About Congressional term limits, and this week’s activities

Published January 5, 2021

Twenty-eight members of the House of Representatives, past and present, held office for 36-to-39 years, 49 were in office for 40-to-49 years, and seven were in office 50 or more years, with Michigan’s John Dingle leading the pack with 59 years and 21 days in office.

Thirteen members of the Senate, past and present, held office for 36-to-39 years, with nine in office for 40-to-49 years, and one, West Virginia’s Robert C. Byrd, was in office for 51 years and 176 days.

All of those people were in office after 1900, and some served in both the House and the Senate during their total tenure. Several of them are in Congress today.

The point of the preceding information is to call attention to how long they held these positions, rather than how many people have held elective positions for many years. 

It is generally accepted that a career lasts between 40 and 50 years, and it is not uncommon for people to work in different jobs during their career. Generally, people begin working in their late teens or early 20s, and retire in their mid 60s or in their 70s.

The intention of America’s Founders was for Congressional positions not to be a career, or even a large portion of a career. The country was intended to have citizen legislators who run for office and hold it for a few years, and then return to the private sector and the work they did prior to being elected. 

That way, legislators will be more in touch with the people they represent, since they have faced, and will relatively soon again face the same issues that their constituents must deal with. Having the same personal experiences as their constituents, they are well prepared to act to the benefit of the people.

Let’s look at the tenure of the leadership of the 116th Congress, which just ended.

The people currently holding leadership positions in the House of Representatives are listed with their position, their name, and the year they entered Congress: Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, 1987; Majority Leader, Steny Hoyer, 1981; Majority Whip, Jim Clyburn, 1993; Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy, 2007; Minority Whip, Steve Scalise, 2008.

Those currently holding leadership positions in the Senate, listed with their position, their name, and the year they entered Congress: President pro tempore, Chuck Grassley, 1981; Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, 1985; Majority Whip, John Thune, 2005; Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, 1999; Minority Whip, Dick Durbin, 1997.

The newest members of the leadership in both houses have been there at least 12 years, and those with the longest tenure have been there nearly 40 years. 

The average age of members of the House at the beginning of the 116th Congress was 57.6 years-old; of Senators, 62.9 years-old. This is perhaps somewhat of a good thing, as the older one is, the more of life he or she has experienced, and hopefully has learned from it.

In 1951, the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, setting a term limit of two four-year terms on the presidency. It is time to do the same for members of Congress.

Changing faces more frequently would introduce more new ideas to law-making, and would allow newer members to perhaps get influential positions. With shorter tenures, members may be more willing to back good proposals that are controversial.

Where to draw the lines? Term limits of 12 years would allow six two-year House terms or two six-year Senate terms, or a combination that does not exceed 12 years.

This method is very close to the average tenure of members of the 116th Congress. The average length of service for Representatives at the beginning of the 116th Congress was 8.6 years (4.3 House terms); for Senators, 10.1 years (1.7 Senate terms).

* * *

This week, two important things take place. Today, the Georgia runoff elections for two U.S. Senate seats are being held. The stakes are important: if one or both Republicans, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, hold on to the seats they now occupy, the Senate will remain under Republican control. If the Democrat challengers Raphael Warnock and John Ossof win, the Democrats and Republicans each would hold 50 seats, and the vice president would be the tie-breaker. If Democrat Kamala Harris is the VP, one party, the Democrats, will control the White House and both houses of the Congress. 

Tomorrow, the Congress meets to validate the Electoral College votes for president and vice president. Electoral votes will be tallied in a joint session of the House and the Senate, meeting in the House chamber. The president of the Senate —Vice President Mike Pence — is the presiding officer of the session.

Members of the House and Senate may file written objections to Electoral votes from any state, signed by at least one member of each house. House and Senate members will then separately debate the objection(s) and vote to approve or disapprove. If an objection is approved by both houses, the Electoral votes for that state are not accepted, and those votes are subtracted.

This procedure is not expected to change the Electoral College winners, Joe 

Biden and Kamala Harris, but it possibly could.

The “Flight 93 Election” of four years ago is over. Or is it?

 

“In September 2016, I called that year’s presidential election contest ‘The Flight 93 Election.’ My thesis was simple: a Clinton victory would usher in an era of semi-permanent Democratic-leftist rule.” 

So wrote author Michael Anton, in his new book, The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.

“But I asserted and still believe that one-party rule of the USA — blue-state politics from coast to coast — could, once established, last a very long time and might end only with the country itself,” he continued.

Blessedly, Anton’s fear was not fulfilled by the American people; Hillary Clinton did not win, and blue state politics coast-to-coast did not become reality. 

And now we are approaching another election, and concerns are raging. Democrats are afraid that if President Donald Trump loses the election he will not allow a peaceful transfer of power.

In 2016, instead of the blue state take-over Anton feared, we got President Trump. But we also got a group of Congressional Democrats that would not allow the next administration to operate without interference. They spent the next dozens of months and tens of millions of dollars hampering Trump’s efforts to straighten out the eight previous years of Democrat failure with fatally flawed investigations.

Much straightening out was accomplished, despite the Democrats’ efforts, however. For example, taxes and needless regulations were reduced, setting off a long-awaited, but long-delayed recovery from the Great Recession of 2008. Unemployment for every group, especially black and Hispanic Americans, reached record, or near-record lows, as jobs and companies returned from overseas where they had been driven by past foolish economic policies.

Today, despite the good things that have occurred since 2017, we have a country more divided than at any time in decades. Much or most of the division comes from the emotional reaction to Trump’s personality, and some resulting from the successes he has achieved, much to the Left’s chagrin. 

The opposition decries the good that has been done, and proposes to “fix” things with higher taxes, lax immigration policies, killing the fossil fuel industry along with the jobs and economic boost that go with it, and a list of other equally foolish, socialistic concepts.

A major issue this time is the United State Supreme Court, the only one of the three co-equal branches of the federal government that was designed to be non-political. This was done quite purposefully to provide objective, politically neutral legal oversight of the political decisions made in the legislative and administrative branches. The Supreme Court was to be a non-political body to apply the Constitution and the laws, the meanings of which do not change over time, unless change is brought about through established legal and constitutional processes.

Through the years, judges have been confirmed to the federal courts who are not neutral interpreters of legal and constitutional language, but apply their personal, social and political ideals in place of applying Constitutional principles based upon their meaning when ratified, and applying the meaning of laws when enacted. They refer to their activism as providing “life” to the Constitution and laws. The meaning of a “living” Constitution changes with the swirling winds of society.

The encroachment of these activist judges and justices destroys the political independence of the courts, turning them into another political body, the members of which were not elected by anyone. That is not smart, and it is not acceptable.

Which brings us to the confirmation hearing for Judge Amy Coney Barrett. The Democrats are opposed to her confirmation for one reason: They do not like her because she said, and they believe, that she will not be an activist justice who makes law from the bench, the way Democrats prefer.

Democrats depend upon activists on court benches to create through judicial fiat policies and laws they cannot enact through the legitimate law-making process.

Judges/justices are supposed to apply the law as written, not rule based upon how they might feel about litigants or issues. As Justice George Sutherland, on the Supreme Court from 1922 to 1938, wrote, "If the provisions of the Constitution be not upheld when they pinch as well as when they comfort, they may as well be abandoned." 

We are not electing a Homecoming King next month, or a senior superlative, like Most Popular, Best Looking, Funniest, etc. We are voting for a person to put into effect policies and support laws that move the country forward. This is a person who gets things done, however ill-mannered or offensive he/she may otherwise be.

Donald Trump has filled that role well for four years, and if re-elected he will again; Joe Biden lives in a different universe.

‘Therefore, not only will 2020 be another ‘Flight 93 Election,’ as will every election, until and unless one of two things happens,” Anton continues. “Either the left achieves the final victory it has long sought, and the only national elections that matter are Democratic primaries to determine who goes on to defeat — inevitably — a hopelessly outnumbered and ineffectual ‘opposition.’ Or the Republican Party — or some successor — leads a realignment along nationalist-popular lines that forces the left to moderate and accept the legitimacy of red-state/flyover/’deplorable’ concerns.”

Thoughts on Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden

There is so much ado over President Donald Trump’s nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court.

She is a devout Catholic. That seems to send pangs of fear through some Democrats. Well, former President John F. Kennedy was a Catholic. The late Justice Antonin Scalia was a Catholic. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden are also Catholic.

More to the point, Article VI, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution says: "… but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States."

So, whether she is Catholic or a non-believer is irrelevant to appointment to the Supreme Court, or any federal position.

In nominating her, Trump did what the Constitution provides for the sitting President of the United States. None of the complaints about him making the nomination are mentioned, or even loosely alluded to, in the Constitution. What he did is exactly right, and follows much precedent.

The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s dying wish is not part of the Constitutional process, and the American people are getting to have their say on who gets to make the nomination for her seat, as they elected Donald Trump for a full four-year term, which is not yet over.

Opponents are worried that she will overturn Roe v Wade, or the Affordable Care Act. But this concern is misplaced.

As an originalist/textualist, she follows the written intent of the Constitution and the laws, as judges and justices are supposed to do. Barrett will merely rule on the legality/constitutionality of any measures that come before the Court, including those.

Hopefully, in the confirmation hearing just getting underway, the character assassins who eagerly attended the confirmation hearing of the last Trump nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and trashed his character and his honor, and those that provided the “high-tech lynching” of Clarence Thomas years before, will be infected with good conscience, decency and civil respect for Barrett and the Constitutional process being followed.  

* * * * *

So, Kamala Harris ran for the Democrat nomination for president, but was only an also ran, and is now the Democrat nominee for vice president. Before being elected to the U.S. Senate, she was a prosecutor and California attorney general, and prosecuted people in court for violent crimes.

Yet, in the vice presidential debate with current Vice President, Mike Pence, he has been criticized for not treating her appropriately, for — gasp — “mansplaining!” Instead of treating her like a little girl, a delicate flower, Pence spoke to her like an adult.

Not the least of reasons Pence spoke to Harris like she is an adult and not a little girl is her penchant for saying things that were not true. Like the fairytale about President Lincoln foregoing a Court appointment near an election because it was “the right thing to do.”

So, is Harris up to the job? Or not? If she needs to be protected from the kind of opposition a male nominee would — and should — experience, perhaps she’s not ready for the job. Will Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un and Xi Jinping give her the break a female apparently deserves, should she have to deal with them?

* * * * *

One thing nearly everyone recognizes is that former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign has been riddled with oddities. It now appears that Biden has been involved in collusion. You remember collusion? The long, expensive investigation by Congressional Democrats into Trump’s imagined irregularities with Russia that found nothing?

When the Affordable Care Act was before the House of Representatives in 2010, Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the completely absurd comment to the American people that “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it, away from the fog of controversy.” Well, fog or no fog, we don’t pass bills in the U.S. Congress so that the people will be able to know what is hidden inside them. That happens before the votes are taken.

Apparently, Biden has colluded with Pelosi and has made the equally absurd decision to refuse to answer whether or not he will attempt to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with activist judges if he is elected, so that it will be easier to control everything the government does or does not do.

A reporter asked Biden, “Well, sir, don’t the voters deserve to know…?” He replied, “No, they don’t.”

He’s wrong, of course, but he’s also walking a narrow plank: don’t offend the radical Democrat left by saying he won’t pack the Court; don’t offend the others by saying he will.

Some Democrats hint that if they win the election and control the White House and Congress, they will pack the Court, abolish the Electoral College, eliminate the filibuster that protects the Senate from the tyranny of the majority, and perhaps add two more states to the Union to increase the number of Senate Democrats.

These measures will transform the nation into a chaotic mess that is the opposite of the ordered republic that our Founders created. That cannot be allowed to occur.

Secure elections are imperative for a free and honest society

The stay-at-home orders, the business and school closures, certainly have introduced a lot of changes to our daily lives. These changes have interfered with some of the spring elections across the land, and created questions about what to do on Election Day in November. That has spawned a movement to use voting by mail as the way to resolve fears and possible problems that voters may encounter by going to their local polling places.

Voter convenience and safety from the COVID-19 virus are cited as reasons for mail-in voting. And we are told that voter fraud does not make a difference in any given election.

But voters in parts of Florida, Missouri, New York, and North Carolina have reasons to disagree, based on what has occurred in recent years.

Voter fraud in these states resulted in overturning elections. The Daily Caller listed 15 state and local election results over the last few years that were overturned due to mail-in voter fraud. Guilty parties were removed from office, fined, or sentenced to community service, probation, or jail time.

The ballot crimes involved bribery, vote buying, ballots stolen from mail boxes, absentee ballots asked for or purchased from valid recipients, voter assistance involving filling out an absentee ballot in a way other than how the voter directed or without direction from the voter, the casting of absentee ballots by persons who did not receive absentee ballots, ballots with forged or not properly witnessed signatures on them, illegally applying for absentee ballots and voting them, racially motivated manipulation of ballots, and obtained and improperly counted defective absentee ballots.

Things were bad enough in Florida that the state Department of Law Enforcement concluded: “The absentee ballot is the ‘tool of choice’ for those who are engaging in election fraud.” 

Things in Texas were no better. An assistant attorney general with the Criminal Prosecutions division in the Attorney General’s Office, Jonathan White, testified that mail ballot fraud “is by far the biggest problem that we see across the state ... It’s the wild West of voter fraud.”

And, highlighting the larger scale problem mail-in voting could cause is this: "A significant increase in mail-in voting this fall could greatly incentivize 'ballot harvesting,' where third parties collect mail-in ballots on behalf of voters and deliver them to election officials," Real Clear Politics reported. "There’s long been a consensus that such a practice incentivizes fraud ..."

To illustrate the risk, Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), notes that in 2016 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by garnering over 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump. But nearly 6 million unaccounted for mail-in ballots were never counted in 2016, more than twice her margin in the popular vote. Based upon this, Clinton may have won the popular vote by a wider margin, or maybe have lost.

Concerns about fraud in mail-in ballots were serious enough that a 2008 report produced by the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project recommended that states “restrict or abolish on-demand absentee voting in favor of in-person early voting.”

The convenience that on-demand absentees produce “is bought at a significant cost to the real and perceived integrity of the voting process,” the report added.

But the PILF obtained voter data from Oregon, the first state to adopt voting by mail exclusively, for the 2012 and 2018 elections and checked it against census data. Of the 7,000,000 ballots the state sent out in those two elections, some 871,000 ballots were totally unaccounted for.

The U.S. Census Bureau data show that 11 percent of Americans move every year. And it further shows that lower income voters are much more likely to move around. This makes it difficult or impossible to reliably get ballots to the mobile population without lots and lots of ballots going to the wrong address, where they may be illegally marked and submitted.

And the federal Election Assistance Commission reports that between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots remain unaccounted for. The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail.

From 2004 to 2016 the number of mail-in ballots more than doubled, from 24.9 million to 57.2 million, and roughly 40 percent of U.S. voting is done by mail.

Yet this huge increase in mail-in ballot use has been accompanied by little if any additional research on the risks of voting by mail, or improved methods to secure the process. And the methods of fraud mentioned could dramatically increase if more than 200 million ballots are mailed out for the November general election.

Every American voter should be concerned about the security of the election process. No election, at any level, can be decided by cheaters who want to overrule the decision of the citizenry for cheap political purposes. State and local governments must insure an honest and fair election process.

If we can go to big box stores, grocery stores, pharmacies, gas stations and other such places safely by employing safe distancing and other sensible measures, we can safely go to polling places and vote in a more secure process.

Democrats’ move toward socialism isn’t sitting well with their base

Most would agree that since the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States things have been crazier than they have ever been, or at least crazier than they have been in our memory.

The left regards Trump as whacko, even as their own policies push the boundaries of radicalism.

Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and even Hillary Clinton are still on scene, and they are joined with a cadre of faces new to the race for the Democrat nomination to oppose Trump, or if he is somehow taken out in the primary, or otherwise, whomever the Republicans put up in 2020.

Trump’s unconventional, non-politician, combative style has put off nearly everybody at some time (or always) and the inability of folks to get beyond their personal feelings surely has further gummed things up even more.

But somehow, all of this has emboldened and set free the most radical among the Democrats, who push socialist ideals as if they are actually reasonable.

“The Democrats have become socialists,” stated liberal columnist Dana Milbank back in September of 2017, less than a year after Trump took office.

“This became official, more or less … when [Bernie] Sanders rolled out his socialized health-care plan, Medicare for All, and he was supported by 16 of his Senate Democratic colleagues who signed on as co-sponsors, including the party's rising stars and potential presidential candidates in 2020: Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand.”

You may have seen the news since then that all of those folks, and even more, have either declared their candidacy, or hinted at it.

Sen. Harris, the former California Attorney General, suggests doing away with private health insurance, replacing it with single-payer government healthcare.

She told CNN’s Jake Tapper that if people like their current health insurance, they would not be able to keep it. "Well, listen, the idea is that everyone gets access to medical care,” she said. “And you don't have to go through the process of going through an insurance company, having them give you approval, going through the paperwork, all of the delay that may require," she told Tapper.

On its face, this actually sounds like a good move. But just ask many a military veteran how government healthcare has worked for them. And the idea that government healthcare would have less paperwork? Where does she think the mountains of existing paperwork had their origin?

But returning to Milbank’s 2017 column, he noted the dramatic shift since 2013, when “Sanders introduced similar legislation” and “he didn’t have a single co-sponsor.”

Democrats obviously believe this approach is their winning strategy, and perhaps even believe it makes sense. The current environment among Democrats has allowed the emergence of a 29-year-old whippersnapper named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to dislodge a long-time New York House member, and quickly rise to fame. So fast and so prominently, in fact, that the old guard was knocked off balance, if balance they ever had.

These folks generally advocate doing away with ICE, open borders, single-payer healthcare - Medicare for All, doing away with private health insurance, abortion up to and even after birth, removing requirements for a photo ID to vote, allowing illegals to vote, radical gun control, raising taxes, free college education, and the Green New Deal.

The latter is one of Cortez’ favored positions. Somehow, despite her wild ideas and silly answers to serious questions, she has garnered a good bit of influence, enough to attract the attention of party leaders in Congress.

And liberal gadfly Michael Moore thinks so much of her that he wants the Constitution amended so that she can run for president.

“It's too bad you have to be 35 to be president,” Moore said on MSNBC. “We put that in the constitution, the Founding Fathers, because people died at 38 or 40 back then. Y'know, we need to lower that. If that was lowered to 30 ...” Obviously, logic is not Moore’s strong point.

These Democrat ideas have gotten so radical that one liberal Democrat, former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, raised the flag of caution. “We’ve got to have actionable, practical ideas,” he said. “And I worry — we can’t get into this election season with everybody trying to out-promise one another.”

One survey shows that McAuliffe’s concerns are backed up by data. Democrat and Democrat-leaning registered voters responded to a Pew Research Center survey that by a 53- to 40-percent margin, they want their party to move right, to a more moderate position.

The number of Democrats who view their ever-more-socialist party favorably has fallen from 53 percent last September to 49 percent this year, and 47 percent viewed the party in a negative way.

Interestingly, the survey showed that 58 percent of Republicans seek a more conservative party, while 38 percent seek a more moderate party.

An editorial in Investor’s Business Daily puts things nicely into perspective: ”Socialism is the most pernicious political system ever. Wherever it's been tried, it's led to mass misery, poverty, loss of rights, and even mass killing. Today, Venezuela, North Korea and Zimbabwe are notable examples. True American socialism wouldn't be any better.”

Amen to that.

Can the Democrat Party recover and rehabilitate in time for 2020?

Having blown the 2016 "sure thing" coronation of Hillary Clinton; having magnificently failed to realize how badly they had alienated the people who live between the two coastal liberal strong-holds, not noticing their growing displeasure and desire for change, we are left to wonder if the Democrats can return to Earth in time to rebuild their party and find good candidates to head the party ticket in 2020.

In their effort to figure out what happened the Democrats have blamed James Comey and the FBI, Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders, Wikileaks, racism, sexism, fake news, Russia, and voters: everyone and everything is to blame except the DNC itself and its candidate.

After the election there were demonstrations by Clinton supporters that turned into riots, crying sessions and a search for safe spaces, suggestions that Russian hacking impacted the election, which led to efforts to undermine the Electoral College by persuading Republican electors to not vote for Trump, as their voters has instructed them. There were instances of intimidation and death threats against some electors.

But no evidence has been advanced suggesting that the Russians actually changed votes or affected the results of the election. One analysis says all the Russians did was hack Democrat emails that were then released by Wikileaks, which exposed the lies, deceit, corruption, and collusion of the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and the media to the public. Since their dirty little secrets were exposed to the world, naturally the Democrats had to try to get the electors to overturn the results of the election, right?

Of course, Democrats disagree with this analysis, but the fact remains that they are so badly flummoxed and disoriented that we have every reason to wonder if they can recover rationality in time for their party to function well enough to field competent candidates for the next presidential election.

Assuming the DNC is able to establish lucidity, who are the potential candidates? Odds are that if Hillary Clinton is still alive and well, she will put herself out there again, despite her weak performance in 2008 and her substantial defeat this year.

But there are alternatives, too.

The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto cites a poll by Public Policy Polling showing that “Joe Biden leads the way for Democrats with 31 percent to 24 percent for Bernie Sanders, and 16 percent for Elizabeth Warren.” As if to underscore the depths of confusion among Democrats, however, Taranto goes on to say that they also expressed preference for younger candidates: “57 percent of Democrats say they want their candidate to be under the age of 60, and 77 percent say they want their candidate to be under the age of 70. Only 8 percent actually want a candidate who’s in their [sic] 70s.”

He points out that by the time of the 2020 election the favored potential candidates will be north of 70: Biden will be 77, Sanders will be 79, and Warren, the baby of the group, will be 71. Based upon the ages of the favored Democrats, Taranto termed the DNC the “Great-Grand Old Party.”

James Hohmann, national political correspondent for The Washington Post, suggests that since VP candidate Sen. Tim Kaine, D-VA, has declined to seek the presidency in 2020 that the door is open for other recognizable faces to enter the fray, such as New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, and New York’s Kirsten Gillibrand, who took over Clinton’s Senate seat when she became secretary of state.

In addition to the aforementioned possibilities, Post opinion writer Chris Cillizza names some other lesser-known potential candidates in a commentary published by the Chicago Tribune.

California’s Attorney General Kamala Harris, who was elected to the U.S. Senate in November, is the first African-American woman elected to the Senate since Carol Moseley-Braun in 1992, Cillizza notes. He points out that she also represents the largest and most-Democrat state in the country, and that her “law-and-order-background” as AG will help her.

With first a business background, then serving as a mayor, and now Colorado’s governor, John Hickenlooper would have broad appeal, Cillizza believes. One negative is Hickenlooper’s moderate political position, which may not appeal to the current very-liberal Democrats.

Having demonstrated an ability to work across the aisle to achieve things for veterans and child adoption, Callizza believes Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., has a positive profile for national office. Despite that her state is not exactly a fundraising hotbed for national politics, her ambitious demeanor may be attractive to Democrats.

Cillizza also notes that while current First Lady Michelle Obama has never run for office or expressed interest in doing so, she has excellent name recognition and “star power,” and would go into a race for the nomination as a beloved figure. He noted his approval of two of her political speeches, which he termed the two best in the last two years.

So, after Biden, Sanders, Warren, Booker, and Obama, the other possibilities have the name recognition hurdle to clear, so watching who says and does what during Trump’s first four years will help clarify the DNC’s dilemma.

Of course, if none of the above finds favor with the Democrats, Kanye West has already thrown his hat into the ring, and Martin Sheen of the recent effort to persuade electors to not vote for Trump is available. He’s never been a president, but he did play one on TV.