2. First sentence of Article II changed to: “The President shall execute the laws of the United States of America”;
3. Abolish the electoral college;
4. Congress may regulate money in politics; and
5. Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years. (President still names and Senate still confirms appointments. But they can be insulated from “the executive Power.”)
Everything else, including judicial reform, expanding the House and implementing a wealth tax (1% over $100mm, 2% over $1bn, 3% over $10bn, 4% over $100bn and 5% over $1tn), can be done through statute.
No chance 3 ever passes, and a wealth tax would require an amendment unless it is "apportioned among the states" or some such thing (and it can't be because wealthy people are concentrated in a handful of states).
Editing to add: It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities. They would completely ignore rural areas, which are financially and culturally different. This would not end well.
Separately, it would also mean we wouldn't know who the president is until all states are done counting, and it would complicate the recount process. Both are simpler under the EC, assuming the slow states are not close calls or big enough to swing the EC count (which they usually are not).
> It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities. They would completely ignore rural areas, which are financially and culturally different.
This already happens, though. Candidates largely ignore entire states they know they can't win, as well as ones they think they will win.
(Ask Hillary if she regrets not campaigning more in Wisconsin, for example.)
Who cares about campaigning? It's whats happens after the election that matters: Does the representative represent their constituents? That's not an electoral system issue.
Each eligible voter should get one vote of equal weight to all others. The EC breaks that.
The EC doesn't "break" equal weights. The US is not a direct democracy; it's a federation of states. The states (semi-sovereign entities) get votes, not people. This is an explicit, intentional design decision.
If anything, we probably need to better subdivide states, and in several cases, at this point large metros (e.g. LA or NYC) should probably become city-states with direct representation in Congress but a loss of governing power and senatorial representation from the rest of their (present) state. e.g. there's basically no reason for voters in LA to have any influence over the governance of Redding.
Having to contribute 3 months out of every year to a government that gives you a proper, even 1/250,000,000 say in how many more wars it starts isn't really any more comforting. The solution to that is more localized governance to limit the impact of all the crazies you live among, not a more direct democracy.
Capital gains are permissible because of the 16th amendment; the 16A does not permit the congress to tax assets. It seems like quite a stretch to apply Moore to cash holdings.
Article I establishes's Congress's fairly broad taxing powers.
> The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.
Of course, the SC could easily declare it unconstitutional....interpret any amendments as they see fit anyway. The decision on the 14th very nearly went the other way.
Counting votes is a rudimentary way to come to the conclusion that it "very nearly went the other way". SCOTUS is much more complex than that, as anyone who follows it knows.
I agree with everything, other than the two caveats below:
> Strike pardon power;
I'd go slightly narrower. I think pardons and clemency are a good thing to have in the system. I think we can put reasonable guardrails around it
- Require pardons to be published to a public register to be effective
- Allow a 2/3 vote of both chambers of congress to veto a pardon within 90 days
- Disallow pardons in the final year of the term
- Explicitly affirm that Congress can make bribery and other forms of direct/indirect quid-pro-quos for a pardon illegal
> Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years.
I think we should also create room for Congress to create rule-making agencies that exist within the Congressional branch.
There are lots of executive actions which require consent of congress. I think that would work fine here. Obviously, the point is for congress to have a means of overriding a corrupt pardon (not that such a thing would ever happen!)
> pardons and clemency are a good thing to have in the system
Congress can do it any time. The fact that it will probably result in a statute change, too, versus a one-off benefit, is a feature of that process.
I debated this for a while, myself. Kept creating carve-outs. But at the end of the day, pardons are a shitty and ineffective check on either the judiciary or criminal statute, and they have been known to be a potential source of corruption since at least the Roman Republic, which denied this power even to their dictators.
> we should also create room for Congress to create rule-making agencies that exist within the Congressional branch
Eh, I prefer independent agencies. If the Congress wants a law it can pass it.
We haven’t tried in a generation. I could see pardon power and independent agencies getting through recent Congresses. (Between Biden and Trump, the former has been thoroughly abused. And the Congress likes creating independent agencies.)
Longer than a generation if you include the Congressional stage of the process as part of the attempt - the last time Congress sent an amendment to the states was in 1978.
Yes, an amendment was ratified as recently as 1992, but that amendment was approved by Congress all the way back in 1789 (!) along with ten other amendments which we now know as the Bill of Rights and one additional amendment that has still never been (and probably won't ever be) ratified. The story of why that ended up getting ratified in 1992 is quite interesting, but it has nothing to do with how to get new amendments through Congress these days.
Independent agencies are not getting through recent Congresses unless the Republicans party has a total collapse and the Dems simultaneously find their balls again and stop being allergic to the use of power.
The removal of Humphrey’s executor was a goal of Project 2025, they are elated at this ruling.
> One example includes potentially seeking the overruling of Humphrey's Exec-
utor v. United States.
62 This case approved so-called independent agencies whose
directors are not removable by the President at will. The Supreme Court has
chipped away at Humphrey's Executor in cases like Seila Law v. Consumer Financial
Protection Bureau,
63 but the precedent remains. The next conservative Adminis-
tration should formally take the position that Humphrey's Executor violates the
Constitution's separation of powers.[1]
> the Dems simultaneously find their balls again and stop being allergic to the use of power.
If only the problem was that they don't have balls. Everything they've done, and not done, is intentional. Hence why most of them see the DSA as a bigger threat than the Reps, and the former is what's awakening some of them rather than 8 years of MAGA.
While I am also struggling with the dems reaction to the DSA I do still think the allergy to power is a problem.
I have caused some flame wars and/or been removed from dem leaning groups by asking if a candidate or the person speaking would be willing to use 100% of the power lent to them by my vote to enact their policy goals. I didn’t even expect it to be inflammatory, but apparently being frank about power being power is inappropriate.
> would be willing to use 100% of the power lent to them by my vote to enact their policy goals
This probably branded you as an extremist. Those aren’t usually useful to a non-extremist political movement. If you made it clear you were open to compromise and weren’t looking to burn the system down to make a point, you might gain better reception.
Eh, while you’re right on the 100% quote after I got that reaction I toned it down to versions of “using any of your political power to enact your policy goals” and “do _anything_ to hold people accountable for their crimes” and got similar levels of vitriol.
The only people I see advocating for doing anything are unfortunately extremists or insane currently, but people want some action and I think the Democrats inability to articulate what they would do and own it publicly is part of why they are so unpopular even amongst their own base.
And I literally mean the advertising and owning of actions, Biden did a fuck ton(wanted him to do more, him and Obama both failed with their Attorney General picks imo), but when it came to speaking in public the Dems were always demure.
The US might actually do better with a parliamentary system. We could even change the Presidency to an actual monarchy, since that seems to be what many Americans really want, but as a ceremonial position only.
Other than 4 I disagree whole heartedly. The worst part of the Fed government might be the Federal Reserve (abolish the fed), which would be like your 5. Electoral college is an important step to relegating the power of the masses. Pardon should be clarified in scope but not removed, Bidens indefinite pardons for any possible crimes was absurd.
lol, abolish the fed and only complain about Biden’s pardons. I thought I was the most the openly partisan person on this forum but apparently I have competition.
I believe Biden granted clemency to entire classes of people, which was unprecedented. Previously it was only done by name, and therefore limited to much smaller numbers of people. Trump may have been more egregious in other ways (and he'll likely pardon his family/friends on the way out, to avoid having them be targeted), but Biden was unprecedented in this respect.
Can be done through statute. And, I’d argue, is better done there. Independent redistributing commissions? Proportional representation? Expanding the House? Combination thereof? I don’t know if we know the answer; hard coding a solution ex ante seems unnecessarily risky.
This is generally hard. And should be possible for something as intricate as election mechanics.
> or SCOTUS intervention
Oh, I have lots of ideas for Court reform. Worst case, add justices. (Or, my favorite, every Supreme Court case gets a random slate of appellate judges.)
18 year term limits. Each president gets to pick 3, or something. I forget the specific number.
Any one judge per district. Our House was supposed to scale with the population. IT only makes sense that the courts should too. There should be more than 9 given how large the population is.
- if budget isn't balanced all members of congress become ineligible for election
Ask Colorado how TABOR[0] is going. The answer is a 1.5 BILLION[1] deficit because TABOR restricts how money is collected and spent by the state.
A balanced budget isn't actually all it is cracked up to be. The deficit spending at the federal level we have now is bonkers, but a balanced budget every year is just unrealistic. Learn from Colorado and do not put yourself into an unrealistic corner. A budget will grow and shrink with the economy -- a balanced budget over X years seems much more realistic. It would mean we could have never, at a federal level, done the kind of spending necessary to cope with COVID, for example.
What I'd like to see is Congress be entirely unable to draw a paycheck while the government is shutdown. Shutdowns are a last resort, but are now so common we have normalized them. This is immensely unfair to federal workers and everything downstream that depends on a functioning government, like SNAP benefits. If the government shuts down over budget issues, make the people who made that decision pay HEAVILY for the action.
I’d strongly argue against the community-service bit, however. That’s just job loss for those who earn income from labor and an inconvenience for those who earn it from capital.
Yea, I think a better option would be to make fines proportional to income, and then give a flat hourly rate that you can earn for fines from community service as an option
If you have capital rather than income then this is still better for you.
e.g. a retiree has capital but not income and for someone like Musk will have plenty of capital but proportionally much ledd income as that will be the best way to avoid tax.
What are you going to replace it with? What happens to someone who is convicted in a case where the law is both clear and clearly wrong? The courts can't help them when they actually did it but there are scores of laws that "innocent people" violate without knowing it on a regular basis. You need something else to address that if you're going to take away the thing that was intended to.
> First sentence of Article II changed to: “The President shall execute the laws of the United States of America”;
That sure sounds like the abolition of prosecutorial discretion, which is the same problem but worse. You would have to repeal the majority of existing regulations to keep the general population from overwhelming the prisons because existing laws are drafted to be overly broad to prevent "bad people" from getting away and then rely on prosecutorial discretion to prevent prosecutions when that's unreasonable.
The existing system sucks, but are people prepared for something that works very differently than that? Actual rule of law isn't flexible. People go to jail for breaking the law even when they're sympathetic and get off on technicalities even when they're unsympathetic.
> Abolish the electoral college
The electoral college is old and kind of silly and structurally very similar to the process for amending the constitution, thereby ensuring that the people who would have to do it continuously have the incentive not to.
That's why politicians complain about it -- they love to complain about things that are almost impossible to change because then people vote for them wanting it to change even though they can't actually change it, allowing them to run on it again next time having accomplished nothing.
> Congress may regulate money in politics
There are two ways you could try to do this.
The first is that they could only regulate money, but not in-kind contributions like a media outlet providing favorable coverage or a company sending employees to volunteer for a campaign. This would be completely pointless because they would obviously just use in-kind contributions instead and nothing would change.
The second is that you're passing the political speech version of the interstate commerce clause, because 100% of speech requires you to consume resources in order to do it. People talking about politics on the internet are contributing computer time, internet bandwidth and labor hours and their views favor one candidate over another. You would essentially be granting Congress the power to regulate political speech, which seems Very Bad.
> Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years.
This is like the pardon thing again. The executive is currently the only elected official with authority over executive agencies. Suppose the head of one of these independent agencies goes rogue. Who is supposed to rein them in? Creating something which is immune from public accountability seems bad.
> What happens to someone who is convicted in a case where the law is both clear and clearly wrong?
Same thing that happens most of the time now. They serve their sentence unjustly. If it’s a serious issue, the Congress can act.
> You need something else
You don’t. Most societies don’t. Pardon power is an anachronism nobody would argue for if it weren’t already here.
> sounds like the abolition of prosecutorial discretion sounds like the abolition of prosecutorial discretion
What? No. This is a unitary-executive thing. Prosecutorial discretion is unrelated.
> second is that you're passing the political speech version of the interstate commerce clause
Lots of thought has gone into this. One can write it competently. At the very least, the First Amendment would still stand.
> executive is currently the only elected official with authority over executive agencies. Suppose the head of one of these independent agencies goes rogue
They’re not! SCOTUS just confirmed this for the Fed. We have a mishmash of authorities, with the Congress clearly wanting some agencies to retain some independence. Most statute creating independent agencies contemplates how members may be fired. If the Congress wants to create a judicial-type independent agency, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be able to properly—the executive already magics these up with administrative courts.
This is the "make repealing laws as hard as passing them" mistake. You want the process for taking government action to be deliberative because the cost of doing the wrong thing is orders of magnitude worse than the cost of doing nothing.
Using the same process to stop something that has already been set in motion is getting the equation backwards. When there is a steamroller on its way to flatten an elementary school full of children you want the emergency stop button to be accessible rather than bureaucratic.
Many people think the EC is somehow a distinctly idiosyncrasy of the United States, but the Presidential election of the European Union is similar.
The difference is that somewhere along the way, the member states of the USA lost most of their power. That hasn't yet happened to the members states of the EU. But perhaps it will?
The president of the European Commission is practically an inconsequential figurehead because of how the EU is structured. The president of the United States is the most powerful person in the US because of how the US is structured. It might be fine for them to have an electoral college like system for that but it absolutely is a disgrace that our most powerful person is elected by a handful of swing states.
The entire EU Commission (executive branch) is also not proportionally elected.
Nor is the European Parliament (legislative branch) proportionally elected.
Nothing about the EU is proportionally representative, but it's understood that it's a union of member states, not a union of people.
The United States was created similarly.
You can argue whether that's good or bad, but the dissonance between the US's original purpose -- an American Union -- and its current reality is the source of the wtfs.
This one is completely useless. Congress may regulate, but why would they? They directly benefit from more money in politics.
If anything this should be more direct, and read: "Political donations may only come from individual US citizens, and cannot exceed the amount of monthly minimum wage per person, per year".
Or maybe just add a field in the tax return form where anyone can name a party to receive some fixed amount donation, subtracted from person's taxes.
Campaigns already have strong limits. They get around it by giving money to PACs, which can spend money opposing other candidates or talking about issues in particular.
Should there be limits on spending on messaging opposing a certain candidate? Or supporting / opposing a specific policy? It's going to be pretty tough to draw a line there that doesn't sound a lot like solidifying and entrenching the powers that already exist. And it usually includes an ugly way of determining what speech is "political" and what is not.
> Congress may regulate, but why would they? They directly benefit from more money in politics
One, they have. Repeatedly.
Two, the reasons historically varied, but it tended to range from it being good for them when winning elections to most electeds being okay fundraisers and not wanting to compete with the great fundraisers.
It would be better to make the Constitution unamendable than to let people like you get their hands on it. People are just not smart enough to foresee the consequences of their choices, so it's better to stick with choices that at least worked once.
You can’t abolish the electoral college without standardized voting across all states. A single state or even county allowing frivolous or unverified voting can swing the entire election.
The EC provides a failsafe by capping the max impact of a single state in the event of an anomaly.
In other words, you can’t talk about abolishing the EC without a national voter ID law.
Voter fraud has been prosecuted, measured, and accounted for across the US. It basically never has any sort of impact on any election. There are 10s of instances of it each year. Far too few to swing any election.
That said, I'd be willing to accept voter ID with a few caveats
1. A national ID has to be provided to all voters. Charging people to vote shouldn't happen.
2. We need reform to polling location laws, it should be a violation of the law if it takes more than 10 minutes to get to a polling location in a district.
3. We need reform to location capacity, more than a 10 minute wait to vote should be against the law.
I'm fine if we want to require in person voting or whatever. I'm fine with paper ballots counted by machines. That said, there should be accommodations made for the old or disabled.
You could even make the problem of fraud moot if you have mandatory voting (or opting out of voting) so that every person is accounted for regardless. It'd make it much harder for anyone to "cheat" as there'd be pretty obvious statistical anomalies.
Yeah. The main problem I have with voter integrity laws is they all seem to revolve around making voting harder. To me, it seems to be an effort to make it easier to throw away inconvenient votes.
Some laws, in particular signature matching, should be eliminated. With so little hand writing, I'd be shocked if almost anyone has consistent signatures now-a-days. Since there's such variability it makes it a lot easier to discard votes due more to prejudice and less due to an actual problem with someone's signature.
Voter ID laws would not be a problem if said IDs were free. They’re not, and nobody that ever proposes such laws ever proposes a way to make IDs free, because they aren’t actually caring about election integrity, they only care about the practical disenfranchisement that would result from it.
The mental gymnastics that jurists attempt to go through to justify their rulings as "principled" in some sense is just baffling to me. The right railed against "judicial activism" for years, but it is plainly obvious that is what is happening here (overturning precedent after precedent solely based on their current feelings), especially by giving credence to the "unitary executive" theory that obviously makes separation of powers a moot point when taken to its conclusion.
The executive branch, as the one tasked with "faithful execution of the laws", is really the only branch that actually does anything substantial. I mean, yes the Congress passes laws and the SC interprets them, but the only branch that can actually carry out those laws is the executive branch. These rulings by the SC basically say that the President can do whatever he wants because (a) he can't be prosecuted for any official actions, and (b) all regulatory decisions are now solely within his control.
Starting with Citizens United, this crop of SC justices will go down in infamy as some of the worst since Dred Scott. Let's hope we don't need another actual civil war to rectify their buffoonery.
Please don't forget the gifts and donations the judges receive because "Until recently, the judiciary’s ethics guidance didn’t explicitly address the ownership issue."
> If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000
Even if you ignore the, frankly, incredible impact of this ruling on the very idea of a modern independent civil service, it is crazy to see this opinion come alongside another that protects the Fed from the exact same thing for reasons that very few learned people (conservative and liberal) buy. Understandably, applying the unitary executive theory to the Fed is basically a recipe for disaster, but they're just blatantly trying to have it both ways in a way that deeply undercuts the credibility of the current court's opinions. Afterall, if it's a disaster for the Fed it might also be a disaster for all the other agencies...
EDIT: adding that it's sad that people downvote an alternate source that is from an expert outlet. I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim SCOTUSblog is biased, and NPR has surely been credibly accused.
It's difficult to find anything except wildly biased news sources. After reading the article I know I should be upset about what the supreme court has done, and I should be fearful about what could possibly happen tomorrow because of it.
But I don't have a very clear picture about what actually happened.
How could one possibly build their own opinion one way or another from this piece?
IANAL, but pretty curious of SCOTUS. I just read a lot of the opinions. (I hate that the pdf does not have a table of contents).
I've used the mental model of math and theorems to reason about it. In this model, all laws have to be consistent with base axioms from the constitution (and common law maybe?)
I have come to realize that it is not a great analogy. The model breaks down when you realize that the law is not about "truth" (objectively true statements), but about "goodness" - what is right or wrong. That's the subjective component. Reading opinions help guide through the logic and what is thought of as good. Dissents are useful to glee into different perspectives. Some dissents are high tower rants though. Learn to discern the two.
Take a look at Marbury v. Madison[0] for the background on how SCOTUS gained the power of judicial review, i.e. power to strike down laws as unconstitutional. Judicial review is not granted in the constitution.
I watched the live chat to get the news about these opinions.
Good on the reporters that cover the opinions and post updates. Without much editorialization I may add.
As an aside, I find it very exciting that audio of oral arguments are broadcast and opinions are read without cameras in the room It's a retro feeling.
It is funny that these things are done by """conservatives""". To be conservative means to conserve things, keep them as they are, and to develop them further guided by traditional values. These """conservatives""" are not conserving anything, they are destroying old institutions with the motivation to build an autocracy.
What most people miss when reading court news headlines is that most cases are decided based on federal law not on the constitution. Laws of course can easily be changed by a majority of congress. If congress abdicated its power, the court is not the problem, congress is.
Five Constitutional amendments we need:
1. Strike pardon power;
2. First sentence of Article II changed to: “The President shall execute the laws of the United States of America”;
3. Abolish the electoral college;
4. Congress may regulate money in politics; and
5. Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years. (President still names and Senate still confirms appointments. But they can be insulated from “the executive Power.”)
Everything else, including judicial reform, expanding the House and implementing a wealth tax (1% over $100mm, 2% over $1bn, 3% over $10bn, 4% over $100bn and 5% over $1tn), can be done through statute.
No chance 3 ever passes, and a wealth tax would require an amendment unless it is "apportioned among the states" or some such thing (and it can't be because wealthy people are concentrated in a handful of states).
Editing to add: It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities. They would completely ignore rural areas, which are financially and culturally different. This would not end well.
Separately, it would also mean we wouldn't know who the president is until all states are done counting, and it would complicate the recount process. Both are simpler under the EC, assuming the slow states are not close calls or big enough to swing the EC count (which they usually are not).
> It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities. They would completely ignore rural areas, which are financially and culturally different.
This already happens, though. Candidates largely ignore entire states they know they can't win, as well as ones they think they will win.
(Ask Hillary if she regrets not campaigning more in Wisconsin, for example.)
Who cares about campaigning? It's whats happens after the election that matters: Does the representative represent their constituents? That's not an electoral system issue.
Each eligible voter should get one vote of equal weight to all others. The EC breaks that.
The EC doesn't "break" equal weights. The US is not a direct democracy; it's a federation of states. The states (semi-sovereign entities) get votes, not people. This is an explicit, intentional design decision.
If anything, we probably need to better subdivide states, and in several cases, at this point large metros (e.g. LA or NYC) should probably become city-states with direct representation in Congress but a loss of governing power and senatorial representation from the rest of their (present) state. e.g. there's basically no reason for voters in LA to have any influence over the governance of Redding.
Even more taxation without representation, nice.
Having to contribute 3 months out of every year to a government that gives you a proper, even 1/250,000,000 say in how many more wars it starts isn't really any more comforting. The solution to that is more localized governance to limit the impact of all the crazies you live among, not a more direct democracy.
> Who cares about campaigning?
Electeds. Where they campaign signifies who they think they have to convince and compromise with to earn their seat.
> No chance 3 ever passes
It’s honestly the hardest one on there.
> a wealth tax would require an amendment
Genuine question, why?
> It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities
This doesn’t mathematically work. Most Americans live in suburbia. (We define “urban” very, very broadly for statistical purposes.)
And this effect is more than compensated for by the existence of the Senate and even House.
> it would complicate the recount process
No messier than now. And you’d only be delayed in close elections, in which case carefully recounting everywhere is fine.
>”Genuine question, why?”
A wealth tax would clearly be a ‘direct tax’, which must be apportioned among the states according to the constitution.
Eh, this is debated. (Moore.) It could be written as an excise tax, too, push come to shove.
Capital gains are permissible because of the 16th amendment; the 16A does not permit the congress to tax assets. It seems like quite a stretch to apply Moore to cash holdings.
We already have taxes on assets. They're called property taxes.
The state govts can do things that the federal govt is forbidden to do.
Congress is not permitted to levy property taxes.
Tax money is fungible.
The 16th amendment plainly restricts taxation to income. Same reason there isn't a Federal sales tax or property tax.
No, the 16th Amendment expands taxation to income; there was some dispute at the time over its legality. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollock_v._Farmers%27_Loan_%26....)
Article I establishes's Congress's fairly broad taxing powers.
> The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sales_tax
> The federal government has not enacted a national sales tax, although it has the constitutional authority to do so under Article I, Section 8.
There are federal capital-gains taxes. (I’d be fine with just treating wealth gains for anyone with more than $100mm as income, too.)
The irony here is (3) is by far the closest to actually occurring as in practice, it doesn't require amending the constitution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
Of course, the SC could easily declare it unconstitutional....interpret any amendments as they see fit anyway. The decision on the 14th very nearly went the other way.
> The decision on the 14th very nearly went the other way.
Really? How do you know?
Because I read how each justice voted and several justices are advanced in age.
Counting votes is a rudimentary way to come to the conclusion that it "very nearly went the other way". SCOTUS is much more complex than that, as anyone who follows it knows.
> It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities.
As opposed to campaigning exclusively in the half-dozen swing states that matter?
I agree with everything, other than the two caveats below:
> Strike pardon power;
I'd go slightly narrower. I think pardons and clemency are a good thing to have in the system. I think we can put reasonable guardrails around it
- Require pardons to be published to a public register to be effective - Allow a 2/3 vote of both chambers of congress to veto a pardon within 90 days - Disallow pardons in the final year of the term - Explicitly affirm that Congress can make bribery and other forms of direct/indirect quid-pro-quos for a pardon illegal
> Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years.
I think we should also create room for Congress to create rule-making agencies that exist within the Congressional branch.
If we keep pardons, no reason to give that power to the executive branch at all.
There are lots of executive actions which require consent of congress. I think that would work fine here. Obviously, the point is for congress to have a means of overriding a corrupt pardon (not that such a thing would ever happen!)
The benefit of vesting a power in the executive is unity of purpose (regardless of what administration is in power).
The benefit of Congress is slowing and deliberating over knee-jerk decisions.
Having the President initiate and Congress approve plays to the strengths of both offices.
> Having the President initiate and Congress approve plays to the strengths of both offices
Which wastes everyone’s time. If a case merits pardon, amend the law that convicted them in the first place.
These are all great ideas.
> pardons and clemency are a good thing to have in the system
Congress can do it any time. The fact that it will probably result in a statute change, too, versus a one-off benefit, is a feature of that process.
I debated this for a while, myself. Kept creating carve-outs. But at the end of the day, pardons are a shitty and ineffective check on either the judiciary or criminal statute, and they have been known to be a potential source of corruption since at least the Roman Republic, which denied this power even to their dictators.
> we should also create room for Congress to create rule-making agencies that exist within the Congressional branch
Eh, I prefer independent agencies. If the Congress wants a law it can pass it.
Constitutional amendments that can actually be passed:
We haven’t tried in a generation. I could see pardon power and independent agencies getting through recent Congresses. (Between Biden and Trump, the former has been thoroughly abused. And the Congress likes creating independent agencies.)
> We haven't tried in a generation.
Longer than a generation if you include the Congressional stage of the process as part of the attempt - the last time Congress sent an amendment to the states was in 1978.
Yes, an amendment was ratified as recently as 1992, but that amendment was approved by Congress all the way back in 1789 (!) along with ten other amendments which we now know as the Bill of Rights and one additional amendment that has still never been (and probably won't ever be) ratified. The story of why that ended up getting ratified in 1992 is quite interesting, but it has nothing to do with how to get new amendments through Congress these days.
Independent agencies are not getting through recent Congresses unless the Republicans party has a total collapse and the Dems simultaneously find their balls again and stop being allergic to the use of power.
The removal of Humphrey’s executor was a goal of Project 2025, they are elated at this ruling.
> One example includes potentially seeking the overruling of Humphrey's Exec- utor v. United States. 62 This case approved so-called independent agencies whose directors are not removable by the President at will. The Supreme Court has chipped away at Humphrey's Executor in cases like Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 63 but the precedent remains. The next conservative Adminis- tration should formally take the position that Humphrey's Executor violates the Constitution's separation of powers.[1]
[1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042/project-2025...
> the Dems simultaneously find their balls again and stop being allergic to the use of power.
If only the problem was that they don't have balls. Everything they've done, and not done, is intentional. Hence why most of them see the DSA as a bigger threat than the Reps, and the former is what's awakening some of them rather than 8 years of MAGA.
While I am also struggling with the dems reaction to the DSA I do still think the allergy to power is a problem.
I have caused some flame wars and/or been removed from dem leaning groups by asking if a candidate or the person speaking would be willing to use 100% of the power lent to them by my vote to enact their policy goals. I didn’t even expect it to be inflammatory, but apparently being frank about power being power is inappropriate.
> would be willing to use 100% of the power lent to them by my vote to enact their policy goals
This probably branded you as an extremist. Those aren’t usually useful to a non-extremist political movement. If you made it clear you were open to compromise and weren’t looking to burn the system down to make a point, you might gain better reception.
Eh, while you’re right on the 100% quote after I got that reaction I toned it down to versions of “using any of your political power to enact your policy goals” and “do _anything_ to hold people accountable for their crimes” and got similar levels of vitriol.
The only people I see advocating for doing anything are unfortunately extremists or insane currently, but people want some action and I think the Democrats inability to articulate what they would do and own it publicly is part of why they are so unpopular even amongst their own base.
And I literally mean the advertising and owning of actions, Biden did a fuck ton(wanted him to do more, him and Obama both failed with their Attorney General picks imo), but when it came to speaking in public the Dems were always demure.
Your president is already hard at work “executing the laws of the United States of America”. They're taking them behind the shed one at a time.
Why don't we just eat the entire elephant and abolish the Presidency?
The US might actually do better with a parliamentary system. We could even change the Presidency to an actual monarchy, since that seems to be what many Americans really want, but as a ceremonial position only.
Other than 4 I disagree whole heartedly. The worst part of the Fed government might be the Federal Reserve (abolish the fed), which would be like your 5. Electoral college is an important step to relegating the power of the masses. Pardon should be clarified in scope but not removed, Bidens indefinite pardons for any possible crimes was absurd.
lol, abolish the fed and only complain about Biden’s pardons. I thought I was the most the openly partisan person on this forum but apparently I have competition.
I believe Biden granted clemency to entire classes of people, which was unprecedented. Previously it was only done by name, and therefore limited to much smaller numbers of people. Trump may have been more egregious in other ways (and he'll likely pardon his family/friends on the way out, to avoid having them be targeted), but Biden was unprecedented in this respect.
I forgot about the precedent of pardoning a group of people who tried to overthrow an election to keep you in power.
Luckily Trump is only a “may” for being more egregious.
Throw something in there about gerrymandering. Maybe even ranked choice voting?
> Throw something in there about gerrymandering
Can be done through statute. And, I’d argue, is better done there. Independent redistributing commissions? Proportional representation? Expanding the House? Combination thereof? I don’t know if we know the answer; hard coding a solution ex ante seems unnecessarily risky.
> Can be done through statute.
And undone through statute, or SCOTUS intervention.
> And undone through statute
This is generally hard. And should be possible for something as intricate as election mechanics.
> or SCOTUS intervention
Oh, I have lots of ideas for Court reform. Worst case, add justices. (Or, my favorite, every Supreme Court case gets a random slate of appellate judges.)
18 year term limits. Each president gets to pick 3, or something. I forget the specific number.
Any one judge per district. Our House was supposed to scale with the population. IT only makes sense that the courts should too. There should be more than 9 given how large the population is.
if we're making a wish list, I also want:
- term limits for congress
- voter day national holiday
- if budget isn't balanced all members of congress become ineligible for election
- repeal citizens united (maybe covered by op)
- and change all fines/tickets to paid in human hours of community service rather than money
- if budget isn't balanced all members of congress become ineligible for election
Ask Colorado how TABOR[0] is going. The answer is a 1.5 BILLION[1] deficit because TABOR restricts how money is collected and spent by the state.
A balanced budget isn't actually all it is cracked up to be. The deficit spending at the federal level we have now is bonkers, but a balanced budget every year is just unrealistic. Learn from Colorado and do not put yourself into an unrealistic corner. A budget will grow and shrink with the economy -- a balanced budget over X years seems much more realistic. It would mean we could have never, at a federal level, done the kind of spending necessary to cope with COVID, for example.
What I'd like to see is Congress be entirely unable to draw a paycheck while the government is shutdown. Shutdowns are a last resort, but are now so common we have normalized them. This is immensely unfair to federal workers and everything downstream that depends on a functioning government, like SNAP benefits. If the government shuts down over budget issues, make the people who made that decision pay HEAVILY for the action.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxpayer_Bill_of_Rights [1] https://coloradosun.com/2026/03/19/colorado-budget-shortfall...
> What I'd like to see is Congress be entirely unable to draw a paycheck while the government is shutdown
Rich congresspeople already don't need their paycheck. I want more people in congress who need their paycheck, not more who don't.
Yep, so do I. But there has to be at least some consequences for their actions. This seems like the bare minimum and a good place to start.
Most of this can be done through statute.
I’d strongly argue against the community-service bit, however. That’s just job loss for those who earn income from labor and an inconvenience for those who earn it from capital.
Yea, I think a better option would be to make fines proportional to income, and then give a flat hourly rate that you can earn for fines from community service as an option
No that does not fix the issue.
If you have capital rather than income then this is still better for you.
e.g. a retiree has capital but not income and for someone like Musk will have plenty of capital but proportionally much ledd income as that will be the best way to avoid tax.
Sure, tying it to net worth instead of income is fine too.
> term limits for congress
Then the most knowledgeable and experienced people in the room are lobbyists. And at its root, lobbying is just "asking congress for things".
> Five Constitutional amendments we need
Let's consider these then.
> Strike pardon power
What are you going to replace it with? What happens to someone who is convicted in a case where the law is both clear and clearly wrong? The courts can't help them when they actually did it but there are scores of laws that "innocent people" violate without knowing it on a regular basis. You need something else to address that if you're going to take away the thing that was intended to.
> First sentence of Article II changed to: “The President shall execute the laws of the United States of America”;
That sure sounds like the abolition of prosecutorial discretion, which is the same problem but worse. You would have to repeal the majority of existing regulations to keep the general population from overwhelming the prisons because existing laws are drafted to be overly broad to prevent "bad people" from getting away and then rely on prosecutorial discretion to prevent prosecutions when that's unreasonable.
The existing system sucks, but are people prepared for something that works very differently than that? Actual rule of law isn't flexible. People go to jail for breaking the law even when they're sympathetic and get off on technicalities even when they're unsympathetic.
> Abolish the electoral college
The electoral college is old and kind of silly and structurally very similar to the process for amending the constitution, thereby ensuring that the people who would have to do it continuously have the incentive not to.
That's why politicians complain about it -- they love to complain about things that are almost impossible to change because then people vote for them wanting it to change even though they can't actually change it, allowing them to run on it again next time having accomplished nothing.
> Congress may regulate money in politics
There are two ways you could try to do this.
The first is that they could only regulate money, but not in-kind contributions like a media outlet providing favorable coverage or a company sending employees to volunteer for a campaign. This would be completely pointless because they would obviously just use in-kind contributions instead and nothing would change.
The second is that you're passing the political speech version of the interstate commerce clause, because 100% of speech requires you to consume resources in order to do it. People talking about politics on the internet are contributing computer time, internet bandwidth and labor hours and their views favor one candidate over another. You would essentially be granting Congress the power to regulate political speech, which seems Very Bad.
> Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years.
This is like the pardon thing again. The executive is currently the only elected official with authority over executive agencies. Suppose the head of one of these independent agencies goes rogue. Who is supposed to rein them in? Creating something which is immune from public accountability seems bad.
> What happens to someone who is convicted in a case where the law is both clear and clearly wrong?
Same thing that happens most of the time now. They serve their sentence unjustly. If it’s a serious issue, the Congress can act.
> You need something else
You don’t. Most societies don’t. Pardon power is an anachronism nobody would argue for if it weren’t already here.
> sounds like the abolition of prosecutorial discretion sounds like the abolition of prosecutorial discretion
What? No. This is a unitary-executive thing. Prosecutorial discretion is unrelated.
> second is that you're passing the political speech version of the interstate commerce clause
Lots of thought has gone into this. One can write it competently. At the very least, the First Amendment would still stand.
> executive is currently the only elected official with authority over executive agencies. Suppose the head of one of these independent agencies goes rogue
They’re not! SCOTUS just confirmed this for the Fed. We have a mishmash of authorities, with the Congress clearly wanting some agencies to retain some independence. Most statute creating independent agencies contemplates how members may be fired. If the Congress wants to create a judicial-type independent agency, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be able to properly—the executive already magics these up with administrative courts.
the Executive is required to obtain consent of Congress to appoint principal officers; why not just require consent to fire them?
This is the "make repealing laws as hard as passing them" mistake. You want the process for taking government action to be deliberative because the cost of doing the wrong thing is orders of magnitude worse than the cost of doing nothing.
Using the same process to stop something that has already been set in motion is getting the equation backwards. When there is a steamroller on its way to flatten an elementary school full of children you want the emergency stop button to be accessible rather than bureaucratic.
> 3. Abolish the electoral college;
Many people think the EC is somehow a distinctly idiosyncrasy of the United States, but the Presidential election of the European Union is similar.
The difference is that somewhere along the way, the member states of the USA lost most of their power. That hasn't yet happened to the members states of the EU. But perhaps it will?
The president of the European Commission is practically an inconsequential figurehead because of how the EU is structured. The president of the United States is the most powerful person in the US because of how the US is structured. It might be fine for them to have an electoral college like system for that but it absolutely is a disgrace that our most powerful person is elected by a handful of swing states.
Even if you discard the President himself...
The entire EU Commission (executive branch) is also not proportionally elected.
Nor is the European Parliament (legislative branch) proportionally elected.
Nothing about the EU is proportionally representative, but it's understood that it's a union of member states, not a union of people.
The United States was created similarly.
You can argue whether that's good or bad, but the dissonance between the US's original purpose -- an American Union -- and its current reality is the source of the wtfs.
I think the ship has sailed on #4. It's simply too easy to do it overseas now.
I mean yes, but the bigger issue is that the 14th amendment only survived by one fucking vote.
The supreme court is one vote away from not upholding the constitution.
> the 14th amendment only survived by one fucking vote.
Slavery was almost brought back?
Or are you referring to the birthright citizenship case, which involves an ancillary aspect of the 14th amendment?
> the bigger issue is that the 14th amendment only survived by one fucking vote
We have two corrupt justices. Until a President has the balls to enforce the law, this won’t be a problem solved by changing text on paper.
Um, which laws are you referring to here, that you claim the president is not enforcing?
> 4. Congress may regulate money in politics;
This one is completely useless. Congress may regulate, but why would they? They directly benefit from more money in politics.
If anything this should be more direct, and read: "Political donations may only come from individual US citizens, and cannot exceed the amount of monthly minimum wage per person, per year".
Or maybe just add a field in the tax return form where anyone can name a party to receive some fixed amount donation, subtracted from person's taxes.
Campaigns already have strong limits. They get around it by giving money to PACs, which can spend money opposing other candidates or talking about issues in particular.
Should there be limits on spending on messaging opposing a certain candidate? Or supporting / opposing a specific policy? It's going to be pretty tough to draw a line there that doesn't sound a lot like solidifying and entrenching the powers that already exist. And it usually includes an ugly way of determining what speech is "political" and what is not.
> Campaigns already have strong limits.
The SC decided today that political parties can spend as much money as they want in coordination with candidates.
Do you expect this to result in much substantive change relative to before the ruling was made?
> Congress may regulate, but why would they? They directly benefit from more money in politics
One, they have. Repeatedly.
Two, the reasons historically varied, but it tended to range from it being good for them when winning elections to most electeds being okay fundraisers and not wanting to compete with the great fundraisers.
It would be better to make the Constitution unamendable than to let people like you get their hands on it. People are just not smart enough to foresee the consequences of their choices, so it's better to stick with choices that at least worked once.
The more sclerotic the Constitution becomes, the more likely it is to have the entire system overturned and replaced wholesale.
If you try to make the Constitution unamendable, you guarantee that the Republic that is founded on the Constitution will eventually fail.
I can't think of a worse idea for the long-term health of the Republic.
If it were easy to change, there would be no purpose to having a Constitution.
There is a great difference between immutable and difficult to change.
Do you want to be in a US without the Fourteenth Amendment?
Actually it strictly immutable without any of the Amendments, no 1st, 2nd etc.
I think ratification by 2/3 of states fairly meets the definition of "difficult to change, but not immutable."
That it's been done numerous times in the past suggests it is quite far from immutable.
You can’t abolish the electoral college without standardized voting across all states. A single state or even county allowing frivolous or unverified voting can swing the entire election.
The EC provides a failsafe by capping the max impact of a single state in the event of an anomaly.
In other words, you can’t talk about abolishing the EC without a national voter ID law.
Not an issue.
Voter fraud has been prosecuted, measured, and accounted for across the US. It basically never has any sort of impact on any election. There are 10s of instances of it each year. Far too few to swing any election.
That said, I'd be willing to accept voter ID with a few caveats
1. A national ID has to be provided to all voters. Charging people to vote shouldn't happen.
2. We need reform to polling location laws, it should be a violation of the law if it takes more than 10 minutes to get to a polling location in a district.
3. We need reform to location capacity, more than a 10 minute wait to vote should be against the law.
I'm fine if we want to require in person voting or whatever. I'm fine with paper ballots counted by machines. That said, there should be accommodations made for the old or disabled.
You could even make the problem of fraud moot if you have mandatory voting (or opting out of voting) so that every person is accounted for regardless. It'd make it much harder for anyone to "cheat" as there'd be pretty obvious statistical anomalies.
All of those caveats make perfect sense.
Yeah. The main problem I have with voter integrity laws is they all seem to revolve around making voting harder. To me, it seems to be an effort to make it easier to throw away inconvenient votes.
Some laws, in particular signature matching, should be eliminated. With so little hand writing, I'd be shocked if almost anyone has consistent signatures now-a-days. Since there's such variability it makes it a lot easier to discard votes due more to prejudice and less due to an actual problem with someone's signature.
Voter ID laws would not be a problem if said IDs were free. They’re not, and nobody that ever proposes such laws ever proposes a way to make IDs free, because they aren’t actually caring about election integrity, they only care about the practical disenfranchisement that would result from it.
This is not a problem in other western countries, so why would it be in the US? It sounds very much like post-hoc justification to me.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
Once you see it as a throughline of your conversations with people who have been steeped in the American culture for so long, it is hard to unsee.
> you can’t talk about abolishing the EC without a national voter ID law.
Sure we can. We can even do it right here. I'd never let someone tell me what I can and cannot talk about.
Technically yes you can, but most everyone else will do a bit more scrutiny than you.
The mental gymnastics that jurists attempt to go through to justify their rulings as "principled" in some sense is just baffling to me. The right railed against "judicial activism" for years, but it is plainly obvious that is what is happening here (overturning precedent after precedent solely based on their current feelings), especially by giving credence to the "unitary executive" theory that obviously makes separation of powers a moot point when taken to its conclusion.
The executive branch, as the one tasked with "faithful execution of the laws", is really the only branch that actually does anything substantial. I mean, yes the Congress passes laws and the SC interprets them, but the only branch that can actually carry out those laws is the executive branch. These rulings by the SC basically say that the President can do whatever he wants because (a) he can't be prosecuted for any official actions, and (b) all regulatory decisions are now solely within his control.
Starting with Citizens United, this crop of SC justices will go down in infamy as some of the worst since Dred Scott. Let's hope we don't need another actual civil war to rectify their buffoonery.
Please don't forget the gifts and donations the judges receive because "Until recently, the judiciary’s ethics guidance didn’t explicitly address the ownership issue."
> If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...
Just stop trying to find logic in the hypocrisy. "Every accusation is a confession" by them rings true louder and louder with each passing day.
Precedent and reason is no longer a metric for the conservative justices. Only the party's wishes. Which means they are a political body now.
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Even if you ignore the, frankly, incredible impact of this ruling on the very idea of a modern independent civil service, it is crazy to see this opinion come alongside another that protects the Fed from the exact same thing for reasons that very few learned people (conservative and liberal) buy. Understandably, applying the unitary executive theory to the Fed is basically a recipe for disaster, but they're just blatantly trying to have it both ways in a way that deeply undercuts the credibility of the current court's opinions. Afterall, if it's a disaster for the Fed it might also be a disaster for all the other agencies...
Here's a reliable alternate source. [1] I try to avoid single-sourcing on important news, since most outlets have a bias one way or the other.
1: https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-allows-trump-to-fir...
EDIT: adding that it's sad that people downvote an alternate source that is from an expert outlet. I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim SCOTUSblog is biased, and NPR has surely been credibly accused.
It's difficult to find anything except wildly biased news sources. After reading the article I know I should be upset about what the supreme court has done, and I should be fearful about what could possibly happen tomorrow because of it.
But I don't have a very clear picture about what actually happened.
How could one possibly build their own opinion one way or another from this piece?
> How could one possibly build their own opinion one way or another from this piece?
Having read coverage of it previously, just seeing the headline told me it was not likely to be a balanced/informative article.
IANAL, but pretty curious of SCOTUS. I just read a lot of the opinions. (I hate that the pdf does not have a table of contents).
I've used the mental model of math and theorems to reason about it. In this model, all laws have to be consistent with base axioms from the constitution (and common law maybe?)
I have come to realize that it is not a great analogy. The model breaks down when you realize that the law is not about "truth" (objectively true statements), but about "goodness" - what is right or wrong. That's the subjective component. Reading opinions help guide through the logic and what is thought of as good. Dissents are useful to glee into different perspectives. Some dissents are high tower rants though. Learn to discern the two.
Take a look at Marbury v. Madison[0] for the background on how SCOTUS gained the power of judicial review, i.e. power to strike down laws as unconstitutional. Judicial review is not granted in the constitution.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison
> Judicial review is not granted in the constitution.
Pretty fascinating. I didn't know this.
I watched the live chat to get the news about these opinions.
Good on the reporters that cover the opinions and post updates. Without much editorialization I may add.
As an aside, I find it very exciting that audio of oral arguments are broadcast and opinions are read without cameras in the room It's a retro feeling.
It is funny that these things are done by """conservatives""". To be conservative means to conserve things, keep them as they are, and to develop them further guided by traditional values. These """conservatives""" are not conserving anything, they are destroying old institutions with the motivation to build an autocracy.
"Reactionary" is the term you're looking for.
Probably.
The linked article calls them conservatives, which seems like something they'd like to call themselves as well.
They're not """conservatives""" they're """textualists"""
Aka “trust me bro, I can decipher the hidden meaning that will surprisingly match my preferred political outcomes”
Long Marchers spent like a half century wasting their lives, it turns out. Ahhhhh well, they’re nothing if not persistent.
What most people miss when reading court news headlines is that most cases are decided based on federal law not on the constitution. Laws of course can easily be changed by a majority of congress. If congress abdicated its power, the court is not the problem, congress is.