Perhaps the best commentary yet on this election cycle came from a tweet: “If the 2016 Presidential Election were a season of The West Wing everyone would be like ‘Oh Jesus Christ, Aaron.’” But here we are.
Today marks the eve of Super Tuesday, when voters in the greatest number of states will hold primary elections for presidential nominees. 12 states and one U.S. territory will weigh in tomorrow, potentially making and breaking campaigns. And in the 2016 election, more is on the line than ever. Here we dive in on a couple of the more prominent things that voters should be weighing as they make their way to their local caucus or voting booth.
Executive Actions
Obama didn’t issue an absurd number of executive orders, comparably, but in the contentious political climate of his presidency, many of his executive orders and actions were contested. He And that’s because he made a lot of bold moves, and often those set or changed the standard for how an issue was expected to be treated.
With his 231 executive actions he did things like establish paid sick leave, and raised the minimum wage for federal contractors. He did away with the threat of criminal prosecution for U.S. families who negotiate with kidnappers, and (on his first day in office) rescinded the George W. Bush executive orders from 2002 that authorized more aggressive surveillance of U.S. citizens. In July of 2014, he prohibited federal contractors or subcontractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. 
Obama made numerous moves on cybersecurity before Congress was passing anything on it. And his executive action on immigration is still being challenged in court, and will face the Supreme Court this spring.
During his time in office he’s also taken numerous executive actions, a sort of catch-all term for all of the President’s actions that aren’t as legally binding as their order brethren (though they’ve been equally unpopular with his opposition). Forbes has a nice list with just a sample of the number of memos and actions the Obama Administration has taken. His time in office also saw a handful of states legalize marijuana—and his administration announced it would not challenge laws as long as states were responsible about their decriminalization. Just last month Obama took bold, and (mostly) welcome steps towards closing up loopholes for who can acquire a gun and how.
But all of this could be undone depending on how the next president feels.
“That’s the other side of an executive order; while there’s a good bit that the president can do, it can be undone by a subsequent executive. It doesn’t have that same permanence that a new law has,” said Scott Key of the Georgia Criminal Appellate Law Blog after Obama’s executive action on gun control. “It’s a bold move from a policy perspective—he understands many campaigns are financed in part by the NRA, they have a powerful lobby. He must recognize that it’s going to be pretty hard to go the traditional route of expecting Congress to pass a law.”
Which makes sense: Last year there were 39 federal rules enacted for every law Congress passed. It’s no surprise that Obama was itching to pick up the slack.
During his presidency, Obama has also made a number of steps forward for LGBTQ workers.
SCOTUS nomination
Which brings us to our other productive branch of our government. Sad as it is to say, the current outlook on a replacement for Justice Antonin Scalia doesn’t look great for 2016.
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Senate members have repeatedly said they’ll block any nominee Obama makes, which as the Washington Post notes, is a potentially a big gamble:
Senate Republicans aim to wait until a new president takes office in 2017. If the new president in 2017 is a Democrat, we will still have the “perfect storm” scenario. That’s a bit of a gamble for Republicans, as a new president might have more political capital to expend on a nominee.
If Democrats gain the White House this November, perhaps Republicans would work with President Obama on a consensus pick in a lame-duck session, ceding as little ideological ground as possible on the Court. But Obama could say “no thank you” and let his Democratic successor get someone better.
A Republican presidential appointment would give the senators aiming to block an appointment a lot more ammunition. A conservative nominee would not change the ideological balance of power on the high court—a major focus considering the right Supreme Court nominee could mean the difference on LGBTQ rights, the fate of the Affordable Care Act, and any number of other hot button issues that have changed drastically since Obama took office. As some researchers have noted, any judges that are left, or even center-right like Justice Anthony Kennedy, could mark a return to the 1994-2005 court, when 57 percent of salient SCOTUS decisions swung liberal.
Privacy Battles
The dominant headlines as of late around the “crypto wars” have been Apple standing up to the FBI, but the battle over encryption has a long history—and what looks like a similarly long future.
After all, 2015 saw increased awareness and scrutiny around “stingrays,” which can collect cell phone data without a warrant. Cyber espionage and data hacks have grown from something seen in 1990s movies to a very real, and seemingly commonplace, threat. In 2014 Department of Justice charge China with corporate cyber-espionage, Anthem Health Insurance got hit bad by hackers, and six months later so did Blue Cross Blue Shield. The following year, Obama called cyber attacks a “national emergency” and authorized sanctions against those who commit them. After the Ashley Madison attack consumers were more acutely aware that their data might not be deleted when the company says it is, but there’s still very little regulation dictating what companies should do. Sony is still recovering from a massive hack on their system possibly perpetrated by hackers associated with the North Korean government, who researchers now know have been active since 2009 and are responsible for 45 families of malware since. The federal government has had everything from the Office of Personnel Management to the Department of Justice hacked all in the past year.
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“Security experts like to say that there are now only two types of companies left in the United States: those that have been hacked and those that don’t know they’ve been hacked,” stated one New York Times article last year.
Meanwhile the U.S. is still working with the E.U. to hammer out the particulars of the Privacy Shield, which will replace the Safe Harbor agreement that the European Court of Justice voted out last October. What U.S. businesses (and government officials) are able to do with the data of E.U. citizens could be major across the board, but especially for smaller businesses who can’t afford to set up new data centers in Ireland to get around the dearth of Safe Harbor.
And all this doesn’t even get into the U.S. government’s on-going battle against enhanced encryption methods coming out of Silicon Valley, where even compromising one iPhone could bring precedent for decrypting the entire network of Apple products. Whoever the next president is, they’ll undoubtedly have a whole lot on their privacy and cybersecurity plates—even before we get into the new industries.
Disruptive Industries
Don’t forget, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and driverless cars—all earmarked to be major disrupters for industries across the board—are starting to glimmer on the horizon. These tools could be here soon. Like, very soon.
These things are going to need regulation, or at the very least clarification, and while it doesn’t look like it’s going to be here before the technologies arrive, it’s going to take a village to catch the legislation up to where it will need to be: 3D printing is about to do a number on copyright and ownership law, and if the Internet of Things is implemented before we have a real sense of what the privacy protocols need to be a lot of people could wind up in hot water.
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Driverless cars offer their own solutions to things like Uber’s employment woes and drunk driving, while introducing a brand new set of problems: liability, insurance, and (as with everything) privacy.
And all that is mostly local. As Time points out, the U.S. is just one facet of the evolving face of technology:
More than 2 billion cellphones will be sold in 2015, with about 1.5 billion of them smartphones. However, thanks to lowering prices, nearly all cellphones sold will be smartphones by 2018. At the same time, new wireless infrastructure being built in developing countries is opening the door for an increasing number of people to get online via the mobile Internet. If those people get access to low-cost smartphones, it could have major political, economic and educational ramifications few of us realize is possible.
When smartphones get the next two billion people online, it will be like what the Gutenberg Press and the Bible were to the masses in the Middle Ages. Before the printing press, all knowledge was in the hands of a select few who controlled the flow of information — and so was the power.
That’s a lot (and yet, only part of) the impending picture on the horizon for an incoming-Commander-in-Chief to deal with. But the truth is, soon it’s going to be the everyday. That’s something that these candidates—and their supporters—should probably have in mind while lining up the polls.