RUTHFULLY YOURS

Who would ever have predicted that the Electoral College would attract so much public discussion, let alone the last-ditch hope of the anti-Trump fanatics? Given so many misstatements about it, let me briefly set the record straight.

Begin with the argument that the Founders intended the Electoral College to act as a final quality control review board to weed out unfit demagogues – that is, Donald Trump. This is a complete lie, though some pundits quote Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 68 in support of this “final judge,” argument, an argument lacking any legal standing. The Constitution stipulates only a single qualification – electors cannot at the time of their vote hold federal office (Article II, Section 1). Nothing is said about age, experience, background, or any other trait implying an ability to reject the unworthy. Especially relevant, there has never been any effort to enshrine this talent into laws. Picking judicious, independent-minded electors is a non-issue. The opposite is true – electors overwhelmingly tend to be party stalwarts.

Equally dubious is the oft heard claim from Hillary’s fans that the College is inherently undemocratic, and since Clinton won the popular vote, the only true measure of democracy, she “really” won the election, and Trump’s electors ought to honor “democracy” by stepping aside for Hillary. Totally false.

Prior to the Constitution’s final form, the mechanism to choose our chief executive went through multiple versions and direct election was considered and then rejected. Opponents believed that such a mechanism in a vast nation lacking decent communications would cede power to only a few wealthy notables whose resources permitted a nationwide campaign. Rather than being the authentic voice of the people, this plebiscite would, in the words of South Carolina delegate Charles Pinckney (1757-1824), be led by “a few active and designing men.” In other words, the staggering cost of a “national” campaign guaranteed plutocracy, not popular rule. By comparison, appealing to a hundred or so legislatively selected electors, though hardly easy, was at least possible for candidates lacking wealth and a towering nationwide reputation.

Moreover, in the context of the day, allowing state legislatures – not the voters acting directly – to choose electors was widely viewed as a democratic mechanism since state legislatures were dominated by farmers, tradesmen, small merchants, and other “ordinary” people. Nor is there anything undemocratic about legislatures’ delegate power, including the power to choose a president. To further avoid “a dangerous tendency to aristocracy,” the Constitution also authorized the directly elected House, not the Senate, to elect the president if no candidate secured a majority of the Electoral College vote. On balance, the Electoral College is a democratic element of the Constitution.

What about candidates winning the Electoral College vote but losing the popular vote, as occurred with Trump and Clinton plus the past elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, and 2000? Surely, this is smoking-gun proof of the Electoral College’s anti-democratic nature. Not quite. The Constitution is silent about how state legislatures choose electors, and in the Republic’s early years, states used a district system where the state was divided into districts where each district picked a single elector. In fact, a similar system is currently used by Maine and Nebraska (four electors each) – you get a single electoral vote by winning a congressional district and then two for winning the state overall.

Democrats are creating a big brouhaha over the possibility that Russia
tried to influence the American presidential election by
leaking information to WikiLeaks. The argument is that it wasn’t a fair
election if a foreign power influenced it.

That is true only if the foreign power deceived American voters. If the
information was true, then that foreign power did us a favor in
informing our voters. The better informed our voters, the fairer the
election.

Catholics and Evangelicals who were considering voting for Hillary could
make a decision that was more in their own interest once they knew that
her campaign advisers and liberal allies mocked them. Likewise,
Southerners, Latinos, and other victims of Clinton campaign vitriol were
better off knowing the true attitude of members of the Clinton campaign
toward them. The email revelations exposing corruption of the Clinton
Foundation and the unethical tilting of the primary election playing
field against Bernie Sanders are revelations that helped voters make
informed choices.

The Democrats would have us believe that the blame lies with the
Russians, but the Russians are not to blame for the corruption of the
Democrats. The Democrats are.

Democrat outrage that an outside country may have influenced the recent
American election is hypocritical when one considers the steps Obama’s
and Hillary’s State Department took to influence the Israeli election
against Netanyahu, including supporting an Organizing for America-type
campaign with digital ads, billboards, and phone calls.

Democrat hypocrisy becomes even more apparent when one remembers Mr.
Obama’s admission to Russian president Dmitri Medvedev that he’d be more
flexible in meeting Russian demands after the 2012 American election.
Obama was willing to withhold information about his plans to make
concessions to Russia from the American people in order to get elected.
An American president hiding the truth from the American people in order
to sway an election is much worse than a foreign leader revealing the
truth to the American people.

Donald Trump hasn’t wasted time moving to revive America’s economic growth, with an emphasis on manufacturing. Critics may say the recent Carrier deal, which will save 800 American jobs, is small potatoes, but Mr. Trump’s pledge to reduce regulation is decidedly not. A new analysis confirms that the average industry’s regulatory risk has increased nearly 80% from 2010—and that this burden particularly hurts manufacturing and heavy industry.

The analysis was developed by a small group of quantitative hotshots under the guidance of Alex Vogel, an old Washington hand, and Jeff Hood, a 30-year finance veteran. Instead of considering the question of regulatory risk like D.C. think tankers, they approached it like Wall Street analysts.

Their most inventive technique involved natural-language processing, an essential tool of the big-data era that has been used to analyze Shakespeare and fight spam email. Messrs. Vogel and Hood used the technology to analyze the language in the 10K reports that companies file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Every 10K report includes a formal assessment of the company’s vulnerabilities. Messrs. Vogel and Hood flagged any words and phrases that signaled regulatory exposure. They included general terms like “regulation” and “Congress” as well as specific ones like “fraud,” “inversions” and “Dodd-Frank.” They did something similar with the Federal Register to capture economically significant rule-making.

Then, firing up a suite of algorithms and formulas, they generated a regulatory-risk score for every company in the Fortune 500. Hedge funds are using the findings to gauge how potential investments could be affected by new regulations, court filings and other breaking events.

But the news here is in the next steps. The Vogel and Hood team analyzed corporate lobbying and turned out company-by-company ratings of its effectiveness. They put into the calculations the amounts that firms spend on government relations, the size of government-relations staffs, the expertise of the outside lobbyists hired, and the number of lobbying registration reports filed. Each company can then be ranked in the hierarchy of Washington influence.

Messrs. Vogel and Hood say their method is like a capital asset pricing model with one exception: In place of the standard measure for market risk, they substituted their metrics for regulatory risk and corporate response. What were the results?