those ideas will be seriously discussed this election season.

To summarize, our election system has a variety of important and fundamental flaws. Candidates are picked in nonrepresentative primaries, many elections are noncompetitive, voter information is scarce, while voter choices are limited to two candidates who do not represent the broader electorate’s views on many issues. Other important issues are just broadly ignored while the system promotes discord and extremism. Yet there will be a significant amount of discussion about how important it is to vote in November. With these flaws I’ve outlined, I apologize in advance if I’m unimpressed by such claims.

If you believe that you see a large difference in a particular race for office that you think might be competitive, that’s great, and feel free to vote. But don’t feel bad if you believe voting is a waste of time. Maybe you don’t like Trump, but you also wish all the Democratic candidates weren’t just talking about deficit busting economic policies with poor fiscal outlooks. That’s fine because there are ways to engage politically that are more important than voting. That includes addressing our broken electoral system and raising awareness about how this doesn’t have to be the way things operate; approval voting offers a real alternative that’s being attempted right now. It’s also worth mentioning that Congress’ decline in power relative to the President means that partisan politics is now more infectious; only one of a very few competing ideologies can control the White House and the immense power it has been ceded. Meanwhile, a powerful Congress is made up of hundreds of individuals, allowing for diversity of opinion, broad coalitions, and compromise. Congress should be taking back power it has ceded to the executive branch; I would hope readers would want to make this the major election talking point it should be, instead of the libertarian-rant-footnote it is now.

In conclusion, civic engagement is important; political awareness is vital to a thriving democracy. Nonetheless our electoral system is broken in such a way that voting is not the vital civic duty it is often claimed to be. If you are concerned about the partisanship that created Trump, if you feel like a world where facts don’t matter ought to be changed, then voting isn’t enough to change these trends. That does not mean there is nothing to be done; on the contrary, reforms are needed on a more fundamental level, including changes to our voting system, primary system, and party system. Discussing and promoting those ideas is the best way forward.

Model-Breaking Observations in the Senate

It’s rare when an idea, or piece of evidence, comes along that is so impressive, it forces you to rethink your entire model of the world. The recently released Feinstein-Burr encryption bill has done just that.

It has been described as “technically illiterate”, “chilling”, “ridiculous”, “scary”, and “dangerous“. Not only are the issues with the bill fairly obvious to anyone with a cursory understanding of encryption, the problems are of such magnitude that it thwarts any attempt to understand the Senators’ actions. Let’s look at the effects of the hypothetical law.

The biggest issue is that this bill will significantly damage the United States’ national security. We live in a highly insecure world where cyberattacks, both foreign and domestic, are omnipresent. The Feinstein-Burr bill would fundamentally reduce the security of all technology infrastructure in the country. Jonathan Zdziarski in a blog linked above, gives some details:

Due to the backdooring of encryption that this legislation implies, American electronics will be dangerously unsafe compared to foreign versions of the same product. Diplomats, CEOs, scientists, researchers, politicians, and government employees are just a few of the people whose data will be targeted by foreign governments and hackers both while traveling, but also whenever they’re connected to a network.

That’s awful, and even if you have the most America-first, protect-American-lives mentality, weakening American encryption is the worst thing you could do; it literally endangers American lives.

I think there’s also a strong case to be made that this will do very little to combat terrorism. Unbreakable, strong encryption is widely available on the internet for free, forever; if bad people want to use it, they will. Moreover, terrorism, as awful as it is, is relatively rare; Americans are about a 1000x more likely to die non-terrorism related homicide. And many more “common” homicides occur due to heat-of-the-moment arguments, which means there would be no encrypted messages detailing conspiracies. All this bill does is remove the ability of average, non-technically inclined Americans to secure their data.

And the people whose data will be most at risk will be those consumers who are less educated or less technically adept. Better informed consumers might have the ability to install foreign encryption software on their phone to keep their data safe, but most uninformed consumers just use default settings. Thus, criminals who try and commit identity theft will greatly benefit from this legislation; they wouldn’t usually bother targeting knowledgeable users anyway, and with security stripped away from phones, it will be much easier to steal data from susceptible users. The people most in need of help to protect their data will be disproportionately harmed by this legislation.

On the other hand, most companies are not uniformed users. They have IT departments who understand the value of encrypting their data, and they will continue to purchase strong security software, even if it is no longer sold in the United States. Foreign produced software works just as well. Banning strong encryption will debilitate the American technology sector, one of the biggest and most important parts of the economy. This will cost Americans jobs and diminish America’s influence on the future of the world, as technological innovation moves overseas. But this isn’t just bad for Americans; it’s not easy to simply move an entire company or product overseas. There are huge capital investments these companies have made that will not be available in other countries immediately, if ever, and this will set back the global technology industry billions if not trillions of dollars.

So this really begs the question of why Senators Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr introduced this bill; given their stated obsession with national security, and given the horrific effect this bill would have on American national security, there’s no good way to resolve their stated beliefs with their actions. Here are a couple theories to explain their behavior, and some discussion as to why each respective theory is unsatisfying.

The Senators are actually foreign spies purposefully trying to weaken American national security. Obviously, if this theory is true, it’s self-evidently very bad that our elected officials not only don’t represent us, but actually represent foreign governments likely trying to harm Americans. Sure it’s quite unlikely since it’s very difficult to become a U.S. Senator at all, and no spy agency would send agents in with a plan to become a U.S. Senator. Whether they were turned into foreign agents after being elected, I really can only speculate. But it strikes me as improbable. Nonetheless, it is true that this legislation is exactly what foreign security agencies would want to introduce to make the United States more vulnerable. I was curious, so I checked the constitutional definition of treason as well as the Espionage Act, but it seems that you need to literally give secrets to other people, not just make it easier for them to obtain. But there is that one case where a high ranking official is in trouble for storing documents insecurely…

They’re power hungry politicians. The idea of the Senators being foreign spies is bit far-fetched. But what know for sure is that they are politicians, which means they chose a career path that would give them more power to change things. Maybe Burr and Feinstein are sick of technology companies telling the FBI that they can’t assist their investigations, and they wanted to put them in their place. If this theory is true, it’s pretty self-evidently evil; people in power using their power indiscriminately to harm citizens is the exact problem Thomas Jefferson identified in the Declaration of Independence. Of course, it’s not usually a big problem, because James Madison helped construct a whole host of ways to check the power of government. Of course, the most important check for our situation is that senators are voted in by the people. So as long as people know about this dumb bill, they’ll kick these guys out…right?

Hanlon’s Razor (origin disputed) states that one should “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” This theory would mean that two sitting, highly experienced U.S. Senators are too stupid to realize the ill effects this will have on national and economic security. Obviously, congress has to make laws in areas that its members are not always familiar with…but Burr and Feinstein are the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the Intelligence Committee. If anyone knows about intelligence, they do. And Feinstein is even on the Judiciary Subcomittee on Technology, Privacy, and the Law! If even these people are too stupid to understand what the effects of their own policies are, we might as well stop sending representatives to a legislature at all and just have run-of-the-mill uneducated voters pass everything directly through referendum. Sure, they’d have no idea what they’re doing, but apparently neither do Senators!

What I think is most likely, and most terrifying, is that American Democracy incentivizes members of Congress to make bad policy if it’s politically beneficial. With all the aides and staff Senators have, plus the amount of pressure they receive from outside groups, it seems unlikely they never heard about the bad effects of the bill. Yet, they did it anyway. Given they don’t work for law enforcement, there is no Frank Underwood endgame for passing this bill; banning encryption doesn’t directly allow Burr and Feinstein to look at their political enemies’ phones (…probably), just criminals and the police. So then maybe their incentive was to appear tough on crime and terrorism, consequences be damned. Richard Burr is in a reelection year in North Carolina, so let’s look at the effect this horrible bill has had on his chances to win according to Predictit.org:

Primary was in mid-March, bill introduced in early April

As you can see, the bill had very little effect on his perceived chances. Now, it could be that voters have already factored in Senator Burr’s position on ~~destroying~~ defending American national security, and he needed to introduce this legislation to maintain his position. But it looks identical to a situation where North Carolina voters couldn’t care less about Senator Burr’s position on encryption, and his introduction of legislation consequently had no effect on his reelection chances. If it’s the former, then we are in serious trouble because our legislative representatives are incentivized to make horrible policies because voters aren’t well informed. If it’s the latter, then we have to dismiss this explanation and go back to one of the other three.

Whatever the explanation is, it reflects poorly on how the government constructs policy, and it reflects poorly on American Democracy. Moreover, assuming any of those discussed theories are true, they imply massive issues that will be difficult or impossible to solve. Reforming democracy as many progressives would like, through campaign finance, wouldn’t even address any of these issues; it is the technology corporations and privacy NGOs which have been advocating for more privacy and making unbreakable encryption more accessible, while law enforcement and other government agencies have been advocating for less security. But as far as I can tell, even they haven’t demanded anything like this bill. Thus, more campaign spending by private groups would help, not hinder good policy.

No matter how you look at it, this bill indicates a big failure for democratic government and illustrates the dangers discretionary state power.

Photo credit: Caïn venant de tuer son frère Abel, by Henry Vidal in Tuileries Garden in Paris, France, photo by Alex E. Proimos, licensed under CC-BY-2.0.

Tag: Congress

Biden and Trump on Policy

Great Power Relations

COVID-19 and Catastrophic Risk

Congressional vs Executive Power

Liberalizing Immigration

Housing Policy

Additional Issues

Climate Change

Fed Independence

Trade

Criminal Justice and the War on Drugs

Counterpoints

Taxes

Healthcare

Justices

The Big Picture

A Note on the LP Candidate

A 2020 Policy Platform Proposal

Congressional Power

Liberalizing Immigration

Federal Incentives to Build More Housing in U.S. Cities

Decriminalization of All Drugs

Catastrophic Risk

Other Topics

Candidates’ Priorities Matter Too

Observations on Impeachment

The Transcript

Witnesses and Evidence

Senate Trial

Non Defense Arguments

Defenses

Conclusion

Presidential Power Should Be A Top Election Issue

The Broken Electoral System: 2018 Edition

Model-Breaking Observations in the Senate