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California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to end the sale of all gas-powered vehicles in California by 2035.

Apparently, Newsom is attempting to implement his own Green New Deal via executive order. He announced this plan Wednesday and released an order to phase out all in-state sales of gas-powered passenger vehicles by 2035, with a goal of 2045 for complete adoption of zero-emissions work vehicles.

Newsom’s own announcement attempts to cast his order as, well, an order to the California Air Resources Board requiring it to end to all these sales (but not the ownership and use of gas vehicles) in 15 years.

But the actual text of the executive order shows that it’s really just a wish list of what Newsom hopes will be feasible in 15 years. The order says it’s a “goal,” not a mandate, and requires that California Air Resources Board regulations be “consistent with state and federal law” to work toward this goal.

And that means Newsom isn’t using this vague five-page memo to seize control over the state’s entire car and fuel market. It’s a bunch of calls for state agencies to create a “development strategy” for achieving these goals.

So how achievable is it? According to data from the U.S. Department of Energy, there were approximately 256,800 electric vehicles registered in California in 2018. According to InsideEVs, electric and hybrid vehicles comprise less than 14 percent of California’s vehicle market share. The latest data about electric or plug-in vehicles in California shows that there have been 670,000 cars sold within the state total by the end of 2019.

California has a population of 40 million people living in 11.5 million households. While California has seen a high adoption rate of electric vehicles compared to all other states, it’s still remarkably low. And keep in mind, this is with thousands of dollars of federal and state subsidies for the leasing and purchasing of electric vehicles.

As technological innovation continues, no doubt the adoption of electric vehicles will improve and the cost of owning and operating an electric vehicle will come down. But the current data shows that state leadership attempting to force adoption while threatening to prohibit fossil fuel-powered cars is a bad idea.

As it stands, California struggles each summer to keep the power grid operating. Electric cars use as much power each day as an average home. Try to imagine if California had millions of electric cars this summer while the state was implementing rolling blackouts on its hottest days. Under current adoption rates, the state projects that electric cars will consume 5.4 percent of the state’s electricity by 2030. Newsom wants this to be much higher.

Amazingly, the other part of Newsom’s order will actually make mass adoption of electric vehicles even harder by making energy less affordable. For instance, the order calls on lawmakers to ban fracking. California has about 650 fracking wells out of nearly 57,000 active oil and natural gas wells. The state has actually issued 50 new fracking permits this year.

Why is California issuing fracking permits as the governor calls for the entire industry to be banned? Because California still depends on fossil fuels for a significant amount of power. Even with some large wind and solar farms, its many, many natural gas-fired plants are vital to keeping the lights on.

Clearly, California needs fracking energy, and the people who work in that industry need their jobs. The state cannot currently abandon fossil fuels as an energy source and also pursue greater adoption of electric-powered vehicles. Perhaps it would work as a long-term goal if California were truly serious about using powerful non-fossil fuel sources that actually could replace the state’s existing plants—like nuclear energy.

Instead, Newsom is proposing the kind of green energy program that, here in California, often serves as a transfer of tax money from the poor to the wealthy. Newsom can say in his executive order that he wants “broad accessibility for all Californians” to electric cars, but as Steven Greenhut noted in July, a study determined that California’s energy policies “have been found to disproportionately benefit wealthier individuals.” They’re the ones who can afford the cars and the solar panels. The state’s poor are those who have to live under the burden of California’s disproportionately higher energy costs.

Amazingly, Newsom’s grand plan is under attack by environmentalists for not being grand enough, according to the Los Angeles Times. The Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity is mad that the state continues to approve permits for gas and oil drilling and is threatening to sue unless he halts all new permits.

There’s nothing in Newsom’s executive order that will actually lower the cost or energy or transportation in the Golden State. Newsom also certainly knows this, because he acknowledges and emphasizes that people will still be able to drive gas-fueled cars in California. He just wants to make it impossible to buy them here.

If California attempts to force this mandate into action, does anybody care to make any bets on car dealerships popping up in the tiny three-casino community of Primm, Nevada, just across the California border on the way from Los Angeles to Las Vegas?

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Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, by John Yoo, All Points Books, 299 pages, $29.99

John Yoo and Donald J. Trump seemed like a perfect match from the jump. Yoo is the legal scholar who believes the president can order a recalcitrant prisoner’s fingernails pulled out and his child’s testicles crushed if that’s what it takes; Trump is the politician brash enough to insist that “torture works” and “you have to take out [terrorists’] families.” For a no-limits executive-power enthusiast such as Yoo, what’s not to like about Trump? And surely Trump could use a little scholarly heft for his authoritarian impulses.

Yet a funny thing happened during Trump’s rise to power: Yoo seemed to go wobbly over the prospect. The GOP nominee “reminds me a lot of early Mussolini,” Yoo told The Washington Post in October 2016—in a bad way, that is. Just two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Yoo took to The New York Times to sound the alarm about “Executive Power Run Amok.” Later that year, Yoo all but called for Trump’s impeachment.

But we always knew, however tortuous the path, that Yoo would eventually find his way home. In the opening pages of Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, Yoo declares, Penthouse Forum–style, that he never thought this sort of thing would happen to him. “If friends had told me on January 21, 2017, that I would write a book on Donald Trump as a defender of the Constitution, I would have questioned their sanity, he wrote.” He found Trump’s personal behavior repellent and “saw him as a populist, even a demagogue, who had not prepared for the heavy responsibilities of the presidency.” But then our 45th president turned out to be a “stout defender of our original governing document” and the Framers’ glorious vision of “an independent, vigorous executive.”

Defender-in-Chief has already earned Yoo the coveted tweet-blurb from @realDonaldTrump, so it’s unlikely anything I write here will put much of a dent in its sales. But ye gods, this is a terrible book: a lazy, turgid, error-ridden mess, perched atop an appallingly silly thesis.

Yoo forgets history he learned in high school, announcing that the Mexican-American War kicked off with an “attack on Sam Houston’s forces along the Rio Grande.” (Zachary Taylor’s, actually; Houston was a U.S. senator at the time.) He forgets history he actually lived through, declaring that President Barack Obama “launched attacks on Syria for its use of chemical weapons.” (Er, he didn’t.) Through large stretches of the book, Yoo even forgets what he’s just written, as when he deploys the same damned passage from the Federalist three times in seven pages. You get the sense that with this book, unlike the Torture Memos, his heart really wasn’t in it.

As for that thesis: What makes a president a defender-in-chief, anyway? The answer is in the book’s subtitle: It’s the “fight for presidential power.” You earn your laurels by defending the office’s prerogatives—genuine or imagined—thereby keeping the flame of “energy in the executive” alive for future presidents. Trump amply deserves the honorific, Yoo argues, because he fought back against the special counsel investigation, defended his travel ban in court, dropped bombs without congressional authorization—or, as Yoo frames it, “stood up for traditional executive leadership in foreign affairs and war”—and made some judicial appointments Yoo likes.

It’s really that easy: On Yoo’s scorecard, even Ukrainegate earns Trump points for defender-in-chiefing. Sure, the author concedes, the president “might [!] have had ulterior political motives in mind” when he used military aid as leverage for ginning up an investigation into the Bidens. But even if what was really afoot was a Nixonian attempt to screw a political enemy, Trump was also “protecting the right of future presidents to develop and carry out an effective foreign policy.” 

Just by beating the rap on impeachment, Trump became a Yoovian constitutional paladin, fending off an assault that “would undo the original Constitution’s greatest innovation: an independent executive.” Twenty years ago, Bill Clinton got snorts and eye-rolls for his post-acquittal boast that he’d just “saved the Constitution of the United States.” But by Yoo’s logic, where’s the lie?

In fact, it’s difficult to think of a modern president who wasn’t a defender-in-chief by the standards Yoo sets out. They all fight for their agenda items in court, none have been ready to roll over for special counsels or impeachment inquests, they all strive to put their mark on the judiciary, and, alas, when they’re in a mood to hurl Tomahawk missiles, very few can be bothered to ask Congress first. That’s just how the modern presidency operates. In the words of the political scientist William Howell, “the need to acquire, protect, and expand power is built into the office of the presidency itself, and it quickly takes hold of whoever temporarily bears the title of chief executive.”

Yoo has set the bar low enough to make all the presidents above average, but he seems oblivious to that fact. In consecutive paragraphs, he’ll swerve from calling Clinton and Obama hypocrites for waging war without congressional approval to lauding Trump for his drive-by bombings of Syria.

And inconsistent application is the least of the problems with Defender in Chief‘s thesis. By Yoo’s lights, “energy in the executive” is practically the whole of the Constitution and a good in itself, no matter what it’s used for. The author is at pains to stress his disagreement with Trump’s hostility toward immigration and with Trump’s (largely rhetorical) desire to reduce overseas entanglements. But by pushing to do what he wants, Trump preserves the prerogative of future presidents to do what they will, and that alone a staunch Defender makes. It’s a perverse metric for measuring constitutional fidelity.

The Trump presidency has been a stress test for maximalist theories of presidential power. Even the narrower versions of unitary executive theory, which hold that the president has an indefeasible right to direct and remove executive branch officers, present vast opportunities for mischief. With those powers, a crooked president can cover up corruption by barking “You’re fired!” to inspectors general who might expose it, or direct federal prosecutors to protect his cronies and screw his enemies. Trump’s efforts in this direction so far have been unsubtle, to say the least, but they reveal how much rests on a bed of unenforceable “norms.” Alexander Hamilton’s argument for “energy in the executive” in Federalist 70 took as a given that we’d have a president vulnerable to “the restraints of public opinion,” not one for whom, as has been said of Trump, “shamelessness is a superpower.”

Yoo’s hardly blind to Trump’s character flaws. He admits his hero Hamilton erred badly in predicting that the office would be filled by “characters preeminent for ability and virtue.” Instead, the 20th century drift toward “quasi-plebiscitary” selection favors the sort of figures Hamilton feared: men with “talents for low intrigue and the little arts of popularity”—a description, Yoo concedes, that “could not have anticipated Donald Trump’s public life in more accurate terms.” But if we’re increasingly likely to get people we can’t trust, might it have been unwise to concentrate so much power in the presidency in the first place? 

Hamilton also argued that energy in the executive would provide “steady administration of the laws.” This is, perhaps, another area where the $10 Founding Father could’ve been a lot smarter. The last three presidents have assumed an extraordinary amount of unilateral power to make the laws, as with Trump’s recent decision to conjure up $400 a week in supplemental employment benefits with the stroke of a pen.

Under Yoo’s tutelage, Trump appears poised to take pen-and-phone governance still further. The president is “privately considering a controversial strategy to act without legal authority to enact new federal policies,” Axios reported in July, in a scheme “heavily influenced by John Yoo, the lawyer who wrote the Bush administration’s justification for waterboarding after 9/11.”

The gambit centers on the Supreme Court’s recent decision, in DHS v. Regents of the University of California, blocking Trump’s reversal of Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, itself an arguably illegal use of executive power. The ruling, Yoo lamented in National Review, “makes it easy for presidents to violate the law”—and hard for their successors to undo those violations. In a matter of days, though, Yoo decided Regents was really a blueprint for action and began urging Trump to “weaponize the DACA decision” to enact his own agenda.

One problem with forging new weapons is that you can’t keep them out of the hands of future presidents, some of whom are sure to combine Trump’s shamelessness with actual competence.

Oh, well: The upside is that Yoo’s new theory of executive empowerment scored him an audience with the president. After his Oval Office visit in July, Yoo reported that Trump is “really on top of things,” and, despite what you hear, not all “Nixonian in the bunker and paranoid and dark.” So we’ve got that going for us.

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The possibility of President Donald Trump placing a third justice on the Supreme Court has some Democrats contemplating abolishing the filibuster if the 2020 election gives them control over the Senate.

The filibuster is a standing provision in procedural rules for the U.S. Senate that allows any senator unlimited floor time to discuss pending legislation. Senators can use that time to stall a bill indefinitely, or until a three-fifths supermajority of senators votes to cut them off and bring an item up for a final vote.

This feature of Senate rules has been used by both and Democrats and Republicans, whenever they find themselves in the minority, to prevent or delay the majority party from passing legislation.

Through the so-called “nuclear option“, a raw majority of senators can permanently limit the type of Senate actions that can be filibustered. Democrats deployed this tactic in 2013 to remove senators’ ability to filibuster the confirmation of executive branch and federal judicial nominees. Republicans did the same thing in 2017 for Supreme Court nominees in order to put Neil Gorsuch on the bench.

That latter action has left Democrats with few options for preventing Trump and the Senate’s current Republican majority from filling the vacancy left by the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg and creating a formidable 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

Despite its obvious utility in preventing that perceived disaster, many Democrats are not calling for restoring their ability to filibuster the confirmation of Supreme Court nominees. Instead, they’re saying that they will eliminate the filibuster in its entirety so that no legislation can be held up by a minority of senators.

Going ahead with that plan would likely be a mistake, however. As the results of Democrats’ 2013 reforms show, any weakening of the filibuster by today’s majority can’t help but empower the opposition whenever the senate changes hands.

Given that the electoral map is increasingly stacked against Democrats controlling the Senate, they have the most to lose in the long run from eliminating the filibuster. That’s true even if getting rid of it would help get some progressive policies over the line in 2021.

“Mitch McConnell set the precedent. No Supreme Court vacancies filled in an election year,” said Sen. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) on Friday in reference to Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R–Ky.)rationale for not allowing votes or holding a hearing on Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, in 2016. “If he violates it, when Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.”

Mitch McConnell set the precedent. No Supreme Court vacancies filled in an election year. If he violates it, when Democrats control the Senate in the next Congress, we must abolish the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court.

— Ed Markey (@EdMarkey) September 19, 2020

“The filibuster wasn’t made w/ purpose. It’s the result of an accident in rulebook revision & bloomed as a cherished tool of segregationists,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) in response to Sen. Diane Feinstein’s (D–Calif.) defense of the supermajority requirement. “Now it empowers minority rule. That’s not ‘special,’ it’s unjust.”

Sen. Feinstein’s protection of the filibuster is unjust & unacceptable.

The filibuster wasn’t made w/ purpose. It’s the result of an accident in rulebook revision & bloomed as a cherished tool of segregationists.

Now it empowers minority rule. That’s not “special,” it’s unjust. https://t.co/anKwCSbQWb

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 22, 2020

Over at The New Yorker, Jeffery Toobin argues that getting rid of the filibuster—alongside other reforms like admitting Puerto Rico and D.C. as states and expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court—would be a good way for Democrats to get retribution for the confirmation of another Republican justice and pave the way for a successful Joe Biden administration to do what it pleases.

“Even in the minority, McConnell will do everything he can to thwart Biden, and the filibuster will be the tool,” writes Toobin. “This antidemocratic relic should be retired once and for all.”

Yet in the same article, Toobin is quite candid about how the past decision to immunize Supreme Court appointments from the filibuster is the cause of Democrats’ current woes.

“Democrats have few procedural tools at their disposal to delay the process,” he says, noting that “under McConnell, the Republicans changed the Senate rules to abolish the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, so he only needs a simple majority to confirm a Justice.”

He’s not the only current filibuster critic to straddle this seeming contradiction.

Shortly after Gorsuch’s confirmation, Markey himself promised that Democrats would bring back the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations, which he argued was an important safeguard against some slim, transient majority making such a consequential decision.

“We will ensure that for the Supreme Court, there is that special margin that any candidate has to reach because that is essential to ensuring that our country has a confidence in those people who are nominated,” said Markey in an April 2017 interview, according to Politico.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) likewise bemoaned the decision to weaken the filibuster in 2017, saying on the Senate floor that “today’s vote is a cautionary tale about how unbridled partisan escalation can ultimately overwhelm our basic inclination to work together and frustrate our efforts to pull back; blocking us from steering the ship of the Senate away from the rocks.”

Contrast that with Schumer’s answer to a question in an August radio interview about whether Democrats would abolish the filibuster if they took back the Senate in 2020: “We have a moral imperative to the people of America to get a whole lot done if we get the majority,” he said. He repeated the sentiment in a Saturday conference call, reports The Hill, saying “If Leader McConnell and Senate Republicans move forward with [confirming another Supreme Court justice], then nothing is off the table for next year.”

McConnel, when he was minority leader, offered similarly prescient warnings about the consequences of weakening the filibuster. When Sen. Harry Reid (D–Nev.) deployed the “nuclear option” in 2013 to prevent the filibustering of executive branch nominees and federal judicial appointments, McConnell told Democrats “you’ll regret this and you might regret it even sooner than you might think.”

Republicans went on to recapture the Senate a year later, and have since made a record number of judicial appointments. That Democrats are today largely lining up against the filibuster, rather than calling for its full restoration, proves Schumer’s warnings about the partisan erosion of norms correct. Ship of the Senate, meet the rocky shore.

Democrats—having lost successive battles over the Supreme Court, and being favored by some projections to take back both the presidency and the Senate—are out for blood, and not keen on defending obstacles to the power that they are on the cusp of wielding.

In the immediate term, this rhetorical strategy makes sense. Asserting the value of the filibuster at the present moment isn’t going to bring it back. Threatening to do away with it entirely, on the other hand, could potentially scare some Republicans from voting to confirm a new justice. In an election year, it’s also potentially good politics to attack the filibuster. Promises of a less constrained Democratic Senate majority might help drive progressive turnout.

That argument cuts both ways, however. Democratic threats to brush away obstacles to enacting their agenda could just as easily motivate fence-sitting conservatives who’re none too enamored with Trump to vote for him out of fear of what unconstrained Democrats might do once in power.

Another, more far-sighted argument deployed by progressives is that the filibuster is not ideologically neutral. Democrats, on balance, want to do more things with the government, and therefore are more likely to be frustrated by the filibuster.

Vox‘s Ezra Klein made this very point on a recent podcast about the filibuster.

“Conservatives simply want to do less and stand athwart government yelling stop,” Klein said. “Legislating and being able to act within the context of American government is inherently a progressive act.”

(Klein, in fairness, does acknowledge that a more explicitly nationalist Republican party in the future would have a more proactive agenda, and thus reap more gains from eliminating the filibuster.)

Matt Yglesias, also of Vox, made a related point in a 2019 essay when he argued that it would always be easier for a slim majority of progressives to enact an expansion of the welfare state than it would be for a similar-sized majority of conservatives to undo said expansion.

Progressive programs, he says, create their own constituencies whose self-interest is wrapped up in the preservation of the program. State-shrinking deregulation or spending cuts, on the other hand, do not come with the same advantage.

“If you passed a law making it easier to form labor unions, that would lead to more unionized workers, which would make it harder to pass new anti-union laws,” writes Yglesias.

While Yglesias and Klein could be right about raw majoritarianism (at least in the medium term) benefitting progressives—or at least any faction that wants to expand the size of government—their case becomes less persuasive when applied to the Senate’s filibuster specifically.

The Senate’s membership, as progressives are often eager to point out, advantages Republicans, who are increasingly the dominant political party in rural, whiter states that contain a minority of Americans but can collectively control a majority of the Senate. Empowering majorities in the Senate through the abolition of the filibuster, therefore, will more often than not mean empowering Republican Senate majorities at Democrats’ expense.

Maybe Republicans’ relative lack of a proactive policy agenda would mean they’d end up doing less with those majorities. But they’d still be capable of restricting legal immigration, banning late-term abortions, and requiring social media companies to teach patriotic values (to name a few goals of the contemporary right).

One final case that Democrats currently contemplating eliminating the filibuster should consider is that those checks make politicians like Donald Trump less likely to succeed.

We live in a world of increasing negative polarization, where political factions are defined less by their positive vision and more by fear of what the other side will do with power. It’s in that environment that figures like Trump can garner support despite the likely negative consequences of their policy proposals.

Conservative and Republican voters who might consider themselves Trump-skeptical can still be convinced to vote for the man for fear that empowering an unconstrained Democratic president or Congress would be even worse.

Tying the hands of whichever majority is in power makes that party’s agenda harder to implement, but it also lowers the stakes of losing. That, in turn, might make voters less willing to tolerate objectionably awful behavior on “the other side is still worse” grounds.

I don’t pretend to be a progressive, and support maintaining the filibuster on good old-fashion libertarian grounds: the more checks on the exercise of state power, the better. Given that the Senate filibuster will more often than not check Republicans exercising state power in the near-term, Democrats and progressives should reconsider its utility.

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Josh Gerstein (Politico) has the story, with a link to the Judicial Conference of the United States letter laying out the request, including (bullets added):

2. PROTECTION OF PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION of judicial officers and their immediate family members, to include but not be limited to

• the primary home address;
• date of birth;
• social security number;
• driver’s license number;
• voter registration information that includes a home address;
• bank account and credit or debit card information;
• property tax records and any property ownership records, including a secondary residence and any investment property;
• birth and marriage records;
• marital status;
• personal email addresses;
• home or mobile phone number;
• vehicle registration information;
• family member’s employer, daycare, or school;
• personal photographs or photographs of a judicial officer’s home;
• religious, organization, club, or association memberships; identification of children under the age of 18;
• and any other unique biometric data or piece of information that can be used to identify an individual….

4. MANDATORY REMOVAL OR REDACTION OF JPII UPON WRITTEN REQUEST
SERVED ON ANY PERSON, BUSINESS, ASSOCIATION, OR AGENCY. Upon written request, a person, business, association or agency must, within 48-72 hours of receipt of the request, redact from the public record any existing JPII and may not thereafter knowingly post, display, sell, share, trade or transfer JPII, including publicly accessible and displayed content. No person, business or association shall solicit JPII with intent to do harm to a judicial officer or immediate family member. The written request by a judicial officer, or his or her representative, to remove and/or to redact from the public record JPII of the judicial officer or an immediate family member shall not require a showing of fear of harm or immediate threat and shall remain effective until revocation of the request by the judicial officer or a surviving immediate family member.

Other sections focus on removal of information from the government’s own publicly accessible records, so this seems focused on private entities, and seems to use “the public record” in the sense of “publicly posted information” rather than government records (which wouldn’t generally be under the control of a “business” or “association”). If implemented as requested, this would require newspapers, blogs, and other publishers to, for instance:

1. Remove articles discussing a judge’s membership in some controversial group, or a group that is connected to litigation pending before the club.
2. Remove articles discussing how the work or schooling of a judge’s family member’s might create a possible conflict of interest or source of bias.
3. If a judge’s child has been accused of crime or misconduct (in school or athletics or otherwise) by name, remove articles discussing this in connection with the judge (e.g., if some people think the family connection may have led to a sweetheart deal).
4. Remove articles or posted court documents discussing lawsuits related to property the judge owns (or recusal motions based on the judge’s property ownership) if those articles or documents contain property tax records or address information or home photographs.
5. Remove videos or up-to-date photos of a judge involved in some event or altercation, since those would be “biometric data or piece of information that can be used to identify an individual.”
6. Remove videos or photos of a judge’s family member who was involved in some event or altercation, if “an individual” is read to include family members and not just the judges themselves.

This strikes me as unconstitutional, even recognizing the serious threats that federal judges sometimes face, from disgruntled litigants and others.

The case for restricting the publication of home addresses is stronger than for some of the other items, but even such addresses are sometimes matters of public concern, as item 4 above suggests.

Moreover, rightly or wrongly, in most of the country residential picketing is legal; and the Court has strongly suggested that, while content-neutral bans on targeted residential picketing are constitutional, they are constitutional because they still allow “[g]eneral marching through residential neighborhoods, or even walking a route in front of an entire block of houses.” It’s impossible to organize such constitutionally protected events without informing people of the address of the person who is being criticized. Perhaps because of this, courts have generally struck down bans on the publication of government officials’ home addresses, see Publius v. Boyer-Vine (C.D. Cal. 2017) and the cases it cites. (Disclosure: I was one of the lawyers for plaintiff in that case.)

(The case for restricting the publication of certain information that seems to have very little likely value other than to facilitate crimes—often financial rather than physical—such as social security numbers, bank account numbers, and the like might be quite strong; see pp. 1146-49 of my Crime-Facilitating Speech article.)

Naturally, before judges are judges, they are people. One can’t ignore that this issue literally hits federal judges where they live, and the fact that the letter comes from the Judicial Conference, with Chief Justice Roberts’ letter on the letterhead. Still, I hope that Congress or (if the broad version of the law is passed) the federal courts will recognize that the proposal is too broad.

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Asked at a press conference yesterday whether he would “commit here today for a peaceful transferal of power after the November election,” President Trump declined to answer in the affirmative.

Instead, he offered a non-committal response before diverting to a secondary pet peeve. “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” he said. He then complained about the voting process. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster,” he continued, presumably referencing this year’s expected uptick in mail-in voting, which the president has repeatedly criticized.

Once again, the reporter pressed Trump on whether he would “commit to making sure there’s a peaceful transferal of power.”

And once again, Trump demurred, saying, “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know. And you know who knows it better than anybody else? The Democrats. The Democrats know it better than anyone else.”

Reporter: "Win, lose or draw in this election, will you commit here today for a peaceful transferal of power after the election?"

President Trump: "We're going to have to see what happens." pic.twitter.com/h5RF3dKPD1

— NBC News (@NBCNews) September 23, 2020

As if often the case when Trump speaks, his disjointed sentences leave some room for interpretation. The most alarming interpretation, and the one least likely to be true, is that Trump was refusing to commit to a peaceful post-election transferal of power, that he was signaling a willingness to interfere with the election process (“get rid of the ballots”) in order to gain electoral advantage, and that he plans to be president after the election (“a continuation”) no matter the outcome of the vote.

Another possibility is that Trump was not declaring his intention to make an authoritarian post-election power grab, but evading a direct response in order to focus on himself and his personal grievances. In this interpretation, he was merely saying, in his familiar haphazard way, that he doesn’t expect there to be a transfer of power because he expects to win the election, and then griping about the balloting process.

Neither interpretation is flattering, but the second, more likely version is obviously less troubling since it suggests that Trump is not a dictator in the making but a narcissist who speaks in jumbled half-thoughts and frequently appears incapable of engaging with any idea except through the lens of his own resentments.

That interpretation fits with Trump’s recent responses to other questions that should be easy to answer, such as “How do you think history will remember John Lewis?” to which Trump replied, “He didn’t come to my inauguration”; and “What are your top priority items for a second term?” to which Trump replied with some rambling thoughts on the word “experience” and by calling John Bolton an idiot. (Fair enough.)

The less-worrying interpretation of his response still does not reflect well on Trump. One of the president’s core duties is to speak clearly, partly to communicate his intentions to Americans and the rest of the world, and partly because his words can carry the force of law. Yet Trump’s garbled manner of speech consistently renders his meaning unclear, raising fears about what he might have meant, and what he might be planning. We should expect presidents to be able to answer easy questions clearly and directly. And the transfer of power question was an easy, easy question.

So Trump’s answer probably wasn’t a warning that he’s planning to subvert the election. But it was a fundamental failure of presidential coherence and competence. If you are the President of the United States, and you are asked a question that in any way resembles, “Will you commit to the peaceful transfer of political power if you lose the coming election?” the only acceptable answer is “Yes.”

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