Fix Broken Political System

Our political system is broken thanks in part to an out of date constitution. Here are some constitutional amendments that in the perfect world would fix a lot of things.

1. Replace our House/Senate with a single legislature using proportional Representation so that parties will get the exact number of seats as their popular vote.
2. Replace our outdated electoral college with popular vote.
3. Ban gerrymandering.
4. Lower the votes necessary to debate a bill to the number required to pass it, so 60 vote requirement in the Senate anymore.
5. Congress and President can veto Supreme Court with supermajority.
6. Eliminate presidential and governor pardon.
7. Require congressional approval for military actions against a country. Require supermajority for draft.
8. Term limits on Congress, and Justices and all elected positions.
9. Ban corporate and political group donations to politicians and only allow limited donations from individuals. Ban corporate and political favors to politicians to sway their stance.
10. Require rigorous education of students in economics, politics, and history with minimum standards set.
11. All tax increases, regulatory increases, and spending increases will require 55 votes instead of 50. All others require only 50 votes.
12. Eliminate all federal government regulations, laws, taxes, spending, and programs in education, healthcare, guns, environment, etc. The federal government will only be in charge of military, foreign policy, and civil rights issues. All others will be left to states. If federal government wants to make a law about issues outside its domain it requires a supermajority.

 

What 'dates' the Constitution?

Has human nature changed?

 

My thoughts:

Repeal the 17th Amendment.
Return the age of majority to 21.

 

They don't follow the rules now...why would they abide new ones?

They know the game can't be won playing by the rules.

they change the rules when they're in power, and blame something else when their own rules bite them in the ass when they're not.

Rules are for moral, honest, honorable people, not people who are single-mindedly focused on fulfilling an agenda or obtaining a desired outcome.

Here's the best parts....A) the people who are charged with holding them accountable...the Fourth Estate....have so thoroughly destroyed their credibility no one believes them when they [accidentally] stumble upon our exalted political elites' crimes and corruption, and B) about half the country doesn't care what goes on in DC (or Statehouses) as long as the Freebies and Entitlements Train keeps making its scheduled stops.

 

We can return that age to 21 as long as the age of the draft is also 21. I also want to repeal the 17th amendment but I want to replace it with Proportional Representation.

 

It was a first attempt but has some flaws and constitutions from other countries have fixed some of the problems our constitution has.

 

What you seek is a constitutional convention. My only question; do you really trust any of our current political luminaries? Maybe people rise to the occasion, but I don't trust anyone in politics at this moment in time to write a constitution.

 

We need to keep the electoral college, but we do need a constitutional amendment to require proportional electoral college votes. The winner takes all does a lot to surpress minority vote in deep red and deep blue states, thus making the current system an inaccurate representation.


We could definitely use a lot less federal control over some things, like education, natural resources, and airport security, but I think the real problem with federal agenecies is the bloated bureaucracy. DoD is probably the biggest place that needs a lesson in streamlining.

 

Not sure what you mean by proportional in this instance.

Prior to the 17th the State Legislatures chose a State's representatives to the Senate. I agree with this, it gave the states a direct voice in the federal government. Currently it almost amounts to a national vote with so much money, external to the state, flowing into all Senate elections.

In my opinion this is the fundamental imbalance that has changed what was a good governmental system into one that has become both unwieldy and unchecked.

 

I'd do all this by constitutional amendment. But I do admit that its highly likely any of these proposals have any chance of passing.

 

The problem with your model is that it gives small states a disproportionate voice and makes our system less democratic and doesn't fix the problem with our system leading to two-party domination. Proportional Representation is used by nearly every western democratic nation and is the result of other countries looking at our constitution and its advantages and flaws in actual practice and made a system where parties get a number of seats according to the number of people that voted for them. This allows people to vote for 3rd parties and get some representation and eliminates our two-party monopoly. It also allows more diverse representatives and points of view to be represented in the legislature.

 

What makes you think ours is broken?

 

This is a good point. Lets get rid of blind donations to parties, candidates, and PACs and outlaw out of state spending on elections.

 

It is broken. His fixes dont do a whole lot to fix the real issues though.

 

Partisan bickering and inflighting and now the FBI is involved in this mess. Congress can't get anything major done in either direction. We are over-taxes, over-spent, over-regulated, and over-debted but actual growth for the middle class has been slow to non-existent.

 

Term limits are dumb.

Who are you to tell me who I can have represent me?

 

It is only rare that the electoral college picks someone who didn't win the majority and in many of these case the circumstances and person picked were less than ideal. Also if we make electoral college votes proportional this will make it even less likely that the electoral college will conflict with the popular vote. So why not make it simple and switch to the popular vote? But a proportional electoral college is a tolerable compromise.

My proposition to eliminate most of the federal government and require a supermajority for all laws outside its domain will greatly reduce federal bloat. Also the 55 vote requirement to increase taxes, spending, debt, or regulations while only 50 to reverse them will also reduce bloat. We need a government system that structurally encourages being small and streamlined.

 

I'm not built like that, I may not be from Missouri but you gonna have to "Show Me". I don't think it is broken.

 

Bickering is just a part of it, and President Trump is dealing with taxes, spending, cutting regulations, and growth is on the horizon. It'll be ok man, you are gonna be happy.

 

Why not switch to the popular vote? Did you not see what happened last election?

 

1. not no but hell no.
2. not no but hell no
3. they already are except when the courts command it to make sure the right skin tone has representation.
4.That's already the case. I think you're talking about ending the filibuster. This I've thought about for a while now and as much it would please me to see the Current Democratic minority get bitch slapped, I'm still not sure 51-49 votes are a good way to effect massive sea changes in the way the country is run.
5. Yes.
6. While this is abused with some frequency. I don't know that I want to get rid of it.
7.Already the case.
8. Politicans yes judges no.
9.Best way ever to guarantee incumbents re-election.
10.The likelyhood of you finding an objective person to teach such classes is somewhere between 0 an 1%.
11.I assume you're talking percentages not votes.
12. Sounds good to me you just reduced the federal government by about 2/3

 

Actually Trump's budget is 4.4 trillion almost 1 trillion more than the average budgets under Obama and our deficit is estimated to exceed 1 trillion per year next year. Trump did cut regulations but honestly we have so many he isn't making a debt. And a 150 billion tax cut is nothing compared to the almost 5 trillion dollar federal/state/local tax burden we already have. Economists predict less than 3% growth in the coming years just like we got in 2017 and believe that it is likely we will get another recession soon.

Under my plan, Trump won't have to worry about a lot of these things as most of the responsibility will be in the hands of the states. Trump can focus mostly on foreign policy and immigration instead. Also Trump's deficit increasing budget would require 55% majority instead of just 50%.

 

President Trump is nowhere near done, just you wait.

I like President Trump's plan for the infrastructure whereas Obama just printed more money. Love it Love it Love it.

 

• Replace our House/Senate with a single legislature using proportional Representation so that parties will get the exact number of seats as their popular vote.

Proportional representation leads to fragmented parties. It is used a lot in Europe and leads to a mess.

• Replace our outdated electoral college with popular vote.

This would annoy small rural states and usually not matter.

• Ban gerrymandering.

They should use the Iowa system. Incidentally to date the US Supreme Court has never ruled on Gerrymanding.

• Lower the votes necessary to debate a bill to the number required to pass it, so 60 vote requirement in the Senate anymore.

There is no such rule. The senate chooses to require this. It could change it by a simple majority vote at any time.

• Congress and President can veto Supreme Court with supermajority.

Let just remove the right of the Court to review political decisions period and be done with it.

• Eliminate presidential and governor pardon.

While they have been abused I disagree with this.

• Require congressional approval for military actions against a country. Require supermajority for draft.

There is no draft. It constitutionally takes 2/3 to declare war. This is ignored as any rule like this will be.

• Term limits on Congress, and Justices and all elected positions.

Term limits are bad for the operation of the legislature and shift power to staff and business. I disagree with this idea.

• Ban corporate and political group donations to politicians and only allow limited donations from individuals. Ban corporate and political favors to politicians to sway their stance.

I agree with the first. The later is impossible to define or enforce

• Require rigorous education of students in economics, politics, and history with minimum standards set.

We can't teach them to read or do math.

My proposal would be to elect Congress by lot to a 12 year term.

 

Sorry you feel that way. Change is hard for some people I guess. The rest of the developed world has proportional representation and no electoral college and it works well for them.

Check out the district map of Maryland and try telling me again gerrymandering is banned and isn't happening.

Well, most of the power would go to the states anyway so conservative and liberal states could make all the massive changes they wanted.

Imagine if Hillary got prosecuted and Obama pardoned her. I just don't think someone should escape justice just because of the whims of a bad president.

Congressional approval is only needed for declaring war. Presidents have gotten around this by attacking countries without declaring war. I would end this.

If a democrat president appoints a bunch of young liberal justices he can screw up the Supreme Court for decades. I'd impose a 15 year term limit on Justices.

Actually lobbyists and corporations tend to fund incumbents. I would end this. No more corrupt money in politics.

I'd also add that such classes could not be biased and define that carefully and allow the courts to judge. And even if there is some bias conservative and liberal states would balance each other out with their biases. I just think people are so badly informed on economics, politics, and history and don't pick good leaders and an informed population is necessary for a healthy government. Schools already teach these subjects and I would just make students take more of these classes and make them more rigorous, nothing radical.

Yes, that is correct.

Yep, awesome right?