Federal judges are announcing future vacancies at historic lows ahead of Election Day

As President Donald Trump has nominated a number of judges over his four years in office, and as Senator Mitch McConnell has led efforts in the Senate to ensure that those judges are confirmed, judicial vacancies have fallen significantly. But another thing that’s also dropped off—the number of federal judges announcing future vacancies.

We can look at “future judicial vacancies,” reported by the Federal Judicial Conference, to see how many federal judge have future vacancy plans. Some have announced a retirement date or a plan to take senior status; others announce plans to retire or take senior status upon confirmation of a successor; other non-Article III judges have a term that expires on a particular date; and still others have been nominated for a different court, and the vacancy will arise upon their confirmation to that court. Those announcements could be months into the future.

We can track the historic “future vacancies” recorded as of November 1 in an election year (cheating a bit to include October 23, 2020 at the moment, but I’ll update if there’s a change by November 1).

1992: 3

1996: 14

2000: 11

2004: 23

2008: 19

2012: 19

2016: 17

2020: 2

(Edit: my original number, 3, included the vacancy on the Seventh Circuit caused by the (anticipated) elevation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the United States Supreme Court. She was elevated before November 1, dropping the total to 2.)

There are a number of possible explanations. It could be over political calculus, as Democratic-appointed judges hold on to their terms to see the outcome of the election, and Republican-appointed judges who wanted to retire already have done so. It could be that there are simply fewer announcements, and more judges simply retire with less public anticipation. Fewer judges are being elevated right now because essentially all the appellate court seats are filled, meaning fewer lower-court vacancies. The Senate in the past may have moved more slowly in an election year when the president was of a different party. Judges feel an increased obligation to remain in place during the pandemic to minimize what’s already a disruptive time. Some judges also announce their retirement contingent on confirmation of a successor, and perhaps those have been filled at higher rates.

In short, I don’t have terrific explanations except to name a bunch of ideas. But the low number of announced future vacancies struck me as noteworthy.

What's going on in the Colorado presidential elector case?

This July, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Chiafalo v. Washington, the “faithless elector” litigation. The Court concluded that Washington’s decision to fine its presidential electors who cast votes in violation of their promise to vote for the candidate they were pledged to support (i.e., the candidate who received the most votes in a statewide popular vote).

Colorado’s case—Baca v. Colorado Department of State—saw a slightly different fate. Because Justice Sonia Sotomayor recused due to a conflict of interest with the parties, the cases were not heard together. The Baca case presented some more complicated issues, procedurally and relating to the fact that the faithless elector was replaced, not fined.. And so the Supreme Court issued a per curiam decision sending the case back, for reasons stated in Chiafalo. Based on the slight record in the decision, however, it’s not quite clear to me that Baca would be so quickly resolved as Chiafalo.

The case was sent back to the Tenth Circuit, where it languished for a couple of months before being sent back to the District Court. As litigation proceeds, stuff happens in the interim. To start, the district court judge in Colorado who heard the case, Wiley Young Daniel, passed away in May 2019. It’s been reassigned. Today, the new judge issued an order (cleaned up):

ORDER: This matter is before the court sua sponte. The Supreme Court has resolved the appeal and reversed the judgment of the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Tenth Circuit has vacated its August 20, 2019 judgment and recalled its September 11, 2019 mandate. The Tenth Circuit has remanded to resolve any remaining issues in the case. To facilitate the court's just and speedy determination of this action, on or before November 20, 2020, the parties shall file a joint status report addressing the following: (1) the issues, if any, that this court must resolve on remand; (2) the prospects for settlement; and (3) anything else the parties wish to bring to the court's attention. This case shall be REOPENED. Status Report due on or before 11/20/2020. SO ORDERED by Judge Daniel D. Domenico on 10/19/2020.

Now, I may simply overread things—the parties may simply agree that Chiafalo is on point and dismiss the case. Or the district court agrees and tidies it up. Nevertheless, Colorado’s faithless elector law technically remains under litigation dispute under at least November 20—after Election Day, and before the Electoral College convenes….

July 2020 bar test-takers down significantly from recent years, but much smaller drop in those who passed

I wondered what happened from the July 2020 administration of the bar exam compared to previous administrations, in terms of test-takers and overall pass rates. I looked at results from 10 states: Colorado, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia. These were states that administered a traditional in-person July 2020 bar exam and did not offer some later fall test. I thought this would be the cleanest way to compare recent trends—non-traditional bar exams (like an online option or a new state test), or those that offered another administration later in the fall, might skew the test-taking pool more.

I then looked at the last three years of July test-takers and overall passers. I thought this might even out any irregularities if I looked at just the July 2019 test alone. But, of course, law school graduating classes differ from year to year, both in size and test-taker ability, so it’s only a crude portrait.

In the July 2017, 2018, and 2019 administrations of the bar exam, these 10 jurisdictions averaged 3627 test-takers and 2576 who passed, a 71.0% pass rate.

In July 2020, test-takers were down significantly, 13.9%, down to 3124 (a drop of 503 test-takers). But passers were down just 3.3%, 2492 who passed the exam (a drop of 84 passers over the three-year average).

Complicating this analysis is that North Carolina temporarily reduced its cut score, which might, on the one hand, been designed to offset any disadvantages to preparing for the bar exam during a pandemic, but, on the other hand, may have increased newly-licensed attorneys if bar preparation during the pandemic was not so adversely affected among remaining test-takers. But North Carolina saw a 4.1% increase in passers over its three-year average, one of only two states to see an increase.

A driving factor appears to be that the most likely to fail the bar exam were the most likely to opt out of this administration. That’s particularly the case for those who previously failed a bar exam—repeaters as a percentage of overall test-takers were down significantly according to the NCBE.

For those worried about the pipeline of attorneys more generally and the availability of clients in search of access to justice, the news is at least modestly promising, that while there was a substantial decline in test-takers, the decline in licensed attorneys was much more modest. (This is not to defend other problems with adminstering the bar exam in a pandemic, as I’ve described extensively elsewhere.) It does vary from state to state, however, so it’s worth looking at specific jurisdictions, too. In Mississippi, for instance, passers declined by more than 22% over the three-year average; in contrast, West Virginia and North Carolina saw modest increases. I’ve included the tables below.

	2017-2019 avg		2020		2020 v. avg		2020 v. avg pct
	Takers	Passers	Takers	Passers	Takers	Passers	Takers	Passers
Colorado	740	530	642	499	-98	-31	-13.3%	-5.8%
Iowa	187	151	162	134	-25	-17	-13.2%	-11.1%
Mississippi	169	99	110	77	-59	-22	-35.0%	-22.5%
Missouri	660	525	602	507	-58	-18	-8.8%	-3.4%
Montana	97	80	83	71	-14	-9	-14.7%	-11.3%
North Carolina	833	532	668	554	-165	22	-19.8%	4.1%
North Dakota	72	48	58	44	-14	-4	-19.4%	-8.3%
Oklahoma	288	223	268	215	-20	-8	-6.8%	-3.7%
South Carolina	417	279	385	276	-32	-3	-7.7%	-1.1%
West Virginia	163	109	146	115	-17	6	-10.4%	5.8%

Justice Kavanaugh reiterates statements of allocation of power over elections in Andino v. Middleton opinion

In August, I highlighted a line from Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s dissenting opinion in the Calvary Chapel case in which he linked state decisions over handling the coronavirus, including elections. To requote his opinion:

I agree that courts should be very deferential to the States’ line-drawing in opening businesses and allowing certain activities during the pandemic. For example, courts should be extremely deferential to the States when considering a substantive due process claim by a secular business that it is being treated worse than another business. Cf. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11, 25–28 (1905). Under the Constitution, state and local governments, not the federal courts, have the primary responsibility for addressing COVID–19 matters such as quarantine requirements, testing plans, mask mandates, phased reopenings, school closures, sports rules, adjustment of voting and election procedures, state court and correctional institution practices, and the like.

(Emphasis added.)

Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion concurring in the grant of the application for stay in Andino v. Middleton, concerning South Carolina’s signature witness requirement for ballots, gets at much the same thing. And he does so by linking deference to states on the coronavirus with election rules:

First, the Constitution “principally entrusts the safety and the health of the people to the politically accountable officials of the States.” South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom (2020) (ROBERTS, C. J., concurring in denial of application for injunctive relief). “When those officials ‘undertake[ ] to act in areas fraught with medical and scientific uncertainties,’ their latitude ‘must be especially broad.’” Ibid. It follows that a State legislature’s decision either to keep or to make changes to election rules to address COVID–19 ordinarily “should not be subject to second-guessing by an ‘unelected federal judiciary,’ which lacks the background, competence, and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.” South Bay (citing Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority (1985)). The District Court’s injunction contravened that principle.

(Cleaned up.)

Note that this opinion does not cite other election cases. It cites a free exercise case in South Bay United Pentecostal Church (specifically, Chief Justice John Roberts’s concurring opinion—despite the fact that Justice Kavanaugh would have granted the application in that case but here concurred in the denial.) Instead, it defers to state court judgments on matters relating to the coronavirus, even when a fundamental right is as stake—the right to vote, or the free exercise of religion.

It’s the second time in recent months Justice Kavanaugh has expressly linked this deference to the state legislative process over elections and the state legislative process over coronavirus regulations, and deference of the judiciary to the state legislative process. I’m sure it won’t be the last.

What does it mean for a presidential election to be "independently certified"?

I didn’t watch the presidential debate (I typically don’t watch any of them), but someone alerted me to this question that arose, which I report from a transcript:

WALLACE: Alright, so wait a minute. Final question is, in eight states, election workers are prohibited, currently by law in eight states, from even beginning to process ballots, even take them out of the envelopes and flatten them, until Election Day. That means that it's likely, because there's going to be a huge increase in mail-in balloting, that we are not going to know on election night who the winner is. And it could be days, it could be weeks.

TRUMP: Could be months.

WALLACE: -- until we know who the new president is. So I first for you sir. Finally, for the, for the vice president. I hope neither of you will interrupt the other. Will you urge our supporters to stay calm during this extended period, not to engage in any civil unrest? Will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?

That phrase “independently certified” is curious. Here are some ways of thinking what it might mean.

Presidential candidates can declare “victory” whenever they’d like, of course. But that can be rather embarrassing if they haven’t actually achieved victory (think “Dewey Defeats Truman” headlines).

So, presidential candidates often wait until the other major party candidate has formally conceded. That can be embarrassing, too—think Al Gore conceding in 2000, followed by George W. Bush declaring victory, only for Al Gore to retract it.

A candidate might wait, then, until a candidate concedes. But that also might require waiting when the facts otherwise indicate a candidate has lost. In 2004, for instance, John Kerry did not concede until the day after the election—apparently, consulting with attorneys about whether a challenge to the results in Ohio was feasible. Of course, Mr. Kerry was within his rights to do so.

Independently, however, news networks had “called” states in patchwork fashion, but in all cases refused to “call” at least 270 electoral votes for Mr. Bush until after Mr. Kerry conceded.

One might, then, say that news networks “certify” the outcome of the election—and networks are “independent” of the candidates. But that seems odd phrasing. Networks don’t really certify anything, they just call it based upon their predictive power. And different networks make different calls at different times. So one might say, “Don’t declare victory until a major news network calls it,” but that seems, well, again, odd.

One could turn to the actual entity that “certifies” elections—the state election authority. That’s not a great answer, either. In most states, formal certification can take well over a month. Even states that have a preliminary certification process take weeks. And, of course, no state certifies a result until all the ballots are in, which, as the moderator noted, could be weeks in some jurisdictions—much less that all the ballots are counted. But, it seems unrealistic, even in 2020, to require candidates to wait until at least 270 electoral votes’ worth of states have certified their results. Even then, legal challenges could remain.

In short, I don’t really understand the phrase “independently certified” here. Really, it means some general sense that some authority outside the campaign identifies the campaign as the winner. But beyond that, I don’t know how helpful it is.

The Commission on Presidential Debates has flexibility, but some legal constraints, on how it conducts a debate

The Commission on Presidential Debates (“CPD”) is “eligible under federal law” to conduct presidential debates. That means they thread the needle between maintaining their non-profit status (not acting on behalf of any political campaign) and not providing an in-kind contribution to a political candidate. 11 CFR § 110.13 covers some of the rules for hosting a debate. Disputes most commonly arise over eligibility standards (often, independent or minor party candidates litigate whether the CPD’s threshold is permissible, as those candidates are usually excluded). But the CFR includes some rules for the debate format:

(b) Debate structure. The structure of debates staged in accordance with this section and 11 CFR 114.4(f) is left to the discretion of the staging organizations(s), provided that:

(1) Such debates include at least two candidates; and

(2) The staging organization(s) does not structure the debates to promote or advance one candidate over another.

Advisory Opinion 1986-37 offers some insight on this standard in rejecting the form of one proposed debate:

Each invitee will be allowed to speak to the assembled attendees at the convention for 20 minutes on a topic or topics of his or her selection. At the end of this address, there will be a 15-minute question and answer session with questions being asked by attendees from the convention floor. There will be a moderator who will not comment on the questions or otherwise make comments that imply approval or disapproval of any of these invitees.

[] Each invitee will deliver his or her address from the podium on the dais on the convention floor. Specific portions of the convention agenda will be set aside for these addresses so that each invitee will be given a comparable time for his or her address, such as 10 a.m., 2 p.m., or 4 p.m.

…

The Commission notes that your proposed candidate debate features individual appearances by each of the candidates at separate times over the course of the convention rather than concurrent, face-to-face appearances. Such face-to-face appearances or confrontations have historically been an inherent characteristic of candidate debates since the prototypical Lincoln-Douglas Debates in 1858 and, more recently, the presidential debates in 1960, 1976, 1980, and 1984. Although the format and structure of these debates varied from one instance to another, the common element in all of them was a face-to-face confrontation. The Commission's nonpartisan candidate debate regulations were drafted with this historical, traditional concept of candidate debates in mind. Accordingly, the Commission does not view your proposed candidate appearances as constituting a candidate debate.

Another statement from the FEC in 1995 on a related issue:

Nevertheless, the requirement of including two candidates would be satisfied, for example, if two candidates were invited and accepted, but one was unable to reach the debate site due to bad weather conditions, and the staging organization held the debate with only the other candidate present. Other situations will be addressed on a case-by-case basis. The Commission does not intend to penalize staging organizations for going forward with debates when circumstances beyond their control result in only one candidate being present and it is not feasible to reschedule.

The standards, then, are quite flexible—two candidates, not promoting one over another. That said, there is an expectation that they will be “face-to-face” or “confront[]” one another.

As the CPD considers modifying its debate standards for President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, there will need to be some confrontation between the two candidates. But it has broad flexibility to work within those parameters—at least, under existing interpretations of the law.

Four (unlikely) ways the 2020 presidential election ends up in the House of Representatives

President Donald Trump recently noted that the presidential election could be “thrown” to the House. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi did the same. But how does this work? And how likely is it?

It happens when no candidate wins a majority of the Electoral College. The House (the new House, which is sworn in January 3, then counts electoral votes on January 6) then chooses among the top three vote-getters, with each state casting one vote. Vermont gets one vote; California gets one vote. It takes a majority (here, 26 states) to choose the next president. As occurred historically, a tie vote in a state’s delegation (say, one state with 26 representatives is 13-13) did not count toward that majority.

A so-called “contingent election” is rare. It happened in 1800, when it took 36 votes in the House before Thomas Jefferson was chosen as President. Since the Twelfth Amendment, it happened only once, after the 1824 election, when Andrew Jackson won a plurality of the electoral vote but John Quincy Adams carried the House vote in the contingent election. (The vice presidential election of 1836 was also thrown to the Senate.)

So, how can it happen? Briefly, there are four ways to look at it (with some sub-scenarios noted, and some even more unusual outliers omitted).

First, there’s a tie in the Electoral College. The 12th Amendment requires that the president receive “a majority of the whole number of electors appointed.” If two candidates tie at 269-269, the House chooses between those two candidates.

When did this last happen? Since the Twelfth Amendment, which separated presidential and vice presidential votes, never. (A tie did happen in 1800 under different presidential election rules.)

How is this scenario possible? Presidential electors are based on each state’s Senate and House delegation. The Senate always has an even number of Senators, because each state receives two. The House is currently fixed at 435 members, an odd number. The District of Columbia is guaranteed a number of presidential electors, but no more than the least populous state (which, at the moment, is three, two senators plus one representative). Even number (Senate) + odd number (House) + odd number (DC) = even number. (We could increase the size of the House to 436….)

What are the odds? Very low. FiveThirtyEight puts the odds of no one winning a majority (which includes a tie scenario and others, below) at less than 1 in 100.

Second, three or more candidates divide up presidential electoral votes on Election Day, and no one gets a majority.

When did this last happen? In 1824, four presidential candidates divided up the electoral votes. The top three vote-getters were then sent to the House. While Andrew Jackson had 99 electoral votes to John Quincy Adams’s 83 (but neither crossed 131, the number needed for a majority), the House ultimately backed Adams.

How is this scenario possible? It requires one or more strong third-party candidates. Because all states award their presidential electors on a winner-take-all basis (except for Maine and Nebraska, where it’s winner-take-all for two statewide, and winner-take-all, or really winner-take-each, per congressional district), a third-party candidate would need more votes than both the Republican and Democratic candidates in a state, and end up depriving those candidates of a majority in the Electoral College. Strong third-party candidates like Ross Perot in 1992 won zero electoral votes. Others, like George Wallace in 1968, won a substantial number of electoral votes but did not deprive a candidate of the majority in the Electoral College.

What are the odds? Very low—and here I’ll add, exceedingly low. FiveThirtyEight puts the odds of no one winning a majority (which includes a tie scenario and others, below) at less than 1 in 100. I’ve seen no state polling to suggest that any third-party candidate is close to exceeding even 5% of the statewide popular vote total.

Third, faithless presidential electors deprive the apparent majority-winner of electoral votes, and no one gets a majority.

When did this last happen? Never.

How is this scenario possible? When we vote for the president and vice president on Election Day, we’re actually voting for a slate of presidential electors who later formally vote for president and vice president. Those electors are typically “faithful” to the popular will of the people of the state. Sometimes, however, electors vote for someone else, behaving as “faithless” electors. Historically, however, faithless electors have been rare. They’ve been rarer still to defect from the majority vote-getter to someone else. This past Supreme Court term, the Court in Chiafalo approved of state moves to cabin the discretion of presidential electors. And the faithless electors in 2016 likely have prompted the parties to look closely at how they vet electors in 2020.

What are the odds? Very low, likely exceedingly low. It requires a narrow electoral vote victory (certainly plausible), and faithless electors denying a majority (not just faithless electors generally). Chiafalo reduces those odds further.

Fourth, the House rejects some number of electoral votes that denies any candidate of a majority.

When did this last happen? Never.

How is this scenario possible? There are a few ways it could occur, because Congress formally counts the vote. A state might not send electors to Congress (which seems unlikely in the present day). It could send a slate of electors, but Congress refuses to count them (like it did in Louisiana in 1872)—perhaps because Congress deems the votes not “regularly given.” It could choose between multiple slates of electors (which has only happened once since 1876, Hawaii in 1960), and end up with a tie (which has never happened). One wrinkle is that the winning candidate under the Twelfth Amendment is among those from “a majority of the whole number of electors appointed” (emphasis added). If Congress throws out votes, it depends on whether it includes those votes in the denominator of “electors appointed.” (In other words, if it throws out 20 electoral votes, it might go from a majority requirement of 270 of 538, to 270 of 538—with 20 votes not counting—or, instead, and easier to meet, 260 of 518.) In short, there are a number of complicated things that might happen in Congress, which would be unusual and historic decisions in Congress.

What are the odds? Well, again, likely on the verge of exceedingly low. Congress has been reluctant to throw out electoral votes since Reconstruction. Recent attempts to do so in Congress—Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004, and a slate of states in 2016—lacked even modest support in Congress (only Ohio 2004 went to a congressional vote, where it was soundly defeated and Ohio’s votes were counted). It all depends on the complexity of the decisions left to Congress and Congress’s trust in the electoral outcomes—all with the added condition that these decisions ultimately deny any candidate a majority.

*

In short, the 2020 presidential election could end up in the House, as it could have done for any presidential election in the last 195 years. There are plausible reasons to think up any one of these scenarios. But, I think, it’s worth thinking through, with some precision about these scenarios, and how they may or may not occur.

Would you rather take the bar exam, or work 6000 hours as an apprentice?

Emergency “diploma privilege” has been a hot topic around the bar exam. Modified versions of the privilege have been cropping up. Utah’s, for instance, limits it to certain would-be attorneys, along with a condition of 360 hours’ supervised practice. I won’t rehash a lot of the debate for now.

The District of Columbia recently adopted a version of this. But the version is hardly “diploma privilege”—that is, upon receiving a law school diploma, you are eligible to practice law. Instead, DC’s rule requires recent graduates to have three years of supervised practice in the District of Columbia. Assuming 50, 40-hour weeks (or a 2000-ish-billable year), that’s 6000 hours of work. Yes, you can get paid, but there are strings attached to the practice, and it’s limited to practice within DC.

We’ve moved far afield from “diploma privilege” into, essentially, other alternatives to the bar exam. A three-year apprenticeship might be a good thing, but it’s also a very different kind of requirement from true diploma privilege. Indeed, tacking a three-year apprenticeship at the end of a three-year law degree feels onerous. Advocates for “diploma privilege” in DC have recognized this and pushed back against this new requirement.

To me, the bar exam would be a superior path for most law school graduates than this model. But it’s also worth considering the broader list of costs and benefits with all non-bar exam alternatives. Supervised practice might be better for some cohort—but it does offer a particular delay to the full practice of law. Maybe at the end of it, those under supervised practices are subject to less career discipline, or are more “competent” attorneys. All good things to measure. But, and I just note it here briefly, that it’s hardly the case that all replacements for the bar exam should be deemed “diploma privilege,” and it’s not sure that all alternatives are better than the bar exam.

Brief thoughts on court packing

First, some terms are negative and, no matter how much they’re used, never, at least in my ears, become positive. The phrase “going viral” is one. “Court packing” is another. I’m not a legal historian, but my understanding is that President Franklin Roosevelt proposed—admittedly, with some level of disingenuity—expanding the membership of the Supeme Court to assist aging justices hear cases and increase workload opportunities for the Court to hear more cases. “Court packing” was the critical term for the act, to suggest that his true motivation was to “pack” the Court with justices sympathetic to his political causes. So I’m not really a fan of using this phrase as a political rallying cry, as, I think, it’s a negative take. But maybe that ship has sailed, or maybe I’m idiosyncratic.

Second, it’s interesting to think about the procedural hurdles to clear. Expanding the Court requires legislative from the House and the Senate, including abolishing or surviving the legislative filibuster, and a presidential signature, followed by nominees from the president confirmed by the Senate. It’s a several stage process that takes all of government. It’s entirely achievable, of course, but it’s worth considering that the process may take some time.

Third, if “court packing” is the express goal—bringing on justices to the Court sympathetic to the expanding party’s political views—I wonder about the next question, the number of justices. In the event that a “conservative” jurist (for lack of a better descriptor) replaces the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the “median” justice on the Court (again, imperfect as it may be) may well be someone like Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Currently, it might be deemed Chief Justice John Roberts. Before that, it was Justice Anthony Kennedy. Those are fairly significant moves in the last couple of years.

Replacing a sitting justice with one at the other end of the ideological spectrum is essentially a two-step move: subtracting a vote on one end, and adding a vote on the other. So any “court packing” requires two justices to “make up” for a one-justice switch. (And of course there’s no requirement for an even number of justices.”) If left-of-center parties expand the Court to eleven and secure two more Supreme Court justices, the median justice shifts back to Chief Justice Roberts. If they expand to thirteen and secure four more justices (and four more confirmation hearings!), the median justice shifts to, say, Justice Stephen Breyer or Justice Elena Kagan (or maybe one of the newly-confirmed justices). Fifteen, and move it farther still.

In short, another important question is what one wants to achieve in “court packing.” One might want to restore “balance.” One might want to move the “median” vote. One might say, “they got three in the last four years, we want three.” Whatever it might be, there are political arguments that would need to be raised, then legislation to be drafted.

I confess, I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that “court packing” occurs for any number of reasons. But if it does, these are the questions that come to mind—and I’m sure some others have thought more deeply about them before, but I plead mostly ignorance on that point!