Make Voting Harder? No, Let’s Make Running Harder
As Republicans make voting more difficult, we should protect the nation by creating basic standards for who can run for office
A few years ago, I groused to some friends that I could pull together a better U.S. senate. I could, I thought, in a couple of hours, just selecting from my colleagues.
At the time, I didn’t know that conservative intellectual William F. Buckley, Jr., had once had a similar idea — “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand people listed in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University,” he liked to say.
But my take is different. Unlike Buckley, I would not look to a person’s ideological views (his bon mot being a backhanded slap at the liberal views at Harvard, he was more than happy to take his chances on finding more conservatives away from Cambridge). Among my colleagues, I would look only to their character, energy, and sensibleness. Are they good at what they do? Are they generally happy, curious souls, or do they find ways to crush people’s spirits and make them miserable on the job?
Okay, I see I’m already likely sorting people by worldview.
We rightly venerate voting, but as Winston Churchill wrote, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” (Jimmy Kimmel’s impromptu on-the-street quizzes with passersby prove Churchill’s point.) Voters too busy or disinterested to understand the major issues of the day are a real problem for a democratic republic. That’s why the founders emphasized that a robust free press was essential.
But truly ignorant candidates, and those who choose to play dumb, are far worse. These are the people who gaslight us daily by telling us things that are not true, who call us socialists, who threaten to take away Medicare and Social Security, calling them “entitlements,” and who want to remake America in some hard-line Evangelical/Catholic version of a theocratic autocracy and call it “greatness.”
If the former president, his key advisors, and his trusted pals in Congress are not working for Vladimir Putin, they might as well be. A frightening number of Trumpists in Congress who claim that others are un-American are straight-up traitors. Precisely 147 of them, and that doesn’t count hundreds of Big Lie–espousing candidates at the state level.
We must set basic standards for people who want to be our leaders and representatives. Choosing from the people who meet the basic age and citizenship requirements isn’t working out, at least not for the vast majority of us who want representatives who understand that politics is about finding compromise and — something we never worried about too much before — sticking to your oath of office.
Perhaps we need candidates to take an Oath of Running for Office publicly before their name appears on a ballot, something on the order of,
I hereby publicly affirm that I believe in the principles of the Constitution and of our democratic republic, in the necessity of the press, and in making voting easier. Likewise, I affirm I do not have a hankering (much less a deep, abiding love) for any autocratic leader around the globe. I believe in making decisions based on the best facts on the ground, not on an alternate version of reality. I have no desire to force my religious beliefs on anyone else. At no time in my life have I defrauded the government. I do not think Stars and Bars flag lapel pins are a good idea. I will abide by the results of this U.S. civics test I am about to take and not whine about being cheated out of running for office because I failed. My fingers are not crossed behind my back.
As Dan Rather and Elliot Kirshner wrote recently, it’s a question of fitness. In a wide-ranging interview on the Ezra Klein Show that also touches on her pertinent new podcast, “Ultra,” about pro-Nazi sedition in this country in 1940, Rachel Maddow says that the moral of the Trump story is “don’t give bad people lots of power. Because when you do, things break. And in a certain fundamental way.”
They are not talking about “fitness” in the way Republicans have been of late, which revolves around ageism and cynical misstatements about stuttering or people who are recovering from a stroke. Essentially, they ask the same question I’m asking: Can we find a way to keep non-serious, untruthful, bigoted, self-dealing, and potentially traitorous people from gaining political power?
While Republicans busy themselves curtailing voting, the majority of us should think about whether new laws might curtail who can run for office. Do it by Constitutional amendment (we already have section 3 of the 14th Amendment for those who currently hold office and really should put it to use). People much wiser than me can work out those details. That’s the point: we need wiser people taking the lead in public affairs, no matter what their political ideology.
Unworkable? Unconstitutional? The very definition of a slippery slope? Yes, yes, and yes. But how can it be unreasonable for us to demand some basic standards for people who want to run for public office? If you have to be “this tall” to get on an amusement park ride, you should have to be tall enough, in both public service experience and general psychological fitness, to have your name appear on a ballot — before you take us all for a ride.
In other words, to climb into a key public leadership role you must not only be a citizen of a certain age, but you must also be a big boy (or girl) of reasonably sound mind. You can’t have pals who openly call themselves “dirty tricksters.” That sort of thing.
For all their self-professed business acumen, Republicans are more than happy to elect people who have zero experience in public affairs. But you don’t expect to be a senior-level carpenter without working your way up the pay scale with proven experience; no one at a corporate job would expect to become a director without having worked for some years as a people manager.
Most of us have seen memes expressing the same frustration — say, of the airline pilot announcing to passengers before takeoff that he’s never trained to fly but is an outsider who “tells it like it is” and wants to shake things up.
We need some level of career tracks for politicians or some bare minimum of real experience in public service so voters at least have a track record to look at so we don’t end up with more Lauren Boeberts, Tommy Tubervilles, or, say, a Herschel Walker in Congress.
Can we find a way to keep grifters, insurrectionists, sociopaths, and run-of-the-mill lunatics from running for office? Our democracy must protect itself against shameless narcissists who think they know a ton but know next to nothing, except how to manipulate the media and garner attention.
Shouldn’t there be some level of a bar to admission for higher level state and federal positions that affect all of us, that indeed can affect the entire world?
A few suggestions:
· Grifters. The 5–4 Citizen’s United decision in 2010 was an abomination that led to super PACs and endless dark-money backing politicians. As has been said many, many times, get money out of politics as much as possible. Publicly fund much briefer campaigns, and say goodbye to much of the grifter class of candidate.
· Celebrity candidates. For congressional or presidential candidacies, require a certain amount of prior public or community service (PTA service, town council, dogcatcher, whatever). If they have to actually do something other than flash their veneers to run for the Senate or the presidency — so long to most of the know-nothing narcissists.
· Mob-speakers. Pass a law barring anyone given to making veiled threats from running for any office, even the local PTA board. For that matter, disqualify anyone who even once refers to a political opponent as an “enemy” or who attacks journalists as anything akin to “enemies of the people.”
· Promulgators of disinformation. Make this a three-strikes-and-you’re-out sort of thing. An independent, non-partisan election body will decide, and you can appeal to a higher “court” of experts in the field. Then, if you are just making stuff up, pushing conspiracies, hurting individuals, or undermining trust in institutions, your name will not appear on any ballot. If you can be appropriately banned from social media platforms, you should be banned from the ballot.
· Run-of-the-mill lunatics. For state- and federal-level candidates, require a psychological evaluation by an independent, nonpartisan panel of psychiatrists. (Maybe we need a Supreme Court of Psychiatry, one with the power to also unseat supreme court justices who prove themselves too rabidly ideological to serve out their term.) Or maybe just a Q&A in front of a fifth-grade class of public schoolers could decide your fate? “Kids, what do you think of this person?”
· Religious zealots. As the grandson of a minister and as a former deacon and elder in a Presbyterian church, I think I can pray: God save us from zealots who think their religious liberty means that we all must live by their moral code. If it can be shown clearly that this is your definition of “religious liberty,” you can, of course, keep the faith, but your name won’t appear on the ballot. (You can take your complaints to Justice Amy Coney Barrett.)
If you consider yourself an “originalist” and look to the founding fathers for answers to such questions as “What kind of person should be allowed to run for public office?”, ask yourself this: With whom would Franklin, Jefferson, Madison or Hamilton rather dine to learn about what has happened with the country they founded — attorney and constitutional scholar Jamie Raskin or former Shooters Bar owner and QAnon fan Lauren Boebert? With whom would Abraham Lincoln (founding father of the Republican Party) choose to dine? The twice-impeached and popular-vote-losing, thrice-married, self-acknowledged pussy-grabbing, authoritarian-loving, state secrets–stealing, sore-loser former president or the only person to be a First Lady, a Senator, and a Secretary of State, the wise, charming, and diplomatic Hillary Clinton?
Can you answer honestly? You might troll us with some twisted, “own-the-libs” response, but we all know the real answer.
Unless your purpose is to destroy the government from within (and that has been the only real policy of Republicans for decades now, to “starve the beast” in any way possible), some people simply should remain right where they are — say, the dubious owner of a gun-themed tavern or a former star college football player — and not just raise their hand to be put on the ballot to become a member of Congress or President.
Will any of this happen? Of course not. We cannot go back to a time when only certain people (e.g., landowning white men) could vote or run for office. There would be no agreement, for instance, on that psychiatric evaluation (Rand Paul would no doubt step in to help Republicans create their own board of certification). But in this era when an assumption of people acting in good faith and following norms no longer figures, it’s a shame there are no basic requirements besides age and citizenship.
How about having all candidates pass the same test that people wanting to become citizens take? I imagine Lindsey Graham or Ted Cruz would denounce even such a bare-bones requirement as an outrageous example of tyranny, of giving preference to immigrants because they tend to do far better on that particular test than the average American.
We’ve reached a point where some voters need to be protected from their own worst instincts, but we can find no legitimate way — at least not one that would not be twisted and turned on its head by those who want to undo our democracy — to do it.
