u/WMYDR2005

There is something strange about the final stage of an American presidential election. When Congress meets in a joint session to count the electoral votes, the person presiding over the process is the President of the Senate — the Vice President of the United States.

The problem is obvious: the Vice President may also be a candidate in the very election whose results are being counted.

This has happened several times in American history. In 1961, Vice President Richard Nixon presided over the counting of the electoral votes after losing the presidential election to John F. Kennedy. In 2001, Vice President Al Gore did the same after losing to George W. Bush. Most recently, in January 2025, Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the counting of the electoral votes and formally announced Donald Trump’s victory after having lost the election to him.

In all of these cases, the outgoing Vice President accepted the result and carried out the constitutional process peacefully. These moments can even be seen as powerful symbols of the peaceful transfer of power.

But a well-designed political system should not have to depend on the personal restraint of politicians.

The issue is not whether Nixon, Gore, Harris, or any future Vice President can be trusted. The issue is whether a presidential candidate should be placed in the position of presiding over a proceeding that formally determines and announces the outcome of his or her own election.

That creates, at the very least, the appearance of a conflict of interest.

The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 addressed the most dangerous part of this problem by making clear that the Vice President’s role in counting electoral votes is purely ministerial. The Vice President does not have the power to unilaterally accept, reject, or otherwise determine the validity of a state’s electoral votes.

That was an important reform. But it raises another question: if the Vice President has no substantive authority over the result, why does the Vice President need to preside over the process at all?

I think a better system would be to have the Chief Justice of the United States preside over the joint session in which the electoral votes are counted.

There is already a constitutional precedent for giving the Chief Justice such a role when the Vice President has an obvious potential conflict of interest. The Vice President ordinarily serves as President of the Senate, but when the President of the United States is tried by the Senate after impeachment, the Chief Justice presides instead. One reason this arrangement makes sense is that the Vice President could directly benefit if the President were removed from office.

A similar principle could apply to presidential elections.

The Chief Justice would not decide who becomes President. The role could remain strictly procedural: presiding over the joint session, opening the certificates, supervising the counting process, and announcing the result determined under the Constitution and federal law. Any substantive disputes over electoral votes would still be resolved through the procedures established by law and by Congress, rather than by the Chief Justice personally.

There is, of course, an important constitutional obstacle. The Twelfth Amendment specifically provides that the President of the Senate shall open the electoral vote certificates in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives. Therefore, completely transferring this responsibility to the Chief Justice would likely require a constitutional amendment rather than ordinary legislation.

Nevertheless, I think it is a reform worth considering.

The peaceful actions of Nixon, Gore, and Harris reflect well on the American tradition of transferring presidential power. But constitutional procedures should ideally be designed so that their legitimacy does not depend on a candidate demonstrating personal restraint.

A presidential candidate should not have to preside over the formal confirmation of his or her own victory or defeat.

Having the Chief Justice preside over the counting of electoral votes would not give the judiciary control over presidential elections. It would simply place a neutral constitutional officer in the chair and remove an unnecessary appearance of conflict of interest from one of the most important ceremonies in American democracy.

Canada currently has no term limits for Members of Parliament, meaning that MPs can continue running for re-election indefinitely.

In the United States, there have long been calls to introduce term limits for members of Congress. Some other countries already impose such limits. For example, the Chilean Constitution limits members of the Chamber of Deputies to three consecutive terms and senators to two consecutive terms. However, Chile has a presidential system rather than a parliamentary system like Canada’s.

Do you think Canada should introduce term limits for MPs as well?

For example, should the law provide that no person may be elected to the House of Commons more than four times in their lifetime?

I’m in Canada and I’m looking for some advice on how to handle a very unusual situation involving a cold case.

Years ago, my wife was in a relationship with a man who once told her something very disturbing about his family. According to him, his grandfather had killed a woman more than 70 years ago.

What makes this particularly concerning is that he didn’t just vaguely say that his grandfather had killed someone — he actually told my wife the name of the woman.

His grandfather was already long dead at the time. He had been dead for more than ten years by the time my wife heard this story.

Much later, I decided to search the woman’s name online. To my surprise, I found an actual missing-person case involving a woman with that name who disappeared more than 70 years ago. The case is still listed on a Canadian missing-persons website.

Obviously, this does not prove that my wife’s ex-boyfriend’s story was true. It is second-hand information, the alleged perpetrator is deceased, and we have no physical evidence. It is also possible that there is some innocent explanation or that the story was exaggerated or simply untrue.

However, the fact that the name he gave my wife appears to correspond to a real woman who disappeared during roughly the relevant period makes me feel that this is something the police should at least know about. If the story is genuine, it could potentially provide investigators with a lead in a case that has remained unresolved for more than seven decades.

I told my wife that I think we should report what she was told to the police.

Her hesitation is understandable. She and her ex-boyfriend did not have a bad breakup. They are in the same professional field and still have overlapping professional circles. She also has no idea whether he ever told anyone else this story. If the police contacted him and mentioned the information, he might immediately realize that she was the person who reported it.

She is also worried about how her ex-boyfriend might react if he found out that she had passed on to the police something he told her privately about his grandfather allegedly killing someone. She doesn’t know whether he would resent her for it or whether it could damage their relationship, especially since they parted on good terms and still work in the same field.

At the same time, I feel uncomfortable simply doing nothing. There was a real woman who disappeared, and presumably there were family members who spent the rest of their lives never knowing what happened to her. Even after all these years, I feel that if we potentially have relevant information, the right thing to do is at least pass it along and let investigators decide whether it has any value.

Neither of us personally witnessed anything, of course. All we can honestly tell police is:

- my wife’s ex-boyfriend told her that his grandfather killed a particular woman;

- he gave her the woman’s name;

- the grandfather was already deceased when he told her this;

- I later found a real unresolved missing-person case involving a woman with that name from more than 70 years ago.

I’m deliberately not posting any names here because I don’t want to publicly accuse a deceased person or identify my wife’s ex-boyfriend based only on a second-hand story.

For people familiar with Canadian law enforcement, what would be the best way to handle this?

Should we contact the police service that originally investigated the disappearance, even though we live somewhere else in Canada? Would Crime Stoppers be appropriate if my wife wants to protect her identity? Would investigators even be interested in information this old and this indirect?

Most importantly, is there a way to give investigators the full information while explaining that my wife is concerned about her identity being disclosed to her ex-boyfriend?

I would appreciate advice, especially from anyone familiar with Canadian cold-case investigations.

I’ve recently become very interested in Cambodian history. Can anyone recommend some good books on the subject?
I’m especially looking for books that cover Cambodian history from Funan and Chenla, through the Angkor period, all the way to modern Cambodia.
English-language books are preferred. Thanks!

I'm curious about how Cambodians today generally view Norodom Sihanouk.

Is he still widely respected as the leader who helped Cambodia gain independence, or is his legacy more controversial because of some of his later political decisions?

I'm also curious whether there is a generational difference. Do older Cambodians who lived during the Sihanouk era tend to view him differently from younger Cambodians today?

I'd especially like to hear from Cambodians.

I'm Chinese, and I personally know the Chinese writer Lu Yuegang, who wrote a biography of Zhao Ziyang, the former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, and has known and interviewed many people from China's senior political circles.

A few days ago, I asked Lu a somewhat random question: Do you think extraterrestrials exist?

To my surprise, he told me that more than ten years ago he had asked Tian Jiyun the same question. Tian was a member of the Politburo from 1985 to 2002.

According to Lu, Tian first learned about this story after becoming a member of the Politburo in 1985. As a Politburo member, he was able to read certain classified archives and documents that were only accessible to members of the Politburo. Among them was a document describing an extraordinary incident that had supposedly taken place shortly after China's first successful atomic bomb test in 1964.

According to the document, Party Chairman Mao Zedong, Premier Zhou Enlai, Marshal Zhu De, Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, Vice Premier Chen Yun, and several other senior Chinese leaders had encountered a being who claimed to be an extraterrestrial.

Before the encounter, the being supposedly appeared to Mao in a dream and told him to gather a group of senior Communist Party leaders for a meeting at Juxiang Shuwu, Mao's residence and study in Zhongnanhai. Zhongnanhai is a compound that houses the offices and residences of China's top leadership.

The leaders gathered there as instructed. The mysterious man then suddenly materialized inside the room, seemingly appearing out of nowhere.

What was especially strange was his appearance. He didn't look anything like the stereotypical extraterrestrial from science fiction. He looked exactly like an ordinary Chinese man, wore a Mao suit, and spoke Chinese.

The encounter lasted for more than ten minutes. Mao asked him where he came from. The man replied that he was an extraterrestrial and that he came from a place extremely far away from Earth, but that his people were concerned about what was happening on Earth.

He warned Mao and the other Chinese leaders not to use nuclear weapons.

He also told them that China was not the only nuclear power to receive such a warning. According to him, the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France had also been warned not to use nuclear weapons.

After speaking with Mao and the others for more than ten minutes, the man suddenly vanished from the room without a trace, just as mysteriously as he had appeared.

Later, during a Politburo meeting in 1986 (or possibly 1987, as Tian's memory of the exact year was somewhat unclear), Politburo Standing Committee member Chen Yun brought up the incident again. Since Tian had already read about it in the classified document, he became curious and began asking further questions about what had happened.

Deng Yingchao, Zhou Enlai's wife and a member of the Politburo, was also present at the meeting. In response to Tian's questions, she added a detail that apparently had not been mentioned in the document.

According to Tian, Deng Yingchao said that Mao later stopped living at Juxiang Shuwu and moved to the indoor swimming pool complex in Zhongnanhai because the encounter had frightened him. After seeing a mysterious being suddenly appear inside his own residence and then disappear without a trace, Mao apparently no longer felt comfortable living there.

I know Lu personally and trust his character, so I believe he is telling me the truth about what Tian told him. As for Tian, I also find it difficult to see why a former Politburo member would privately invent such a bizarre story about extraterrestrials when talking to Lu.

Of course, whether the encounter itself actually happened is another question. But I believe Lu really did hear this account from Tian, and I thought it was an extraordinary story worth sharing.