If you could be God-Emperor for a day and amend the American Constitution by fiat, what would you change? How would you fix the American experiment to make it better serve its ideals?
I’ll start:
Instead of having a fixed number of Congressional reps, each rep should represent a fixed number of people within a geographic area: say 500,000. As the population grows, so does Congress. It should be perfectly fine for Congressional districts to cross state lines where appropriate. Districting done by a national independent commission following California’s model.
Fixed number of Senators, say 200, but allocated by population to the states. They’re kind of like at-large representatives, elected by the whole state rather than by district.
I think the Supreme Court should consist of a randomly selected roster drawn from the list of sitting federal district court and courts of appeals judges. They should be reconstituted every Court season.
Voting is mandatory for every citizen 18 and over. National election day is a national holiday. States and local elections must also, as much as possible, fall on national election day. Voting in national elections is ranked choice.
No term limits or other arbitrary limitations on office seekers. If you can vote, you can run for any office.
No legislation by acclimation: no referendums on existing laws or initiatives for new ones.
State primary elections all on a single day two weeks before party conventions. Party conventions one month before national election day.
Failure to pass a budget needs to cause pain for both Congress and President. Not sure how to do this without politically weaponizing it, but I’m sure there’s a scheme that would work.
No statutory debt limit. Congress approves debt when it passes the budget.
#1 priority would be addressing Citizens United. Very strict limits on who can donate and how much, and nothing from corporations. No PACs. Everything is transparent and reported.
I like the Supreme Court idea, but it puts a way higher value on lower courts and perhaps too much power into the clerks and other permanent SC staff who would be the ones who know how everything works. But it’s in the right direction.
Oh, and I’d make permanent absentee voting the default nationwide.
One idea I’ve heard is to make everyone in Congress during a session when no budget is passed ineligible to run again. Either just for the next election, or permanently. Pretty hefty incentive to get something passed given how much those folks love their re-election.
People still work on holidays. Lots of them. Why limit elections to a single day? Give people an extended period of time during which they can cast ballots by mail, which ends in a 3-day open poll period. All employers are required to provide a paid day off to every employee for one of those three days.
I agree with the second sentence, but think term limits are good and should be expanded to other offices. I think the limit should be 2 consecutive terms, after which a one term abstention is required. Keep things percolating, but let cherished politicians back if the people support it once the honeymoon is over.
I’d prefer that Senators serve one 8-year term (two Presidential terms) and can’t be re-elected. Suddenly no need for fund raising.
For Congresscritters, either 2 or 3 terms, maybe three years each? So they can span at least two Presidential terms.
And I know it would be complicated, but maybe an escalating threshold for Presidential re-election? 50% +1 first election, 55% or lose second, 60% or lose third, etc., But no hard and fast term limit.
I agree with this. California has mail-in ballots, and you’re automatically registered to vote via mail-in when you get a driver’s license unless you opt out.
All of the issues with term limits in that article are actually issues with campaign finance. If we are making a better system by assumption, I certainly wouldn’t keep the current campaign finance model, which in turn would address most of the complaints about term limits.
Except that they’re undemocratic. Campaign finance reform could also mitigate the corruption argument in favor of term limits. And there’s not really any other argument for them. These are elected positions. The officeholders have to go back to the voters on a regular basis. There’s no reason voters’ choices should be limited by denying them the ability to re-elect the incumbent. Ideally we’d get a whole Congress full of folks who are good at their jobs and we’d want to keep there.
I think we should repeal the 12th and 17th amendments as a starting point. Then admit PR and DC as states, give the VP a veto over cabinet and judicial appointments, create a strict line of succession for all cabinet posts that can only be superseded by approved appointments, and use proportional representation within each state for House members.
US presidential term limits were introduced after FDR won a fourth term. Earlier, the founders were resistant to running more than twice, despite likely wins, perceiving it to diminish the merits of the democracy they had founded. The general argument is that power accrues to a position, which makes an incumbent more likely to win (a well understood phenomenon), regardless of performance. Incumbents have an electoral advantage, one which possibly grows larger with time.
This label that a ruleset around how an election can work is undemocratic is tired, let’s try to make a stronger argument than that. Any democracy will have rules that prevent certain types of actions, it’s about balancing the system to find the best leadership, durably over time.
Politicians develop a base of support and expertise outside of their corporate donors and think tanks. :P
For the president term limits make sense; the Presidency has enormous powers. There’s a lot less worry about a random senator or congress person setting themselves up as a dictator.
I should clarify: in the context of the discussion above, I was talking about legislative term limits. Term limits for the chief executive make a ton of sense; but for the legislature I think it’s a solution in search of a problem. There are major problems with our legislatures but they have more to do with the influence of money, the perpetual campaigning, lobbyists, etc., rather than with term limits.
Is this going to hold for unions and every other collective group?
How are you going to limit the expression of groups and corporations who actually own media outlets themselves? Like, no one needs to pay Fox to generate political propaganda for Trump. It’s a 24/7 political ad.
Maine adopted legislative term limits in 1993 via citizen initiated ballot initiative. The prime motivator was that the then Speaker of the House had served for over 20 years as a de facto despot. Rather than enacting term limits for legislative leadership offices, backers of the initiative went all in and limited a legislator to no more than 4 consecutive 2 year terms in an office.
I was part of the failed counter campaign to halt it, we lost 63% - 37%. The result of the initiative did not have the backers’ desired effect. A member of the House would serve their terms, then “term out” and run for the Senate. Or a senator would “term out” and run for a house seat, serve a 2 year term then run for their Senate seat again.
Rather than open the doors to new faces and fresh blood, in our experience term limits largely just recycled the same set of office holders.
The other downside is that when experienced legislators termed out and left the State House entirely, there went their institutional knowledge, further empowering the lobbyists who are not term limited. Knowledge is power in the legislature.
My vote for a constitutional change is to alter or remove the status of “personhood” for corporations.
There are currently no federal term limits except for the President. Average turnover for the House per election cycle runs about 16%. For the Senate, turnover per cycle is actually higher, but the cycles are longer. Average length of service for both the House and Senate has been about 9 years since the 1950’s. Those numbers don’t seem outrageous. There’s plenty of turnover and most folks don’t occupy those seats for life.
