Six Years Ago?The Statute of Limitations on Truth Senator Cornyn Wishes the Republic Would Simply Move OnThe Last WireSenator John Cornyn has posed, with the weary patience of a man asked to explain long division to a committee, a question he apparently regards as unanswerable: why, six years on, are we still talking about election security at all?
At the
Aspen Security Forum, invited to reflect on President Trump’s Thursday address concerning foreign interference, intelligence findings, and the unresolved questions of past elections, the senator offered not an argument but a shrug dressed up as one. “We have 109 days until the midterm elections,” he said, “and I don’t understand talking about what happened six years ago.” He added, for good measure, that none of it would have changed the outcome anyway, and that he did not, in his own words, “get it.”
One admires the candor, if not the logic beneath it.
For Mr. Cornyn’s objection is not that foreign interference is a fiction, nor that election security is beneath the Senate’s notice. His objection is temporal: the matter, however grave, has simply aged out of relevance, like a carton of milk or a campaign promise. This is a curious epistemology for a man who has taken an oath to defend the Constitution, which, so far as I am aware, carries no expiration date, printed or implied.
National security is not improved by amnesia. A foreign intelligence operation does not dissolve because a calendar page has turned; a vulnerability in the machinery of democracy does not repair itself while Washington’s attention wanders to the next news cycle. The Pentagon does not close the file on Pearl Harbor because eight decades have elapsed. Langley does not shred its postmortems on September 11 because grief has, mercifully, receded. Serious institutions study their failures precisely because failures, left unstudied, have a discourteous habit of repeating themselves.
Why, then, should the integrity of a presidential election be granted a statute of limitations denied to every other category of American vulnerability?
On the Difference Between Fatigue and Wisdom
Let it be granted that Mr. Cornyn is not wholly mistaken. A governing party must, of course, attend to the voter’s present discontents: the price of eggs, the state of the border, the fraying nerve of a public exhausted by spectacle. These are legitimate claims on a senator’s time.
But the future is not secured by declining to examine the past; it is secured by nothing else. To suggest, as the senator does, that inquiry into 2020 is disqualified by its very age is not an argument from evidence. It is an argument from fatigue masquerading as an argument from principle, and the distinction matters enormously.
Nor is the case here that every allegation about the 2020 election is, ipso facto, true. Serious claims require serious proof, and I have no patience for those who traffic in grievance dressed as fact. But the absence of proof is an argument for investigation, not against it. A prosecutor does not close a case because the crime occurred years ago; he closes it because the evidence, examined, no longer supports it. Mr. Cornyn would have us skip the examination altogether.
The Question China Poses
The president’s remarks touched, inevitably, on Beijing, whose interest in the machinery of American politics is neither new nor subtle. China has invested, with characteristic patience, in cyber capability, in data collection, in the long and unglamorous work of influence.
It bears remembering that the modern battlefield requires no soldier to lay a hand on a ballot box. It requires only information: who the voters are, what divides them, where the fractures in the republic run deepest, and how best to widen them. Foreign access to American voter data is not, therefore, a mere matter of privacy, filed alongside one’s medical records or one’s tax return. It is a matter of intelligence, filed alongside the nation’s most jealously guarded secrets.
The pertinent question is not whether a foreign power altered enough ballots to swing an outcome, a threshold Mr. Cornyn seems to regard as the only one worth crossing. The pertinent question is whether a foreign power possessed both the capacity and the design to shape how Americans think, and whether the institutions charged with our defense responded as though the answer mattered.
These are not the same question. Mr. Cornyn, in his haste to change the subject, has answered neither.
— Gonzo
