Welcome, Senator Padilla

[canyonwalker]

With California Senator Kamala Harris now the Vice President-elect, the state needs a person to fill her seat in the US Senate. Governor Gavin Newsom has named Alex Padilla to fulfill the rest of her term. Padilla has most recently served as California Secretary of State. Prior to that he served in the State Senate and on the Los Angeles City Council. Example news coverage: Bloomberg article 22 Dec, NPR article 22 Dec, New York Times article 23 Dec.

Much is made in the news coverage about Padilla being the first Latino representing California in the US Senate. I agree, for a state that has a 40% Latino population and was carved off from Mexico in 1848 (ceded by the Mexican government under the treaty ending the Mexican-American War), it's time. I've been pleased to discover that, aside from his heritage as the son of Mexican immigrants, Padilla is also a STEM graduate. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT.

Congress badly needs more members with STEM education. The bumbling, clueless questions Congress asked heads of Google, Facebook, et. al. in hearings over the past few years shows that we need political leadership who genuinely understand the role of technology in our lives.

Comments

[stinaleigh]

Oh, the lawyers are often just as bad. And there are certainly good STEM legislators, but he is what came to mind when you mentioned the tech-illiteracy although my mind went to science denial.

[canyonwalker]

For most of the history of representative democracy, from the ancient Roman Republic until a few years ago, it went without saying that anytime you said, "We need an X" in the politics, you also meant, "who isn't a crackpot or a sociopath." The last few years being what they are, that can no longer be taken for granted.

[jnovak]

Quite honestly, we need more judges with STEM training as well-- and for the purposes of this discussion let's not consider economics as any kind of a science. I know it's a crazy idea, but maybe we'd stop getting really stupid tech decisions if some meaningful fraction of the judiciary had some real knowledge of the field.

I don't know how you manage to wedge significant amounts of science and engineering training on top of the level of schooling and experience necessary to get a law degree and then a position on the bench, though.

(And, without meaning to dump on the medical field at all, Rand Paul is not even on the list of people that comes to my mind as STEM oriented. Some doctors, especially but not limited to research physicians, are scientists. Some are just highly trained professionals. Honestly you can make exactly the same statement about engineers, when you get right down to it.)