Thank you guy. However, while I have read the past responses on this topic, I was hoping to see what FriarTed thinks on the matter…
that, and prove that I can too 
stay on a GD topic without flaming a republican.
Actually, that would be a party-list proportional representation system. A parliamentary system would be one where the president and his cabinet are chosen by, and serve at the pleasure of, Congress, rather than being separately elected by the people and enjoying an independent electoral mandate.
AMENDMENT XXVIII
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Victimless consensual behavior in private homes shall not be prohibited or regulated by any law or ordinance.
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All laws and ordinances passed, wherever in the United States, shall be construed to acknowledge their ineffectiveness where they come into conflict with section 1.
I’m not sure I understand how this works. Are you saying that the parties present a group of candidates for a group of offices? For example, say New York is sending ten representatives to Congress. The Republicans and the Democrats, along with the Conservatives, the Greens, the Libertarians, the Right to Life Party, etc, all put forward a list of ten candidates. Then the voters cast their votes for the party they like. And if the final result is 41% Republican, 38% Democrat, 10% Conservative, 7% Libertarian, 3% Green, and 2% Right to Life, then four Republicans, four Democrats, one Conservative, and one Libertarian get picked off the lists by their parties and sent to Congress. Is this correct?
If so, I see problems. First off, you’ve basically eliminated any chance for a non-party independent candidate to run for office. Secondly, many voters prefer to vote for individual candidates rather than party platforms and this wouldn’t be an option. And finally, you’ve given the parties a chance to bait and switch - the parties could present a list with a list of favorable moderate candidates to attract votes but after winning the election they could pick either their most extreme radicals or their most partisan hacks to actually hold office.
In any event, you’ve actually increased the power of the parties in controlling who gets to run. Here’s a simple suggestion that might move us in the opposite direction: don’t mention party affiliations on the ballot. Political parties can choose their candidates and the candidates can identify themselves as part of a party when they’re running for office. But inside the voting booth, the voter will have nothing but a list of names before them. There are many voters who don’t bother learning anything about the candidates; they just pick a party and vote a straight ticket. Under my system, they would at least have to pay enough attention to learn who their party’s candidates are before voting for them.
Upon review, I see that I missed one point in my previous post. The system described would number the candidates in order - if five were chosen, the first five on the list of ten would be the ones elected. This would eliminate the bait and switch, but it would still leave a problem of voters not having a chance to pick individual candidates. Suppose I liked the 2nd, 4th, and 7th candidates and dislike the 3rd and 8th candidates on the Republican list and for the Deemocrats I liked the 3rd, 5th, and 6th candidates and disliked the 1st and 4th choices - why should I have to accept their parties’ decision on where they should rank?
I would also include the absolute, outright banning of any amendment that would attempt to impose governmental authority over abortion, flag desecration, and same sex marriage. I suspect that an outright ban of religion in government and education would produce the same results. I would also propose an amendment stripping any and all religous organizations of their tax-free status.
I meant recognizing that, from the New England colonists to their Founding Fathers/Framers descendants, they held to belief in a Creator God, Jesus as at least a Major Teacher from God, the Bible as a darn good source of moral wisdom & cultural heritage, and a fair afterlife of rewards & punishments (Franklin & Jefferson both concurred to that much), and that public structures & forums & persons don’t have to be stripped of any references to that minimal consensus.
I believe in secular government, but not ultra-secularist culture/heritage-denying government. Ultra-Secularists are those who believe in actually stripping public structures of past religious references & silencing persons from expressing their faith in the public square.
Yeah, cause you know, it’s REALLY HARD to find out about religion nowadays in the US. It’s not like there aren’t religious radio stations or cable networks or anything.
I mean, c’mon, Ted, this “repressed religion in the US” meme is so stupid it makes dogs howl.
Nope. Any honest appraisement of the situation shows that religion is becomming more repressed while secularism grows in power in the US.
I’m an atheist, so I rather think this is a good thing. But, C’mon, lets at least admit that it exists.
FriarTed, all this talk of how you believe all Americans should kowtow to Christ interests me not in the least. 
What would really like to hear is for you to explain your position on third parties. I simply don’t understand why you don’t answer the question, but instead stick to this non-issue. Please, could I ask you to elaborate further on what you would do to “break the two-party stranglehold on the electoral system.”
I sure would love to hear you elaborate on this.
Yes, that’s essentially how it works. But the parties are required to submit their lists in order in advance of the election.
Not necessarily. All that “independent” candidate has to do is choose a party name and submit a list of one. It wouldn’t be mandatory to submit a complete 10-person list if the party chose not to.
In New Zealand, they have a combination of representatives chosen by district amended with proportional representation by party list. So, in each district, you do have the option of choosing the person you like rather than the party, but your choice contributes to an overall total that decides the proportions for the parties.
I see no problem in this. In fact, I believe that a key part of weakening the two-party stranglehold on the electoral system is actually making parties in general stronger. One reason why the system is the way it is is because the parties are weak that they really can’t or don’t wish to control the policy positions taken by their “members.” Under a strong-party system, each party’s policy positions are easier to discern, making a voting choice more transparent.
A lot of state and local elections are already done this way and I think this contributes to the “bait-and-switch” system we have now. We pretend we’re voting “for the man,” but in reality we have little idea what we’re going to get. Tie the candidates more strongly to party planks and you empower the voter, because the voter has a better idea of what he or she is actually voting for.
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Slide all the amandements up one, to make room for what should have been the logical #1) Freedom of thought.
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State explicitly that, while we recognize the viability of life in the womb and believe that it has certain rights (particularly toward the end of term), that those rights are superceded by the right of the mother to control her own body.
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Mandate that government enforce all laws on the books. All laws that are not enforced at least 80% of the time would cease being laws in three years.
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Mandate that the government have complete control of our borders, with the ability to open the gates as wide or as narrow as times dictate.
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For those guilty of the most heiinous murderous acts, speed up the death penalty so that it occurs within one year. But raise the bar for burden of proof dramatically. And make those under eighteen and mentally deficient ineligible for the ultimate punishment.
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Flat Tax. Or National Sales Tax.
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For those found guilty of rape, castration. Serial rapists, the death penalty.
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Make English the official language.
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Make all schools K-12 voucher schools.
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If a CEO is found guilty of embezzlement and other similar crimes, allow confiscation of property that was bought with that money within the palst ten years, whether itt was under his name or not.
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Pass a law stating that whenever an elected official or a candidate for office is asked a question, that the microphone cannot/will not be turned on until he utters the word “Yes” or “No”.
I think that, like most interesting issues, it’s far from black and white. If someone pointed out to me that there was a quote chiseled into the Lincoln Memorial that said something like “and withour abiding faith in God, we will overcome this dark time” or something like that, I would have absolutley no problem with that. First of all, it’s (presumably) what Lincoln himself said. Secondly, it’s a memorial. It’s a big old building, not anything related to the day to day business of citizenship.
Compare that to the pledge of allegiance, in which we are coercing (either by actually telling them to, or by overwhelming peer pressure) school age children to make a pledge “under God” every morning. Also note that “under God” was added relatively recently (the '50s, I think). I don’t see how anything in the pledge at all relates to a recognition of past. The pledge isn’t saying “our country, having been founded by people many of whom were Christian, is awesome”. It’s saying “I pledge… under God.”. It’s making a declaration of belief in God a de facto citizenship test for impressionable young kids. And it’s doing so in a fashion that is NOT a tradition dating way back.
People expressing their faith in the public square should have exactly as much right as anyone expressing anything else in the public square. That is, in general, they have total freedom of expression, but any laws that govern public speaking/pamphletting/harassing/whatever should apply to them exactly as they would to anyone else. (And, seriously, what’s an example of this happening? Or by “public square” do you mean “public school”, which is a far dicier issue?)
That may be true, but if so, only in a rather silly sense. If you make a big continuum with “totally dominant” on one end and “repressed” on the other end, then it’s possible that religion has moved a bit from the totally dominant side over towards the repressed side. If that is true (and I’m honestly not sure it has… look at the power the religious right holds right now, look at who’s president, etc.) then it would be accurate to say that religion is “more repressed”, or is “getting more repressed”. That’s not at all the same as saying that it is “repressed”, which is not a comparitive, but an absolute statement.
I saw several Qs about what I meant about the U.S. religious heritage (and yes, I
do believe ALL people should & eventually will kowtow to Christ, but not by gov’t action), but I missed your Q about disrupting the two-party dominance.
My statement on making the electoral system more open to third-parties was deliberately vague because it’s an area I haven’t read or thought much about.
It may or may not be something worthy of Constitutional inclusion. Electoral law may well be able to handle it.
This probably could use another GD thread in itself.
I just wanted to say that this comment made me smile.
- Honesty
Ouch. As of early 2005, 119 people have been released from death row due to actual innocence since the death penalty was reinstated in 1973. Probably every single one of those took way over a year to overturn, and every single conviction in those cases was the result of a jury mistakenly finding that they were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, our highest standard of proof in the legal system. I’d be afraid that turning up the speed like that would result in a lot of innocent people getting put to death.
Moderator’s Note: Evil Captor, you are not permitted to call other posters “putzes” in Great Debates. Don’t do that again.
Hrrrrm. What exactly counts as enforcement? I ask because there are some crimes, some significant crimes, that have less than an 80% conviction rate, or even arrest rate. Auto theft, for example. I wouldn’t want that to become legal by default.
A flat tax is a regressive tax, as you’re probably aware. With current government revenues from income tax, the tax burden on poor people would skyrocket from near zero to roughly 25 to 30% of their income — which is quite a hit when you’re making only minimum wage. In fact it pretty much makes unaffordable anything beyond a crummy apartment for housing and Ramen noodles for meals.
I exaggerate, but just slightly.
Chemical or physical?
Would that be proper 18th Century English, as used by the Founders? Or modern English, as it exists now? Or now? How about now?
Whose going to enforce the particular grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary of Official American English, and how successful do you think they’ll be? France and Quebec give us educational examples of how this policy works in practice. Remember your “80% enforcement” threshold for all laws, including this one presumably.
Now there’s an amendment I could get behind, almost. Although, I assume you must mean yes/no questions have to be answered with either “yes” or “no”, otherwise we’re in for a lot of mandated confusion.
I should have clarified: I would raise the bar for those eligible dramatically. Maybe only in the case of multiple witnesses AND incontravertible evidence AND video. Or something like that. I would expect only one or two people a year would qualify. Maybe none. But those that do, see ya. I want a system that results in zero mistakes. Also, by attaching the punishment more closely to the crime, it may act as more of a deterrent.
Obviously, this was all pie in the sky, buI was thinking of something that included the arrest rateand the conviction rate. Primarily, I would like to use the the amendment to force the hand of government and the police. To your example, if car car thefts resulted in very few arrests and convictions per 1,000, then the law would cme up for “sunset”. And since no officials would want to be part of “legalizing” car theft, that would have to start to enforce the law better.
You say regressive ( and I understand what you mean), I say fair. Obvioulsy this is a thread (at least!) of it’s own. But I also think the National Sales Tax would be fair, so let’s go with that. But back to the flat tax for a second: I wonder how much more careful our officials would be with our money if every time they overspent (something which both parties are all too guilty of) and wanted to raise taxes they knew that they wold be taking another 1 or 2% from the family of four making $40k.
No violence (date rape, etc.): chemical.
With violence, repeat offenders, or with children or the elderly as victims): physical.
I’d say…Now! Certainly you don’t thiink I mean to outlaw speaking and writing in any language you want. Just that all government documents would published be in English only. I’m siure we could have a few exceptions, like the doucuments produced to help sompeone attain citizenship.
Well done.