Congressional rules should limit a piece of legislation to some reasonable length (~10 pages), and members should have to verify on oath that they have thoroughly read every bill that they vote on.
No amendments and no earmarks.
I haven’t totally thought this through, but how about congressional approval required for all Cabinet and high-level administrative positions? Maybe someone like Brownie wouldn’t have been in charge of FEMA…
Already required. Cabinet positions require the advise and consent of the senate. The Attorney General requires confirmation in the senate. But something like, say, White House Counsel doesn’t, and that’s as it should be.
People, let’s not focus too much on the things Bush has screwed up, and try to dream up rules that would have stopped him from doing the things he did, or prevented him from being elected. Because numero uno, the next president who’s going to cause trouble is going to do it in a whole new way, not just copy Bush.
And numero two-o, note that Bush could have been stymied at any time, simply by Congress finding the collective intestinal fortitude to refuse to authorize the war, revoke funding, refuse to confirm appointees, and so on. It won’t do any good to give congress more power to check an out of control president if they’re too scared and/or disorganized to exercise the powers they already have.
This would functionally make the executive exponentially more powerful. Even simple laws require pages of definition and detail if Congress wants the law to be implemented in a particular way according to the spirit of the legislation. The less detail, the fewer definitions, the fewer mandates, the more power the President (and his agencies) have in interpreting the law in their favor.
I think that would tip the balance of power disastrously toward the least accountable part of our democracy: the federal bureaucracy.
I’d like to see proportional representation rather than voting for specific candidates. Screw this cult of personality nonsense. I want discussion of issues, not personal attacks and rooting in the mud for long ago peccadilloes.
All bills and proposals that go through Congress have to be single purpose, single item bills with no riders allowed to be attached. I’m damned sick and tired of good legislation going down in flames because some jackass tacked an anti-abortion rider or some pork barrel pet project to it.
ONE nationwide polling method with quadruple security redundancy, overseen by an entity that has zero interest in the outcome. Putting Diebold in charge of our elections is madness, especially considering that any idiot can get into their software and change results. I don’t know who we’d get to be in charge of this but something has to be done. Our current level of vote fraud would boggle Tammany Hall.
Rewrite the 14th Amendment so it can no longer be used to justify treating a corporation as a sovereign person–that’s just insanity.
Eh, it’s a start…
Approval voting would achieve that without the need for redesigned ballots, and without the theoretical problems of IRV (where, in some cases, the spoiler effect could be as bad or worse than it is now) or the complexity of Condorcet ranked-choice methods.
Here’s another reform absolutely essential to fixing American democracy.
IF I can offer an outside perspective for a moment, might I humbly make two suggestions about your system of conducing federal elections that strike me, an outsider, as bieng the two GENUINE weaknesses:
As a Canadian, the idea of people having trouble with “Voting machines” strikes me as being asinine. Have a central, non-profit organization that reports to Congress run all elections, and give people a peice of paper for each election and mark an X witha pencil. It works for us.
Let me illustrate this graphically. Here is the federal district, or “Riding” as we call them, that I vote in. In terms of physical and human geography is it very logical, almost coterimous with the City of Burlington, using major roads as borders, and containing more or less the correct number of people to account for one seat in our Parliament. To make sure it doesn’t have too many people in it they took rectagular chunks out and gave them to Halton, but it’s a nice, geometrically arbitrary decision that just serves to ensure the two ridings approximate the right number of residents.
By contrast, American district for House of Reps are often ridiculous, spaghetti-like shapes designed, quite deliberately, to ensure the election or defeat of given candidates. It’s an insult to the voter and to democract, and complaining about election funding when the game is rigged from the outset is a case of really, REALLY missing the point.
Ahh! I understand your meaning now.
Allow me to re-state my suggested amendment to say closer to what I meant:
“Only natural persons who are citizens of the United States may participate in elections and the electoral process at all levels within the United States. For-profit organizations, including corporations and non-profit organizations that are funded by for-profit oganizations, are prohibited from attempting to influence the electoral process in any way.”
Not-for-profit organizations such as PACs and the ACLU are thus exempted from the amendment, as long as their funding comes from the donations of individual natural citizens.
I’m not talking quite so much about politics as I am about the state of the U.S. government. A great deal of overlap, of course, but a slightly different focus.
I agree that the American democracy in general and especially the politics thereof have never been perfect. Still, falling short of perfection need not keep us from working toward it.
It is my opinion that democracy in America is in more trouble now than at any point during the sixty years of it that I’ve witnessed and, possibly, for 180 years before that, as well. It’s time to do something.
An excellent suggestion which I would also include as part of my platform. I recommend to you the Instant Runoff campaign.
Shall we give up, then, and petition Bush/Cheney to suspend the Constitution entirely and thus rule directly? Or should we keep trying?
Another excellent suggestion which I would be pleased to include in my platform.
I’m not hoping for nor expecting miracles, Lemur866. But if all individual persons of good will refused to try doing what is right because it would be very difficult and unlikely to succeed, then we’d still be British subjects, as would India. And the African-American population would still be subject to vastly curtailed rights. The founding fathers, M.K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King knew better.
I’m not sure about this…but I like the spirit. 
I think this brings me mostly up to date.
Ladies and gents, I apologize for the episodic nature of my posts. As I mentioned above, it’s due to the fact that my free access to the Internet is limited mostly to the evening.
Yup! The Bush/Cheney presidency has set a precedent for future presidents.
The problem is that there are existing laws and congressional oversight intended to control Executive power. Cheney and Bush along with their side kicks at the Justice Department argue these laws are unconstitutional and severely weaken inherent Executive power. Unfortunately, but not surprising, the lower court sided with this administration.
The Bush administration operates in ***secret ***and in direct defiance of the laws. Until specific abuses are challenged in the courts, for example habeas corpus, they will continue to be legal. The Patriot Act needs to be repealed – shame on Congress for voting for it.
See The Unitary Executive Theory
I completely agree. The amount of money needed and spent on a presidential campaign is outrageous, wasteful, and corrosive to the democratic process.
Bill Hogan: Center for Public Integrity (You Tube Video)
The White House for Sale – a billion dollar election.
I don’t want to distract from the point of the thread, but I would recommend that you look into other voting methods (such as Condorcet methods or approval voting) before devoting any effort to promoting IRV. Instant runoff has great name recognition, but it’s inferior to other (sometimes simpler) methods in some important respects; most important for this thread is the “third party spoiler” problem, which IRV only postpones until the third party has enough support to become competitive.
That’s not a distraction at all, Mr2001. I’m looking for more imput and more suggestions. I will definitely look at the alternatives you suggest.
I agree.
I think that the U.S. Constitution is in danger of becoming like the Soviet constitution was during the lifetime of the Soviet Union: an admirable document that is blithely ignored whenever the government feels like it and no one else has the power to do anything about it.
The questions, then, are why is this happening and what can be done to stop it?
In my opinion (and those of others as well, i.e. Greider referenced in the OP and Thom Hartmann), the dominant force in elections has become, not the wishes of voters concerned for the welfare of the nation but, instead, the vast amounts of money and other support poured into the campaigns by big business concerned for next year’s profits. As long as this is the case, elected officials will cater to business wherever they can get away with it rather than adhere to the law. Even if there is no outright corruption, it’s a state of mind: Elected officials are not dedicated to the Constitution and the laws of the land.
And that’s why I chose my first suggestion as I did: We need to take for-profit businesses out of elections.
An uphill battle, certainly. But if we can manage that, even incrementally, maybe we’ll see presidents willing to follow the law and congresses ready to remove presidents who don’t.
And for my next suggestion, also a constitutional amendment:
“Any statements made by the President regarding an enacted law do not reduce in any way the President’s obligation to execute and enforce the law. Willful failure to do so may constitute an impeachable offense.”
I’ve had enough of signing statements.
Election reform is huge for me on several levels, most already mentioned here.
get rid of state run elections/primaries and put in federally registered uniform voting machines (or the equivalent)
I could not agree more with the idea of getting rid of corporate sponsors for everything from elections to laws.
electoral collage, enough said
the endless attachments to bills. as already posted good law getting dropped because its attached to crap sucks.
I would also support some method of applying Demmings methods to government
W. Edwards Deming - Wikipedia as it is the government of this country fucks things up more often than it fixes them due to sheer incompetence.
Again, “signing statements” are just one president’s opinion about the law. They are legally meaningless.
If not enforcing a particular law in a particular way is an impeachable offense, it doesn’t matter what signing statement any particular president wrote.
We don’t need a constitutional amendment banning signing statements. Congress isn’t hamstrung because there’s no constitutional authority to force the president to enforce particular laws, they’re hamstrung because they don’t have the political will to force the president to enforce particular laws in particular ways.
OK, lest you think I’m just complaining that nothing can be done, let me make some suggestions.
Fine-tuning the constitution and electoral laws and so forth is mostly a waste of time, because as you say, the USSR had a perfectly fine constitution that guaranteed all sorts of civil rights, the only problem was that the constitution was just a piece of paper that meant nothing.
The place to concentrate is not on constitutional reforms and such, but changing civil society. Proposing a balanced budget amendment is useless unless most voters are convinced that a balanced budget is important. A law banning abortion is meaningless if most people who get legal abortions today would simply get illegal abortions tomorrow. You’ve first got to convince people that abortion is wrong and they shouldn’t do it. If you get to that point, a law banning abortion would be almost beside the point.
So changing how people see political advertising is much more helpfull than a new thicket of regulations that specify who does and who doesn’t have the right to express political opinions on TV. A law that can’t be enforced is worse than no law. Banning political ads doesn’t stop the influence of money, it just forces that influence to take other forms.
My idea’s (quite possibly already posted here by someone much more eloquent):
**1. Erase the Electoral College ** - I get why it was instituted, but it’s time to take the training wheels off.
2. The Government (i.e. taxpayers) will modestly and equally fund the presidential race of the leading candidates from three parties, they are not allowed to recieve money from any special interest group or company nor allowed to use their own. - Special interest groups should indeed be allowed to further their agenda in an open democracy, but their public declaration of support for a specific candidate is enough. If it is an important issue, it will matter at the polls. The intelligent and persuasive, not the rich, should have a significant advantage in an open democracy.
3. Presidential pardon does not count if the person being pardoned served under the current administration. - Again, I understand why this privilege was created, but it’s being abused.
4. It is against the law for State governments to present an unballanced yearly budget. The same should be true of the Federal government.
5. No irrational additions to budget proposals. - “Whaddya mean you’re not going to support the ‘War Orphan Fund & Ice Cream Truck Subsidy’?”
6. The President of the United States has an 8 year 2 term limit, a House Rep or Senator statistically will die or retire at their post. - Entrenched representatives propose and push forward pork barrel bills for entrenched companies, why not just call congressmen ‘made’ and rename us The United States of Cosa Nostra.
It could have been a gentle progression to what we see today instead of a dramatic slide.
Either that or we think that we’re living through the best/worst because…dammit…we’re living through it!
How do you propose to accomplish this without repealing the 1st Amendment? Are you going to force Rush Limbaugh off the air, put Michael Moore in jail, deport Rupert Murdoch back to Australia, send Jon Stewart to a re-education camp?
Freedom of the press is the foundation of our freedoms, and you all seem to think people expressing their views on political topics is somehow morally wrong.
If Rush Limbaugh or John Stewart gets on the air telling people to vote for candidate X, or support cause Y, or fight proposal Z, what’s wrong with that?
If you’re in favor of putting John Stewart in jail for expressing his political opinions on TV every day, then what does that make you?