Constitutional changes I’d like to see
Like many of you, my idle thoughts often go to how I would like to see the Constitution changed. Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s an amazingly well-designed document, and all the praise due to it is deserved. But there’s always room for improvement. Here’s my thoughts:
- The Vice-President. This is a rather bizarre contraption; basically having a guy sit around waiting for the President to die, and, randomly enough, to break Senate ties. Aside from those two events he has nothing to do. It was designed as a sort of consolation prize to whoever came in second in the Presidential election, which was silly even then, but after we ended up becoming a two–political party system and ratified the 12th Amendment to reflect that, it became completely pointless. Parties nominate VP candidates for all kinds of reasons aside from whether they’d be good to take over when the President died, and we end up with a lot of idiots on the ticket (not to mention that Presidents have an incentive to not pick somebody who might be more qualified and/or appealing than they are).Why are we bothering? Can’t we just have a new election if the President dies? Most Western democracies are Parliamentry systems, and manage to hold national elections on short notice. I think we could handle this too. Just have the Secretary of State or the Secretary of the Treasury exercise executive powers between the death/incapacitation of the President until the winner of the new election is sworn in.
- The Emoluments Clause. I have to admit I always pretty much skimmed over this part, and I never really thought about it until recently; it’s in the news now because it probably disqualifies Hillary Clinton from being Secretary of State. It seems like a rather pointless rule; I guess the concern is that the Congress would vote themselves a bunch of cushy jobs and then get appointed to them. This doesn’t seem like a real problem to me; Congressmen want to be Congressmen, not overpaid civil servants. They’re interested in power, not money; anyway they can always cash out as lobbyists if they lose their seats. It seems to mainly get in the way of the President appointing Congressmen to cabinet posts, which is a bug, not a feature.
- The Natural-Born Citizenship requirement for the Presidency. This always struck me as vaguely un-American. In no other circumstance that I can think of do we distinguish between native-born and naturalized citizens; why here? What advantage is there to blocking people like, say, Jennifer Granholm (who has lived in the United States since she was four), from being President? Or Schwarzenegger, or Joseph Cao? I wouldn’t have a problem with saying they need to have been a citizen for 20 years or something like that, but blocking Americans just because they happen to have been born somewhere else doesn’t benefit anyone.
- Repeal the 17th Amendment. I know this will never happen, but I’d still like to see it. I think we get better results when there’s an extra later of elections, and we used to get better Senators before this was passed. Having the House be directly elected and the Senate indirectly elected was a good compromise; the point of the Senate is somewhat lost with direct elections. I’d also like to see states have more power versus the national government.
- A new anti-gerrymandering amendment. One of the biggest problems with the House these days is that states have drawn districts in such a way that Representatives are virtually immune to being defeated. While this is hardly a new problem, computers have made it especially bad. I’d like to see something to curb this abuse, although I’m not sure exactly how to go about it. Perhaps combining a rule that the ratio of the circumference to the area of a district not exceed x with language taken from Iowa’s constitution about the relationship of districts to counties would do the trick.
- Truly “limit” terms of copyright. Okay, this is my pet peeve, but what the heck. Since the Supreme Court held in Eldred v. Ashcroft that the “limited” terms of copyright referred to in the Constitution means basically anything short of infinity, I think we need to actually spell it out. I think two terms of 28 years should be more than enough for anybody, but I would say nearly any specified term would be better than the current rule, which is “keep extending the copyright terms whenever it looks like Mickey Mouse is going to become public domain”.
- Put some teeth in the commerce clause. This would be even harder to spell out than the anti-gerrymandering amendment above, but maybe we could figure out some way to define “commerce” to mean, well, commerce, and not “anything and everything that may ever happen”.
- CSA import #1: Anti-protectionism clause. This and the next two ideas come from, of all places, the constitution of the Confederate States of America. I don’t approve of the guaranteed right to slaves they had, but there were a few other ideas which I think we should adopt. First is this one: that no “duties or taxes on importations from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch of industry” (from Article I, Section 8, Sub-Section 1). Free trade, like free speech, is one of those issues that is easier to implement as a general concept than it is to adhere to in every specific instance, so it would a prime candidate for a Constitutional amendment.
- CSA import #2: Anti-rider amendment. Here’s the text of Article I, Section 9, Sub-Section 20:
Every law, or resolution having the force of law, shall relate to but one subject, and that shall be expressed in the title.
This strikes me as a sound goo-goo addition. Let’s stop the sneaky practice of Congressmen attaching all kinds of nefarious pork to unrelated bills by this simple clause.
- CSA import #3: Close the “recess appointment” loophole. This is pretty straightforward language (from Article II, Section 2, Subsection 4):
[N]o person rejected by the Senate shall be reappointed to the same office during their ensuing recess.
This would stop a rather obnoxious practice of recent years where the President can ignore the will of Congress by means of recess appointment chicanry (both Clinton and Bush did this, so this is a bipartisan problem).
That should do it for now. I’ll let you know if I think of any others.