Donald
Trump's detractors are overestimating the powers of the Electoral College—and,
at the same time, underestimating the politicization of the CIA.
DECEMBER 16, 2016
Ten—count
‘em, 10—of the 538 electors in the Electoral College wrote an open letter to the director of
National Intelligence, directing him to brief all electors days before
they meet in their respective state capitals to certify the election of
Donald J. Trump. Just one of the signatories is a Republican. The other
nine are Democrat electors, including Nancy Pelosi’s daughter. (At least 46
more Democrat electors are reported to
have signed on.)
The dream of this “Pelosi Ten” is, of course, to de-legitimize and
possibly derail the results of the November 8 presidential election, from
which Trump received 306 electoral votes. They asked for this briefing so
that the body could be “informed” before they each
vote their consciences—all 538 of them—never mind the millions they
were entrusted to represent. Of course, this is also about building a
case for abolishing the Electoral College down the road.
These electors claim that the election isn’t valid, because the
Russians may have tampered with the election to get Trump—allegedly the
Russians’ fave candidate—elected. Why? Because a leak from some anonymous
source about a report from the CIA seems to insinuate just that.
The
Electoral College Isn’t Meant To Prevent Someone From Taking Office
As both a former candidate for elector and a former CIA analyst
myself, let me say two things about all this:
1. The Electoral College is simply not equipped to act as a
deliberative body. Voters voted for electors, who were entrusted to vote for
the voters’ choices—not for completely unknown people who would get into a
debate about it all and then vote for whomever. That’s why voters’ ballots at
their polling places were marked “Electors FOR [candidates’ names.]”
2. The CIA has long been highly susceptible to politicization. I
suspect it is especially so after eight years of an administration that
politicized every department and agency it touched.
The underlying pipedream of the “Pelosi Ten” is that the Electoral
College was set up to prevent “someone like Trump” from taking office.
Why, pray tell, wasn’t it also devised to prevent “someone like Hillary
Clinton” from taking office? Or Richard Nixon?
If electors are to certify anything, it is that Americans went
through the due process of electing their president.
Whether any foreign actors tried to influence the election—which they have
in the past—is irrelevant to the process of voting. Neither is the question of
whether an elector personally believes the winner is fit to serve.
The process is over. Each party deliberated—via the
primaries, conventions, campaigning, and debates—and produced their
candidates. Then we had a general election and tabulated the
results. Everyone on both sides concurred with this process—until the
results were in, and all Hell broke loose on the left side of the aisle.
We
Need a High School Civics Lesson On The Electoral College
We should all know that the Electoral College was devised as a
safeguard against mob rule, not as a support for it. Hamilton extolled the fact
that electors did not meet in one place, but in their respective states, where
decentralization would make them less susceptible to pressures. Of
course, today, with the internet and all the threats to Republican
electors by angry Clinton supporters, there will still be pressures. I
imagine Moveon.org (funded, by the way, by George Soros and foreign money) is
planning protests in the state capitals on Monday when the Electoral College
meets.
No matter who the president-elect may be, electors are not in the
least equipped to be a “deliberative body” as the letter from the 10 electors
claim it is, citing the newly chic name of Alexander Hamilton.
Few people
today even know what the Electoral College is. We can thank radical
education reform for that. Civics used to be a requirement for graduation from
high school, but no more. The
good news is that you can compensate for some of that intellectual theft by
checking out this five-minute video on
the Electoral College from Prager University.
In the meantime, consider the electors: Who are these 538 people?
And how did they get picked to be electors?
The
Electoral College Is Not a Deliberative Body
Let me tell you a little story. I was a delegate to a
Maryland Republican Party Convention in 2008. It was near the end of the
session and the hotel ballroom had thinned out a bit, but there was a still
some unfinished business.
“Now we have to select the members of the Electoral
College,” the State GOP chairman announced. Granted, Maryland was a
deep blue state, and Republican electors were unlikely to meet in Annapolis to
vote for John McCain that December.
Nevertheless, it might interest you to know about the process in
which I participated. The chairman directed delegates to meet in various
corners of the ballroom according to their congressional district. Once
gathered, we chose someone from our district to represent the GOP nominee,
should he win the state.
There were maybe 15 of us gathered from District Eight. And it was
a veritable “Oh, pick me, pick me!” kind of thing when we surveyed who was
interested. (Perhaps the Maryland Democrats had a bit more vetting than
that. But every state party goes about it in their own way.)
Then all went back to their seats, and we voted collectively for
the electors who would represent the state’s senate seats: two. One of them was
the State GOP’s longtime hardworking office secretary. The whole process lasted
maybe 20 minutes, tops.
Moral of the story: this is not the stuff of which any
“deliberative body” is made. If Alexander Hamilton could survey this
picture, I think he’d concur. Electors today are, for the most part, loyal
party activists chosen to take on the ceremonial role of certification.
And it’s an honor to be chosen. But that doesn’t qualify the 538 members to be
a “deliberative body.” Not by a long shot.
CIA
Is as Susceptible to Politicization as Any Other Agency
Of course, I
haven’t read the CIA report about Russian hacking. I’m not sure who has.
But cyber warfare—by Russia or any other foreign actor (George
Soros-funded globalists, anyone?)—is a very big deal. And it’s too bad our
nation seems to be so behind the curve on that. Whether such hacking occurred
—and whether the intent of such hacking (assuming the Wikileaks
information was due to hacking rather than being an inside leak by
disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters) was to elect Trump—is not only unknown,
but beside the point.
More likely
the intent would be to undermine the U.S. electoral process, an intent which
seems to be getting the full cooperation of the Pelosi Ten. At best, the claim
is barely even debatable, considering the Democrats’ stance on Russia till now.
In any case, as Winston Churchill put it, “Russia is a riddle wrapped in a
mystery inside an enigma.”
First, I
will say I’ve no doubt that there are very fine people analyzing intelligence
at the CIA. Such folks are professionals, able to put passions aside and look
hard at the evidence before making any conclusions. I just wonder how many
such analysts remain, given reports from 50 whistleblowers
about political manipulation of intelligence analyses during
the Obama administration.
Bureaucracy
Curses Even the CIA
The sad truth is that intelligence analysts live in a great big
fat government bureaucracy, further complicated by the academic nature of its
analytical work. Its social dynamics can be compared to the politicized
environments found at university social science departments. There are pecking
orders, turf wars, peer reviews, political correctness, and a tendency
towards left-of-center ideological conformity.
Add to this
picture the possibility that the poohbahs above have no qualms about using and
abusing analysts’ work for political purposes,
and I’m very inclined to believe in the department’s politicization.
No
doubt such politicization went
into hyperdrive during the Obama Administration. Take,
for example, how the National Security Strategy of 2015 was obviously
written to enshrine gender politics
into the military. Attorney General Eric Holder’s re-writing of Title VII of the
1964 Civil Rights Act—to claim out of the blue that the word “sex”
also means “gender identity”—is just one more example of an extremely
politicized act.
There
Has Always Been Politicization Among CIA Analysts
The leftward politicization of the Agency was a work in progress,
even when I was there during the Reagan era. My career as an analyst at
the CIA was not long-term. I resigned after about nine years to be a
stay-at-home mother. But I believe being a more “junior” analyst who worked in
more than one office allowed me to see more clearly how difficult it was for
some—especially more senior analysts—to put politics aside and resist
groupthink.
Several of my fellow analysts were what you’d today call
“politically correct.” For example, they railed loudly against the nomination
of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. They didn’t hide their utter contempt
for President Reagan, particularly when it came to his policies on the Soviet
Union. And I would often hear them refer to anyone who expressed concern about
communism as “a screamer.”
This caused
me no small amount of cognitive dissonance: my mission was to preserve
freedom and constitutional rule of law. In retrospect, I don’t believe
most who expressed such views really believed them, as much as they followed
the pressures of groupthink. Young professionals always take their cues from
the mentors and chiefs who write up their performance appraisals. We can
hope that most career analysts bear up well under such social pressures, but
that’s difficult for any human being, even if they manage to avoid it affecting
their work. My immunity was due in part to my greater ambition: to
eventually become a stay-at-home mother,
rather than develop a long career there.
But I wasn’t fully immune, because I tended not to express
opinions that could get me derided by my peers. Perhaps this is why one of my
chiefs once asked me to do something political and, I thought, weird. She
claimed that President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative violated the ABM
Treaty.
So one day, she handed me a thick computer print-out of quotes
about the ABM Treaty from American policy-makers. She
basically wanted me to dig up and highlight anything in their words that would
expose a violation. Never mind that I was an analyst, not anybody’s research
assistant. Never mind that there were legions of Washington Postand
other media reporters who did that stuff. Essentially, a superior at the CIA
asked me to do a form of opposition research on American policy makers. (I
decided to “just say no.”)
Anyway, that was way back then. I can’t imagine what it is
like today. I do still have faith that there are highly professional
analysts at work there. But I also suspect that the partisan residue on the
walls of Langley these days is capable of spawning a politically motivated
report about a presidential election the Democrats unexpectedly lost.
Stella
Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow Stella on Twitter.