Interesting thread. These are just my own personal preferences; I understand it might be difficult to convince the Second Constitutional Convention to adopt some of them:
Keep the preamble just the way it is. Sheer poetry!
Enshrine the concept of judicial review in the Constitution (Marbury v. Madison).
Make clear that the Union is perpetual and that no state may secede (Lincoln v. Davis ).
Include some form of the War Powers Act, with the President being given the authority to respond to actual attack, and to send in troops in the short term where he or she believes it necessary, but with Congress still having the power to declare war and the “power of the purse” to cut funding if it does not, by a supermajority, approve the President’s military actions within 30 days.
Add the governors to the Presidential line of succession, after the Cabinet, in order of state population according to the last Census, from biggest to smallest. This would ensure continuity of government if, God forbid, disaster struck Washington, D.C., and ensure that the man or woman who takes office in such a crisis will be a person with at least some executive experience (I started a thread on this a year or three ago).
Permit the Census to make use of best-practices computer modeling and statistical analysis, in addition to - wherever possible - actual head-counting.
Permit the President a third term. As it is, second terms are usually wasted and everyone is just waiting for the lame duck to leave. Permitting a third term will give a good, effective President more time to do his or her work, while retaining term limits ensures that we aren’t stuck with anyone in the White House too long. Not a perfect solution, I’ll admit, but better than the current law.
Permit naturalized citizens to become President or Vice President after 20 years of citizenship.
Make clear that the phrase “officers of the United States” includes anyone who receives a Federal paycheck.
Abolish the Electoral College. It’s antidemocratic and antiquated. Go to a direct popular vote, the winner being the candidate with the most votes (even if “just” a plurality). As a fallback, I’d be willing to accept each state’s electoral votes being divvied up by congressional district, but only if it was done nationwide - the current California initiative is an obviously partisan effort.
Abolish the Second Amendment. Guns should be subject to regulation, control and/or prohibition just like any other dangerous product. The U.S. shouldn’t continue to have the highest rate of shooting deaths and injuries of any Western industrialized nation.
And, if we’re rewriting the whole Constitution, let’s remove all of those noxious veiled references to slavery.
And if the legislature of New York (which is famous for its dysfunction) should forget to renew it’s laws against murder (or worse, hold the legislation hostage for some petty issue – and yes, with NY’s legislature it can easily happen), do you want to see murderers running free in the state?
So what if we outline 2 kinds of laws - say Laws & Ordinances. Laws are permanent until repealed but harder to implement, while Ordinances are easier but have the inherent sunset date?
So, as long as you’re giving legislators the choice to enact laws as permanent or temporary (based on the category), why not just let them put those provisions in the text of the law, as they can do now? Why should it be harder to enact a permanent law? If the law is found to be a bad law, it can be repealed, just like any other law.
Um, I don’t want to know that much about my co-workers. No, I don’t like that one.
I think the Constitution is quite clear:
Art. I, sec 8., par 10 - 16
The Congress shall have power to …
… define and punish …offenses against the law of nations;
… declare war,
… raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;
… provide and maintain a navy;
… make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;
… provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions;
… provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the militia…
I don’t see “unless the President says he’s the Commander in Chief and he says he’ll send troops where he damned well wants.”
Congress has illegally abrogated responsibility. Only Congress can declare war, and if anyone tries to (that would be the President), they should cut off funding.
HoboStew, you were a victim of my posting “cut & paste” style, in a hurry. It was the “in a hurry” part what done me in. I actually had no (or no substantial)quibble with your post. My apologies.
My intended target, derisive vitriol and all, was aptronym’s “landmines and bazookas” comment. I’m generally nice to newbies, but this comment jerked my knee around 180 degrees.
Ummm…it occurs to me that I let my frivolity get away with me up there.
To clarify: the Privacy Amendment should be a serious juicing-up of the 4th and 9th Amendments. Bork was, and is, a lousy jurist, but he did expose the need for stronger defenses against invasions of our personal space.
The “Sunshine Law” Amendment is basically to make it harder for gummint to casually screw us and claim it can’t allow us access to the culprits. Given that people don’t react to the graphic BS already available, it’s debatable how much difference it would make. Still…having the full story on Neil Bush and Silverado would be neat.
ERA=no-brainer. YES already.
Another occurs to me regarding judicial review. And this could work in any direction, ideologically. It works like this: when the Supreme Court strikes down a law as being unconstitutional, ALL such laws are invalidated and erased . As in, they can’t lie dormant, waiting for a new decision. They have to be passed again, ALL over again, with the public debate and review that entails.
We could use some Constitutional oomph to the Voting Rights Act (and a better VRA). Something that would make Florida '00 or Ohio '04 tougher to pull off.
Now, we just let peoples’ natural good sense take over, and permitez les bonne temps rollez!
Abolish the Second Amendment. Guns should be subject to regulation, control and/or prohibition just like any other dangerous product. The U.S. shouldn’t continue to have the highest rate of shooting deaths and injuries of any Western industrialized nation.
[QUOTE]
For good or bad, this will never ever happen. Gun ownership is ingrained in our national mindset, much more than most folks can even begin to know. I always find it interesting that the more rural one gets, the less anti-gun one gets. And there is a LARGE section of this country (called fly-over country by more than a few coastal types) that is decidedly rural.
As things are, rules vary from state to state, and that seems to work fairly well. The guns are here, and millions upon millions of gun owners live out their whole life without killing anyone. Those killing people with guns are also those that aren’t going to beat them into plowshares because the gov’t says so (not to mention that a sizeable percentage of those millions of legal gun owners that would refuse to destroy valuable collections).
It should be pretty clear to anyone who’s fully awake that he means guns, dear. What, are you afraid Constitution 2.0 will fail to enshrine your right to keep and bear melee weapons?
I really don’t see what your problem with HoboStew’s discussion of firearms could possibly be.
Senate elections are staggered. They don’t all come up for re-election at the same time. In any case, 90% of the incumbent candidates are re-elected, so it’s not like there is ever really massive (or even significant) turnover anyway.
ETA: ExTank, I see you apologised to him above, so ignore the first half of this post.
Tristan, I conceded that not everything I suggest is likely to come to pass. And yet another nine people are dead tonight, shot by a suicidal young man in an Omaha shopping mall in a matter of minutes. This is the fourth shopping-mall rampage this year. Enough.
For what it’s worth, it was a person with severe problems, who had the clear intent to go out in a big way. Without handguns, he may have decided to run down folks with a car (cars kill more folks that guns in the US every single year), or made a bomb, or something.
The occasional nutjobs desires are no reasons to take away a law abiding persons rights As I said, millions of guns and gun owners in the country, the vasta majority of whom will only shoot targets at a range, or an occasional animal in hunting.
Wouldn’t that basically result in us having 435 presidential races going on at once, with THOUSANDS of candidates cris-crossing America seeking votes from people who share their ideology? Plus, you’d need some sort of federal vote-counting authority to even be able to manage that sort of thing, which just seems like it would be rife for abuse, since it presumably would be appointed by the president.
The United States is comprised of two separate but coterminous unions: a union of people and a union of states. As far as I’m concerned, the House and Senate are the perfect embodiment of those principles into a legislative body. The only thing that I think needs serious fixing is how House districts are determined. I think the idea mentioned earlier of having everyone in a state vote for a big list of candidates and the top X winning seats is a pretty good one.
I also like the idea of revising the Second Amendment to make it centered on self-defense, and not all this militia business. I think by making that the focus, you’d also make it clear that citizens aren’t meant to own bazookas.
Not to turn this into another gun control rant, but I guess it’s a little late.
He didn’t have a bazooka or landmines, did he? Bazookas and landmines and machine guns are already highly regulated and pretty much impossible to own legally, even with 2nd Amendment.
He had a rifle. And despite news reports calling what he had an “assault rifle”, it wasn’t a fully automatic rifle, but a semiautomatic rifle. In other words, a rifle just like all the other deer rifles out there in America. Now, we could pretty much ban all rifles except in extremely rare cases, like has been done in the UK, but that’s not going to fly in the US.
And unless you’re going to ban all rifles except to a very small number of certified not-crazy people, then what ARE you going to do? Fiddling at the margins won’t work, in order to prevent this sort of thing via gun control you’d have to effectively ban private ownership of rifles and handguns and shotguns for almost everyone, and then start rounding up the guns and arresting the people who refuse to hand in their guns.
Given the, shall we say, neurotic attachment some segments of the public have for their guns, how many Randy Weaver style incidents would be caused by a general ban on firearms?
And if you’re NOT talking about a general ban on firearms and confiscation of existing firearms, what ARE you talking about?
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