I think we all need to just admit that there will be policies that the next US President will implement that we will hate. It doesn’t matter if you support a Republican or Democrat candidate. You may even like some of their policies, but you’ll probably hate a handful and those may define what you really think about that President.

In my case I was an Obama supporter. I think overall, he’s done a pretty good job, but I hate his Mid-East policies, many which Clinton was the architect. I also hate his current stance on encryption, because I think it’s incredibly short sighted.I think we need our leaders to be long in vision, because it’s impossible to know who is going to be sitting in that chair when they finish. This is exactly the case we’re seeing with people incredibly alarmed about the policies that Obama has implemented in Donald Trump’s hands.

Techdirt raised this issue a few days ago in an article called “Abuse Of Power: Laws Should Be Designed As If The People We Distrust The Most Are In Power“. In the simplest terms the author calls for all laws to be written as if the people in charge right now expect to be replaced with people that are the polar opposites of them. In our current political climate that would be the conservatives being replaced as soon as they finish their terms with the most liberal democrats conceivable.

This is essentially how the Bill of Rights were written. Basically, the framers had a clear understanding of what the worst tyrannical  rulers in the world do to their subjects. Consequently, they could immediately imaging what would happen if that person became the ruler of the United States, but still bound by the laws of the new constitution. In that case, they could see that the tyrant would be constrained by these laws in such a way as that they would be “comfortable” with them leading the country.

In our case, we have continually eroded the defenses in the Bill of Rights over the past 200 plus years. So now, we have many policies that a great deal of Americans don’t really trust either political party with the powers they’ve been entrusted with. This is further complicated by the fact that our intelligence agencies don’t magically realign with the wishes of a new elected official. Similar to any entity, they continue to pursue their overarching objective and changes in those behaviors require massive changes. In the case of the NSA/CIA it may require changes in laws restricting them from behaving in certain ways with very serious repercussions to those that don’t change their behavior.

As a result, Techdirt is correct. We need to develop our policies with the assumption that “the other” is going to be in charge at some point in our lifetime. The group that we don’t ever want to be in power, will be. We have to admit that. To ensure that they are never able to abuse fellow Americans is to ensure that we do not ever abuse Americans nor other international actors. This then must be codified into law, thus when the most unsavory candidate you can image has a solid chance of winning an election, they will not have powers that we would abhor in their hands. That’s what we need to be thinking about.