The Gun Counter

Whether by amendment or by including in a new revised Constitution, there are a few things that should have been put in. Input or other ideas are welcome, because this is really a silly exercise anyway.

I. House of Reviewers: A third House of Congress
Each State elects a Reviewer. The Reviewers' primary job is to review every bill passed by Congress, which will automatically expire no more than two years after passing unless the Reviewers vote in a 2/3 majority to renew it, and the President may veto a renewal, which requires a 3/4 majority to override. A bill that is renewed every two years for ten years may be renewed for five years at a time thereafter. The Reviewers may also vote to dismiss from office, for any or no particular reason, any Justice of the Supreme Court who has served for at least ten years. The Reviewers shall receive an annual bonus equal to their normal annual salary multiplied by the percentage of bills the Reviewers allow to expire.

II. Anyone holding public office, who has sworn an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States, and is found, under due process of law, to have used the powers of his office to violate any rights of the People enumerated in the Constitution, shall be found guilty of High Treason, punishable by death or exile.

Amendment XXVIII

Any person running for election to a federal office, shall, not less than six months before the election, resign any other federal elected office that he or she holds.

George, I fixed this one:

I. House of Reviewers: A third House of Congress
Each State elects a Reviewer. The House of Reviewers shall review bills passed by Congress, and no bill shall have force of law until such review has taken place, any bill which passes such review shall [strike]automatically[/strike] expire no more than two years after passing unless the Reviewers vote in a 2/3 majority to renew it, and the President may veto a renewal, which requires a 3/4 majority to override. A bill that is renewed every two years for ten years may be renewed for five years at a time thereafter. The Reviewers may also vote to dismiss from office, for any or no particular reason, any Justice of the Supreme Court who has served for at least ten years. The Reviewers shall receive an annual bonus equal to their normal annual salary multiplied by the percentage of bills the Reviewers allow to expire. The House of Reviewers shall also have to power to repeal federal legislation. Any member of the House of Reviewers may at any time, propose to repeal any federal law, rule, executive order, or regulation, and with the concurrence of 1/3 of those reviewers present such law, rule, executive order, or regulation is repealed..

Something to get the judiciary under control, especially the Supreme Court. Thomas Paine warned against an unaccountable judiciary, and he was right.

A few and/or possibilities:

1) Appointments for some term less than life-10 to 15 years max, perhaps--with no reappointment. Or if the term is less, allow some 2nd terms, but no more than that.

2) A throw the bum out clause, under which Congress or a number of States could vote to remove a justice from the bench. (Heck, let the Prez have a say, too.) But I don't mean only for impeachable offenses. A justice should be subject to removal for being stupid and issuing rulings contrary to justice and/or the Constitution.

3) Something to ensure that the ability to remove a judge is not TOO easy, and results in it just being another political appointment and installing a revolving door at the Supreme Court.

We still want to strive for a so-called "independent" judiciary, but the current setup has resulted in a tyrannical judiciary.

A lifetime is forever.

I've never been a fan of (what I call) 'Who Watches the Watchers' legislation because if the legislature is “misbehaving”, such structural change is basically a band-aid fix for an improper and illegitimate grant of constitutional power and, as such, doesn't treat the cause of the problem. A House of Reviewers may slow down a “misbehaving” Congress, but I'll put my money on the fact that the same laws of bureaucratic inertia would be at work there and, in short order, the members of this House will be just as corruptible as members of the other two. No, it is better to remove the source of the problem to begin with.

For the same reason, I am not a fan of sunset legislation. Rather than address the question of whether the legislation is needed or just, it instead tends to inspire the citizenry to just “endure” an odious piece of legislation until the law expires -- and then pray that it never happens again (like the Assault Weapons Ban that we all believe is looming on the horizon.) Why should we have to quake in fear that it will re-appear and, if it does, how many of us are going to meekly endure an unjust law because it will eventually expire (or renew) when we could put our effort into repealing the law in the first place? Sunset laws inspire acquiescence and I don't like that in a citizenry.

Instead of countervailing chambers, sunset provisions, term limits, or increased representation (a suggestion of Walter Williams), what is needed is to strictly define (i.e., limit) the proper role of government. I would cite as an example one of the major sources of government intrusion into all of our lives – and an excellent example of how dangerous a vague, ambiguous law can be: the Commerce Clause in the Constitution.

According to the Constitution, the Congress shall have the power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states”. This is needlessly ambiguous. With respect to the domestic economy and taking into account the common practices of legislative bodies at the time and the obvious intent of the Framers, the “regulation” that Congress was empowered with in this section was to prevent a trade war between the States. (Something that occurred to a limited extent, IIRC, under the Articles of Confederation.) I'm sure that the Founders wrote this passage thinking that it just needs to be applied with common sense (which it does) and it would work fine (which it did – up until the Civil War.) The problem is that “common sense” goes out the window, for example, when you give the government a blank check that it isn't entitled to have (objectively and constitutionally), like to print all the money that it wants (a la the destruction of the gold standard via the Federal Reserve) as it did in the early 20th Century.

From this innocuous little sentence springs the roots of legal legitimacy for the bulk of Congress's abuse of power: to “regulate” -- i.e., to forbid, to limit, to repress, to “encourage”, to seed, to subsidize, to “grow”, to favor, to bailout, to tax – practically everything in the economy. It is targeted at ONE thing and one thing only: property rights.

What the Framers of the Constitution brilliantly (though, implicitly) understood was that the only worthwhile social system was one that was based upon individual rights – that is, freedom of action. Freedom of action is predicated upon the notion that one has the right to one's own life and consequently must be free to take the actions necessary to sustain that life with one's own labor, that it is just to enjoy the fruits of one's own labor and to have the freedom to dispose of that product as you see fit, i.e., to possess property rights.

They implicitly understood that without the latter (property rights), the former (the right to one's life) is impossible.

The key word to the last sentence is “implicitly” and it is where the Founders erred with the Commerce Clause. What they had no reason to believe at the time of the adoption of the Constitution was that “common sense” would go out of style. And when that happened, the statists would use the vagueness in the language of the Constitution to establish the legitimacy of their cause. Mix in a Supreme Court that is insular in its nature (not to mention imbibed with the unconstitutional power of “judicial review”) and eventually cognizant that they could ignore case law and precedent when the mood (or cause) suits them and – SURPRISE! -- the power to “regulate” commerce can be “interpreted” to mean anything that the legislature or judiciary want it to mean. (I would add to Chief Justice Marshall's quote on taxation that the power to interpret is also the power to destroy.)

The immediate and most serious problem with “interpreting” the Constitution this way is that – suddenly – men are not equal under the law. The men with the ability to “influence” -- persuade, cajole, or (let's just say it:) bribe – their congressmen will get political (and invariably economic) favoritism (i.e., advantages) over their fellow citizens. The legal system – which was implemented to outlaw the use of force between men – instead of acting impartially and mechanically to protect the rights of men, now operates as an arbitrary instrument of their destruction. Instead of the government guarding the rights of its citizenry, it has become an agent of the “special interests” that manipulate the government's monopoly on force over their fellow men to benefit themselves.

On the face of it, the concept of “interpreting” the rights of man spits upon the idea of equal rights under the law and there is no excuse for it.

Now there are a great many folks on both sides of the political aisle who fear “unfettered capitalism” and who think that the state has a duty to “regulate” the “large” corporations to some extent because these corporations will “force” people to buy products and services at “monopoly” prices that they don't want or can't afford. Wonderful. However, it is also incumbent upon them to answer the question: in a free market, how does a business put its customers in this alleged position (i.e., if all businesses must compete without the coercive monopoly on force that the government provides)?

That is, if a business is not given political favors – i.e., tax breaks, subsidies, protective tariffs, monopoly powers, research grants, incentives, favorable regulation, etc. -- then a business must be competing in a free market. And if a business is competing in the free market, then it cannot afford to alienate its customer base – unlike the way that businesses frequently do when they receive political favoritism. (In the interests of keeping things brief in this discussion, I will presume that we can all understand the benefits of a free market.) Given the roles of prices and of competition inherent in the free market, businesses are usually unable to achieve a monopoly in their given market, thus, they cannot force anyone to deal with them. Consequently, they are forced by competition to keep prices as low as the market allows -- to the benefit of consumers. Those rare few businesses that do act as a monopoly in a free market are able to do so because they bust their heinies keep their costs low enough to discourage competitors from moving into their market – costs which necessarily are passed onto the consumer and which do nothing but benefit consumers also.

The problems inherent with government "regulation" of the economy to any extent are obvious: who gets to interpret what is or isn't "the public good”; by what standard is that definition established; who's rights will be violated by this definition; and what are the limitations of the definition? If Congress does not regulate all the People equally, then Congress necessarily picks a subset of the People to regulate and, immediately, there is inequality under the law because of arbitrary favoritism by Congress, e.g., one business must abide by (and assume the costs of) regulations that others do not.

This is not fair or equal. And those who would “regulate” the economy for “the public good” have an obligation to explain to the rest of the citizenry how is it “good” when we have ceased to become a nation of laws and not men? That is, if the goal of government is the protection of individual rights then how is the arbitrary and unlimited rule of government superior to an objective, limited and defined government?

Under the current standard – the effective “loophole” of the Commerce Clause – there is no limit, constitutionally, to congressional regulation of the economy. And if we cannot point to the Constitution and say, objectively, “the law has been violated because this action contradicts what the law clearly says here in the highest law of the land”, then our liberty is – as it currently is – at the mercy of whatever special interests and socialistic ideologues there are in this country.

The answer to our problems is to understand the nature of our rights and to address the cause of their violation. The cause is not structural; it is foundational. One of the causes is non-objective law, i.e., laws that are vague and subject to “interpretation”. The answer to the problem of vague, subjective and "interpretable" laws to make the laws clear, unambiguous, limited and enumerated. I don't care if the Constitution becomes 50 pages in length so long as it is clear where the government is permitted by the People to operate. Concepts such as a “Constitutional Convention” to “amend” the Constitution if necessary sounds wonderful but without a specific blueprint as to how it would operate, it is worthless.

Another one of the causes of our political and economic problems is that the Congress is (implicitly and expressly) permitted to interfere with our economy. The proper role of the government is to provide for the physical protection for its citizens from those who violate their rights in the form of a police force (against criminals) and an armed service (against invaders.) Its only other legitimate function is to protect individual rights by performing as an impartial adjudicator of laws and contracts through the court system. The funding of the legitimate functions of government is the only exception to violating one's right to property.

It is not a proper function of government to interfere in the economy of the country because in “regulating” the economy, the government will necessarily violate the rights of some citizens to provide relief, material aid or financial support for others. It is wrong for the government to create legislation that forces business to deal with unions, that penalizes business for being “too efficient” and gaining market share, that subsidizes one business at the expense of its competitors, or other such nonsense. It is the duty of the government to protect the rights of all in a free market and, as such, can have no legitimate business in attempting to influence the outcome of the market.

If the Constitution explicitly reflected the proper functions of government and the protection of individual rights there would be no welfare to divvy up amongst the unwed mothers and slackers of the nation, no funding of abortion by taxpayers who disagreed with the practice, no Social Security Ponzi scheme to maintain, no Medicare/Medicaid artificially driving up the cost of health care, no Bridges to Nowhere, no FDA to delay the arrival of life-saving drugs and medical procedures, an educational system that would have to be focused on results as opposed to what is necessary to qualify for federal grants, and a return to the concept of Federalism and its role in checking the abuse of federal power. With few things to constitutionally spend any federal monies on, government spending would be (proportionally) minuscule and we could actually implement a fair taxation system that included everyone (e.g., a flat tax or a fair tax) – if you needed to tax income at all.

To be sure, there would still be problems in the world to deal with – poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, disease research, etc. But without having your tax dollars taken from you and distributed to “causes” with which you do not sanction, you would get to decide if and where you'd like to donate your money.

Let's see here...

My wish list would run as follows...

1. Term limits. 12 years in the House OR Senate, no more than 16 years in Congress, no more than 20 years in Federal elected office.

2. Residency in district defined...as sleeping in the district/state you purport to represent at least 185 nights per year. Failure to do so is considered abandonment of office...and no person who has abandoned an office may hold elected office again.

3. Payment of income tax required for voting. Divide the Federal personal income tax revenue by the adult population. The result is a Share of tax. No person may vote who has not paid his Share...either in taxes (it works out to $4K/year), military service (valued at $100/day), or voluntarl labor service (valued at $15/hour). Those Who Pay Shall Have The Say.

4. Passage of a written civics exam required to vote. Simple multiple choice questions, all questions and answers published beforehand. Covers the Constutition, current law, and military affairs. Passing a more extensive version is required to hold elective office.

Mike OTDP wrote:Let's see here...


2. Residency in district defined...as sleeping in the district/state you purport to represent at least 185 nights per year. Failure to do so is considered abandonment of office...and no person who has abandoned an office may hold elected office again.

That would certainly be one way to cut down on the number of stupid laws; force the weasels to spend more times listening to their constituents. I'd suggest something a little more ambitious on the order of 250 nights per year, the President calling an emergency session notwithstanding.

It would also be nice to get Representatives and Senators to pledge to vote no to (and the President to veto) any bill that is longer than they have time to read and properly research all questions about the subject.

A simpler measure would be to require that the final bill be read aloud on the floor before the vote. Not practical in the case of the budget, but definitely a must for criminal law.

In the case of the budget, it might be reasonable to let them take it home and read it, and then issue a quiz on its contents, where anyone getting less than 80% has their vote nullified.

I like the idea of a third house whose job is to UNDO any law, executive order, policy, or court ruling (I think an exception for criminal trials may be OK). I think a 33% minority is all that would be needed for an undo.