One of the many indefensible things about Ted Cruz's behavior last Wednesday is the fact that this supposed "constitutional conservative" was pushing a plan for an electoral commission that would have been wildly unconstitutional.
The Constitution says that electors shall vote in each state, then transmit their vote certificates to Congress. Then Congress counts them. There is no provision for Congress to send the certificates back to the states for a do-over.
So even assuming this electoral commission somehow got approval from Democrats and found clear evidence Trump won the election, it's not clear what Congress could do about it. The Constitution allows for only one electoral college vote and the winner is president. End of story.
Cruz cited 1876 as a precedent, but that year rival factions in some Southern states had submitted competing electoral vote certifications. Congress could effectively choose the president by deciding which certifications to accept and count. That wasn't the situation this year.
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The Senate's 50 Democrats (and Kamala Harris) have the power make the District of Columbia a state if they want to. 51for51.org/news/with-demo…
DC statehood would also need a majority in the House of course but that should be doable. The House passed a DC statehood bill last year with every Democrat voting yes except Colin Peterson. Peterson lost his seat in November. thehill.com/homenews/house…
Joe Manchin, previously one of the Senate's strongest Demodratic holdouts, now says he's open to DC statehood: "I don’t know enough about that yet. I want to see the pros and cons." washingtontimes.com/news/2021/jan/…
There's an under-appreciated interaction between macroeconomics and manufacturing economics when it comes to renewable energy policy.
A basic factor driving progress in renewable energy is the learning rate: the more of something (batteries, solar panels, windmills) you make, the cheaper it gets.
In the early years, this was the policy rationale for heavily subsidizing green energy technology heavily even though it didn't otherwise pass a basic cost/benefit calculation.
Waymo is in a weird place right now. They're now operating an honest-to-goodness commercial driverless taxi service. No safety drivers. No rider non-disclosure agreements. A pretty big service area (~50 square miles). But it's growing very very slowly. arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/t…
Three years ago, I thought that if Waymo "solved" the self-driving problem first, as seemed likely, its big challenge would be scaling up quickly enough to grab territory before other companies came to market. I was wrong. arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/w…
Waymo has driverless cars that can operating in most situations in the Phoenix suburbs. But for some reason they don't seem to be trying very hard to scale up. They haven't provided a clear answer about why not.
The fact that three different companies have apparently made COVID vaccines in ~8 months makes me wonder if there's room to be a lot more ambitious about other technology projects. Like maybe we should follow the UK and ban internal combustion engines in 2030.
A lot of corporate decision-making is driven by risk aversion about future market conditions. What if your car company goes 100 percent electric and it turns out customers don't want electric cars? When that uncertainty is removed an industry can move pretty fast.
The de facto US ban on incandescent light bulbs a decade seems like an under-appreciated model. It seems to have significantly accelerated light bulb technology, and the transition happened so smoothly that most consumers barely noticed.
Robert Caro's first LBJ biography includes a passage that explains how rural electrification transformed the lives of farm families, especially women. It makes a powerful case for Robert Gordon's thesis that innovations of the last 50 years pale in comparison to what came before.
The arrival of electrification relieved farm families of several categories of back-breaking labor: washing clothes by hand, milking cows by hand, canning, hauling wood to (and tending) woodstoves. Refrigeration drastically reduced milk spoilage. Plus of course electric lighting.
Big-screen TVs and smartphones are nice but they just aren't transformational the way washing machines and electric lights were to our great grandparents.