Mitch McConnell plans to confirm Donald Trump's nominations for federal judges when Senate returns to Washington over advice of Capitol Hill physician

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will be back to prioritizing President Trump’s judicial nominations when the Senate returns to Washington on Monday.

A Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for a controversial judicial pick has been slated for Tuesday, according to NBC News, which will be one of the first things senators tackle when work resumes.

House Democrats announced Tuesday that they will no longer come back to D.C. on May 4, due to health concerns expressed by the Attending Physician of the United States Congress.

“There was a risk to members that he would not recommend taking,” said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on a call with reporters Tuesday, explaining that the doctor pointed to the fact that D.C.’s coronavirus cases haven’t peaked yet.

Hoyer also explained that it didn’t make sense for the House to come back into session when the contents of the next coronavirus aid package haven’t been worked out.

It can also be done with fake electronics.

It can also be done with electronic signature. Not the fake electronic 'signatures' you see in most applications where you just click something that indicates a 'signature. PGP or GPG can be used to create real electronic signatures that cannot be faked or repudiated. Granted, you'd probably need more intelligence to use GPG than is available with the average congresscritter, but it could be done pretty easily. Additionally, the message could be encrypted so that it couldn't be discerned until the message itself was actually decrypted and validated.

The following is a clearsigned message by Zeugma using a key I created for FR a few years ago. If you have a copy of my public key, you can validate that this message was, in fact, created by me, or at least the entity that purports itself to be Zeugma.

Here's the same message, which is also signed. It is encrypted with a symmetric cypher (AES), for which the passphrase is "Free Republic", without quotes.

With the above, you can use email securely and record and publish responses. Anyone with a copy of the critter's public key can validate the message and vote. Again. None of this is rocket science. I've been using PGP for more than 20 years.

You can use the same method to send a copy of the text of any legislation to a congresscritter. The signed text can be validated easily. In the vote, the critter could imbed a detached signature that had been validated against the legislation as a part of his 'vote', so that one could validate which version of the legislation was being voted upon. Here is a signature detached from the original file that can be used to validate same.

The tech for all this isn't new. Again, I've been using it for 20+ years. Probably closer to 30, as I started with PGP 2.3, which was a DOS command line program.

The public key for each congress/senatecritter can be published on their respective websites. They could all be cross-signed to validate them. I'd expect a particular private key to expire after an individual session of congress, or perhaps it would last the length of the critter's term. If a critter is re-elected, he'd sign the new key with the old to document continuity.

You could actually take this really far if you wanted to. Suppose to have a committee (a creature with 24 legs and no brain). If a report is issued by the committee, each member could sign it electronically, and you'd have an official document that anyone could validate as an official document via the signatures (either embedded or detached).

Sadly, the government has a great fear of good crypto in the hands of ordinary people, so such a system would never be implemented because it would spur too many people to learn about and actually use encryption in their daily lives. What passes for 'electronic signatures' today is a massive joke. It could be so much better.

They Practically had a conniption 40 years ago when PGP was first announced. I am sure that there are many secure methods to determine who is who, but my concern was fake people created out of digits which is not beyond possibility. Virtual reality is not something to ignore. Can be good or super bad.

One of the early Star Trek shows had that as a subject when Spock took a disables Captain to the forbidden planet that was strictly a virtual reality construct. A 1981 movie "Looker" that is noted elsewhere in this thread had that possibility as a subtopic. They were constructing virtual politicians but the theme was more about digitizing female models then killing the real human ones and replacing them.

It would be much harder to extend into the normal voting realm. Legislooters have no expectation of the privacy of the vote. This is why it’s such an easy system to design. You could do it many ways. What I’d suggested was one of many proposals that have been made in the past. Everything related to the vote of the legislooter should be public and verifiable. (Hence use of actual digital signatures to verify and validate a vote).

In most civilized societies, there should be no way to trace back a specific vote to an individual. I’ve seen proposals for using this kind of encryption technology, but nothing I’ve seen is workable, as the protocols are extremely complex, and fragile. You’re better off vetting voters in person and dropping ballots in a box. Bruce Schneier, who’s a recognized expert in cryptographic systems, has a rather old document that describes how dangerous electronic voting can be in elections. I don’t have a link handy, but google his name and ‘electronic voting’ and you’ll find it. You have to validate a lot of stuff, starting with the voter himself. His recommendations would be right at home with most here on FR, even if he is a bit of a lefty.

If I had my way, the District of Criminals would contain nothing but museums and monuments. There is no reason anymore for having all the folks together just to cast votes. These people should live in the states they are allegedly elected to represent. They should have to live under the laws they make the rest of us shoulder.

The one reason I could see putting them all together in one place was if I had access to a small thermonuclear weapon under the floor of the room.

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