This Is Not News

A bunch of threads are colliding against each other in my head right now. Reuters is reporting on a new poll that shows a majority of Americans want a timeline to withdraw troops from Iraq. In the meantime, there have been numerous reports about the Congressional Democrats’ problems coalescing behind any particular proposal to try and stop the war before Bush leaves office. (Here’s Dick Polman from the Inquirer on the subject, and right now the front page of MyDD.com has several competing perspectives on the subject.)

Meanwhile, I’m putting together review material for my American Philosophy students, and going over some of the Anti-Federalist writings that opposed the Constitution because they thought the new national government was too powerful and insufficiently responsive to the people – some thought that the checks and balances that we all learned about in grade school would just gum up the works and keep the government from doing what the public wanted. Which was precisely what folks like Madison and Hamilton had in mind, of course. And many times I think that’s a good thing. Right now, though, maybe not so much.

Not News launched right before the 2000 election, and so it should not be too much of a surprise that we spent a lot of time in our forums in November and December talking about what do about the voting system. And at the time, I was a proponent of using electronic voting machines, ideally ones with photographs of candidates.

Well, the execution of that idea hasn’t exactly proven me prescient. There have been reports of buggy code, impossible-to-verify record trails, buggy code, and all sorts of other problems. So Rush Holt has reintroduced H.R. 811, an amendment to the Help America Vote Act that would mandate that every voting system produce a paper record.

I will say this: I still think electronic voting systems have potential. Every paper system of balloting has problems with spoiled ballots, and I’d like to see those reduced. Truth be told, I’m not sure I was ever really able to verify that the big machine with the levers was actually recording my vote, either. But in 2000, I imagined that a country that’s managed to make ATMs ubiquitous would be able to come up with better interfaces than we’ve gotten. I was wrong. So adding one more layer of verifiability through paper receipts is probably a good idea. But if we do put a whole new system into place, again, can we please put the time and money into making sure it works thsi time?

The Senate held a rare Saturday session today to attempt to vote on the same to-the-point non-binding resolution opposing the escalation in Iraq that the House passed yesterday. They were four votes shy of the 60 they needed to invoke cloture and move to a final vote. Now, since we’re talking about something non-binding anyway, I don’t have a problem with saying that the 56 senators who voted for cloture supported the resolution, although there might be one or two that would try to wiggle and say they were just in favor of moving to a final vote.

The problem is, if you need 60 votes to pass anything, and you can’t get that many on a non-binding resolution, it doesn’t seem feasible to think that you can get 60 on any binding legislation that would change policy in Iraq. The closest thing I can think of right now is Jack Murtha’s plan to attach riders to appropriations bills setting certain requirements for troop readiness, equipment, training, and recovery time that would reduce the number of troops Bush can send into Iraq. Now, I think that’s a constitutionally valid option – Congress has the power to govern the construction of the armed forces, and basic standards of readiness fall into that area, in my opinion. And the beauty of attaching these restrictions to an appropriations bill is that if Republicans try to block, they’ll be the ones preventing the military from getting funding.

But I have to admit I’m not terribly confident that such a tactic will work. I think the media coverage, much of the public, and even some Democratics members of Congress will see putting those restrictions on funding to be an act of blocking the funding, especially since I’ll bet the ranch that Bush would veto such a bill and you’ll never find enough votes to override it. I sure hope I’m wrong about that, though.