I’ve been watching the growing controversy over the refusal of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to bring various proposed legislation concerning foreign interference in Federal elections to the Senate floor. For example, his reaction to the recent is reported in Roll Call:
The House has sent two major election security bills to the Senate since Democrats regained the majority. McConnell has sidelined both. He has made clear that he believes control of elections should reside primarily with state and local governments. …
McConnell defended his position on Russian interference in the 2016 election, acknowledging that it happened, and he said that the Obama administration should have done more to protect the U.S. election system. Members of that administration, including former Vice President Joe Biden and Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, said McConnell prevented the administration from being more public about the Kremlin’s 2016 attacks, claiming he would not sign a bipartisan statement condemning the Russian actions.
“Let me make this crystal clear for the hyperventilating hacks who haven’t actually followed this issue. Every single member of the Senate agrees that Russian meddling was real and is real,” said McConnell. “We all agree that the federal government, state governments and the private sector all have obligations to take this threat seriously and bolster our defenses.”
How about the Foreign Influence Reporting in Elections (FIRE) Act, Securing America’s Federal Elections (SAFE), and other such legislation? What does he think of them? Scott Anderson, et al, on Lawfare discuss McConnell’s response:
Schumer later moved for unanimous consent to consider the SAFE Act. But Senate Majority Leader McConnell objected, calling the bill “partisan legislation from the Democratic House of Representatives relating to American elections.” Referring to Democrats’ flagship House bill addressing a range of voting and election-related issues, H.R. 1, McConnell stated:
This is the same Democratic House that made its first big priority for this Congress a sweeping partisan effort to rewrite all kinds of the rules of American politics. Not to achieve greater fairness, but to give themselves a one-sized political benefit. The particular bill that the Democratic leader is asking to move by unanimous consent is so partisan, that it received one, just one, Republican vote over in the House. So clearly this request is not a serious effort to make a law. Clearly something so partisan that it only received one single solitary Republican vote in the House is not going to travel through the Senate by unanimous consent. It is very important that we maintain the integrity and security of our elections in our country. Any Washington involvement in that task needs to be undertaken with extreme care and on a thoroughly bipartisan basis. Obviously this legislation is not that. It’s just a highly partisan bill from the same folks who spent two years hyping up a conspiracy theory about President Trump and Russia and who continue to ignore this administration’s progress in correcting the Obama administration’s failures on this subject in the 2018 election. Therefore I object.
McConnell’s claim that the House GOP refusing to vote for it means the Democrat-written legislation is partisan is a very poor, even shameful argument. There are several reasons the House GOP may have given it a futile down-thumb, from technical reasons to partisan reasons, including their own partisan reasons, such as it might interfere with their elections to simply, It’s not a Republican-sponsored act and therefore we won’t vote for it, which would be the mark of a very insecure party. Incidentally, a lot of GOP behavior over the last twenty+ years has resembled that reasoning.
But, in case you’ve been puzzling over the hashtag #MoscowMitch, this is its origin.
I was curious about the wording of partisan national security legislation might look like, so I tracked down FIRE here. It’s quite short and … not very partisan. In fact, not at all. It strikes me as being quite neutral. It boils down, in my untrained eye, to “If any member of a political campaign is contacted by a foreign individual, it must be reported to an individual responsible for reporting such incidents, and that individual must report it to the FBI within a week. There are exceptions, and there are fines.”
And it’s that last part that interested me the most. How do you punish a campaign for accepting foreign-supplied intelligence?
SEC. 4. CRIMINAL PENALTIES.
Section 309(d)(1) of the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (52 U.S.C. 30109(d)(1)) is amended by adding at the end the following new subparagraphs:
‘‘(E) Any person who knowingly and willfully commits a violation of subsection (j) or (b)(9) of section 304 or section 302(e)(6) shall be fined not more than $500,000, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.
‘‘(F) Any person who knowingly or willfully conceals or destroys any materials relating to a reportable foreign contact (as defined in section 304(j)) shall be fined not more than $1,000,000, imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.’’.
It seems woefully inadequate, especially if the guilty campaign ends up winning the election by, shall we say, a hairsbreadth? Of course, we could go on and on about how a properly patriotic, or at least loyal, campaign wouldn’t require such laws, and, indeed, in the past that has been true, but in the Age of Trump, of a man who really doesn’t seem to understand the operational realities of governing, it seems that we need such legislation.
But what if the offending campaign wins? Here we are, at the very edge of democracy, trying to define how elections are run, and this is where it’s possible to run into very hairy situations. Should this legislation deprive the winners of their fruits, instead of a measly fine that could be cancelled by an unscrupulous President?
Do we need a new Amendment to clarify the situation? The bitterness resulting from a trial in which the winners become the losers would be a problematic social situation, to say the least.
It’s a problem worth thinking about.
In fact, this may be one of those situations in which the communal ethics of any people undertaking the democratic experiment must, for want of a better analogy, clear a certain bar. I have often felt that the activity we call nation-building, which consists of both material assistance and, more importantly, the installation of a democratic government, is, at least in the latter part of the definition, a waste of time.
Democracy is, quite frankly, a lot of work: the citizenry, in addition to working for a living and all the other distractions that go along with life, also must keep up with all the complex subjects that come with self-government. In particular, this includes the concept of disinterest when it comes to actually being a member of government. Disinterest is, in this sense, the opposite of self-interest, where self-interest is the gathering of tangible benefits.
Today, we label people who use their job in their self-interest when they work in the public sector as corrupt. But this is not some eternal concept of Western Civ, but rather an innovation. Several hundred years ago, it was quite common to use a seat in the British Parliament to acquire wealth, and no one blinked at it. I regret that I do not know when, or who, came up with the idea that the use of a position, at least while occupying it, to accumulate wealth or other perks is not in the public interest and should be considered corrupt.
Looping back around to nation-building, this is one of those key concepts that I think must be evolved by the society in question, and not simply assumed by the nation-builders to exist. Our communal ignorance of political history comes to the fore in this situation; we think democracy is easy and doesn’t require ethical / moral adjustments, because we don’t have that learning, that communal memory. But I think that a society must come to an agreement that those who will participate in government must have, as a core ethical concept, that of disinterest; otherwise, the system becomes unstable as people fight for positions and use those positions to engage in behaviors contraindicated for the nation as a whole. A person’s self-interest isn’t necessarily aligned with a country’s self-interest.
That moral position is really one of the key pillars on which democracy is built, and when someone comes along who just doesn’t subscribe to it, yet wins approval of the people, it tells me two things: the people have either been fooled or have lost their moral footing, and that nation is in trouble.
