Since I am feeling contrarian today lets just all admit that, outside the Bill of Rights, the Constitution is kinda crap. It completely ignores the very natural existence of political parties and thus foolishly relies on institutional separation in order to provide checks and balances. That was pretty short sighted. It is jsut one of many thngs worng with the thing. Here is how it needs to be fixed:
- Remove the Senate: I see no value in it. The notion that government needs to be protected from the opinions of the people offends every little “d” democratic bone in my body.
- The Bill Of Rights Applies to states as well as the Federal Government. Which is what the 14th says, but conservatives hated that so they wrote it out of the Constitution via the Supreme Court. But the rights provided by the national government should be a floor, not a ceiling.
- Make the ability to regulate arms clearer in the 2nd Amendment: You don’t get to yell fire in a crowded theater, you don’t get to buy a gun form a private seller without a background check.
- Formalize the filibuster: The filibuster does provide on value: it can delay a vote long enough for opposition to be heard. So, once per bill, right before the final passage, if 1/3rd of the House actively votes to do so, a bill can be delayed for five business days, with the last two of those days dedicated to debate on the measure in question. You cannot break the government, but you can prevent things form being enacted in the dead of night.
- Make all of the rules that ruin the Senate explicitly not allowed. No unanimous consent, etc.
- Judges require a 2/3rds vote for confirmation. I am actually a little tentative on this, because I am afraid that a dedicated minority could keep those positions form being filled, so there might have to be a mechanism to work around that. But I do think that, under normal order, lifetime appointments must be consensous appointments whenever possible.
- Make it explicit that civil law always trump the Commander in Chief powers of the President. No treating the Constitution as if its a suggestion when the President says we are at war.
- No act of aggression can be authorized by the President against another country, whether it be military or covert, without express approval of Congress – -approval that Congress must affirmatively renew every thirty days. No invading or bombing people without asking Congress first, no covert operations to topple governments because some CEO somewhere gets his bananas in a twist.
- Presidential Question Time. Once a month, for the entire day, the President must come and answer questions from Congress. You’d have to work out some way to decide the details, but question time in Parliament is the best thing the UK has come up with next to Terry Pratchett.
- Corporations and similar institutions do not have the same rights as people.
UPDATE: Not sure where all this text went earlier.
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leanleft
Kevin
tgirsch
Kevin T. Keith
Judd
You don’t get to yell fire in a crowded theater, you don’t get to shoot people.
fixed it for you.
SU
No, you covered up your ears and yelled “LALALALALA I CANT HEAR YOU.” Not really the same thing.
For your comparison to hold, the degree of regulation should be comparable to the enumerated right you’re advocating regulating based on the the impact that misuse of said right can have. Fire in a crowded theater is not equivalent to buying a gun in terms of the harm it causes. That is, the fire analogy causes harm and threatens others. The act of buying a gun sans some check doesn’t in and of itself harm anyone. So, it would be either not shooting people. Or you can adjust the right to speech in a comparable. But no one is silly enough to advocate background checks for free speech.
Re #6, only justiced get life-time appointments, not all judges.
crap, that’s “justiceS”
I’d make a number of deletions and an addition or two.
1) First and foremost I’d add an amendment stating “Congress shall make no law restricting the freedom of production and trade.”
*ducks*
2) Delete the “general welfare” clause from the preamble since people have a nasty habit of reading too much into it. With that I’d reword or remove the interstate commerce clause and the elastic clause as too many reindeer games are played with them by the Washingtonian types. The fact I grow tomatoes in my back yard and thus don’t have to buy them in the store so my garden if subject to Congressional regulation because it affects interstate commerce by keeping me out of the tomato market is logic that merits a horsewhipping, not a federal judgeship.
3) Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment.
4) Codify the right to own and use firearms (including handguns) in the defense of your life, liberty and property within your own home if need be.
5) Make voting a privilege to be earned. I’ve entertained two different possible forms for this. One would be to simply require each voter pass a multiple choice high school-level civics exam before being allowed to cast a ballot. (Interestingly I’ve found both liberals and conservatives believe such a plan would offer their side a distinct electoral advantage.) The other one I’ve given thought to would be a requirement of a certain term of full-time public service before being allowed to vote. Either two years in the military or some other form of national service before the franchise is extended to you. It wouldn’t be compulsory but would have to be completed before you could cast a ballot in a federal election.
And finally my own little pet idea: any time a bill is introduced that contains any provision drawn from the writings of Karl Marx or Frederick Engels, all co-sponsors of said legislation will promptly be taken to the town square in the largest municipality in the state or district they represent, be placed in the stocks and horsewhipped while the good townspeople pelt them with rotten vegetables. The original author of the offending legislation would be spared the stocks and the whip and simply be tarred and feathered. *smiles at the thought of Chuck Schumer in a tar barrel* Now that’s entertainment!
Judd
Two general thoughts: Life is not an Ayn Rand novel
and we tried it your way. It lead to the gilded age. heck, it lead to feudalism 
Seriously, though, concentrations of capital have as much power to deny freedom as concentrations of political power. You have to balance the two to have any hope of freedom for any but the most privileged. Your world leads, inevitably, to serfdom and misery for the majority.
SU
Yeah, we regulate speech. Pornography is not allowed. Slander and Libel and incitement to violence are forbidden. The notion that preventing a private person form seller a stalker with a restraining order against him a gun so he cannot go blow his wifes head off is the first road down to losing all of your guns is lunacy on par with Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories, only not as well thought out or logically supported.
Kevin,
I suspect that if the GOP held the House and the presidency and some GOP radical proposed eliminating the Senate we’d suddenly hear a staunch defense of the Senate from you.
The work of the delegates at the constitutional convention in Philadelphia was truly inspired and created a system of government unparalleled in the World.
If we want to fix the Senate, we should return it to the original constitutional system of election to the Senate – by the respective state legislatures. That change would serve to make the Senate truly more of a “cooling saucer” and revitalize federalism.
Finally, there is simply no way to logically trace feudalism to free markets and individual liberty. Feudalism relied on force, not on economic freedom.
Kevin:
Really #1 was just a test; I’ve noticed Atlas Shrugged is a fairly popular whipping boy around here so I thought I’d pull that just to see if anyone caught it. #2-5 were more serious (and #4 is mostly superfluous under Heller).
Uncle:
I’m not sure I’ve fully understood the nature of your objection to Kevin’s proposal regarding firearms transactions so before I respond I just want to make sure I know exactly where you stand. Are you opposed to background checks on individual private sales only or background checks in general?
Matt
No, I wouldn’t. In fact, I wouldn’t so much that I am willing to agree that the changes happen in 2017, when I can have no idea who will be in charge. I really and truly do not want my country to turn into California or pre-partitian Poland. If that means having to clean up after more GOP messes, then so be it. The filibuster just prevents anything form being done, and encourages radicalism and dysfunction.
As for the Constitution, it isn’t handed down on High from God and the Founding Fathers. It is a very flawed document that ignored things like partisanship to its detriment and is sometimes unnecessarily obtuse. It has some very good points — a completely independent judiciary and the Bill of Rights to name two — and I think they probably did a good job knitting a country together with it, but it really is deeply flawed in a lot of ways and we aren’t children. If we think it wrong, we should change it.
As for feudalism and economic freedom, I think you need to spend a bit of time researching things like company towns.
Kevin,
First of all, political parties (factions) were most certainly considered in the drafting of the Constitution. I strongly suggest reading the Federalist Papers. I might add that as the Constitution was being drafted and then considered, there were the federalists and the anti-federalists. In short, political parties and partisanship are not a new phenomena.
Second, I agree that where the Constitution is wrong we should correct it by amendment. We’ve done that a number of times during our 200+ year history, often for the good and often for the bad. But I do not at all agree that the Constitution is “deeply flawed in a lot of ways.”
Lastly, feudalism arose not out of economic freedom; rather, it arose out of a denial of economic and other freedoms. Limited government, the rule of law, and liberty have created more wealth, for more people, and more broadly distributed than any other system of government. And I fail to see any connection at all between economic freedom, feudalism, and company towns. Feudalism (9th – 15th centuries) and company towns (primarily late 1800s) involve denial of, not promotion of, economic freedom (in the case of company towns, I’m generalizing to address only the abuses: e.g. violence to suppress strikes or unionization, etc.).
Matt
I have read the Federalist papers and they are irrelevant to my point. Please name me a part of the Constitution that attempts to ensure that partisanship does lead to a loss of political liberty? They counted on the various branches to protect their own privileges instead of their partisan interest. It was a terrible failure.
Matt
Power is power. Your version of economic freedom lead to the power of economic actors to deny basic freedoms to others. Those people were wholly and entirely dependent upon their bosses for subsistence — not the textbook definition of feudalism, but close enough for those who lived through it. There is a reaosn workers were willing to die trying to end that system.
You cannot have economic and thus political freedom without a strong and active government, especially in today’s world.
Kevin,
Read Fed. 10. It addresses the role of factions and the way a republic mitigates the effects of faction.
The negative aspects of company towns existed not because of economic power (both employer and employee possessed that power), but because of force, or the threat of force, exercised by the employer and often sanctioned by government.