Off-Topic: Rating the Primary Candidates

This isn't about ideas to fix the Constitution, I admit. With the primaries coming up, the urge to rate / review / bash the usual suspects of losers running for the high office is too overwhelming.

Starting first with the Republican candidates, with their Pros and Cons. To be fair, the list is in alphabetical order, not in order of current polling. These are also the official candidates at the moment (12/6/07).

Rudy Giuliani (NY)

• PROS: Large public presence, well-known. Ex-Mayor of one of the biggest major cities in the world. Linked to 9/11, viewed by the GOP base as one of the big heroes that day. Has positioned himself as the 'heir' of the current Bush Administration in terms of pushing the War on Terror, as there is no one currently linked to Dubya's term of office that is running for 2008. Has started off polling in high numbers and is leading in various states.
  
• CONS: Thrice-divorced SOB whose family drama makes the WWE soap opera look tame by comparison. Well-known adulterer, not to mention a northeastern moderate on issues such as abortion, which is upsetting the hardcore family values base of the Republicans so much that they are seriously threatening to leave the party or even not vote for him if he gets nominated. His cronyist habits have linked him to problematic figures such as Kerik, currently facing trial for criminal misdeeds. He's built up too many political enemies in his own home state, especially among the firefighters and police, the two major groups whose 9/11 acts of heroism give them enough clout to blunt his media image. His close ties to the Bush administration means he's going to be tied to all of the failures of the Bush administration. His coziness with the major GOP media forces, such as FOX News, is alienating him among the other candidates. And newly emerging scandals about his adulterous affair with his now-wife (using the police and city government offices to serve his needs and hide his affair), and regarding faulty equipment used during 9/11 as well as other 9/11 related issues, are going to hurt.
• ODDS: Falling. He's currently not polling well. The adulterous behavior being revealed now to the media, especially all the financial shenanigans, make him look more like Bill Clinton (think State Troopers, only more expensive) than Ronald Reagan. There's also a good chance investigations into the "faulty equipment" and false billings could turn into criminal investigations, something that will scare away primary voters. As the candidate most linked to an unpopular sitting President, and as the candidate with the most scandals to worry over, Giuliani is taking serious hits.
  

Mike Huckabee (AR)

• PROS: Popular ex-governor of southern state, plus ordained Southern Baptist minister. Is religiously evangelical but plays to the compassionate aspects of Christianity to where it can disarm religious skeptics. His record as governor for the most part scans well. His fiscal policies, which saw him cut AND raise taxes, have upset the Grover Norquist anti-tax crowd, but he is a supporter of the Fair Tax movement. Among the GOP candidates is the most charismatic in person: folksy, witty, good oratory skills, the works. His early numbers were mild but after a few shocking straw polls where he did better than expected has brought him up to Number Three in the media's view behind Romney and Giuliani. His religious background is making him a safe choice for the Religious Right who both abhor Mitt and Rudy, which could win him some major early primaries.
• CONS: One name. Wayne Dumond. If Willie Horton destroyed the Dukakis campaign in 1988, Dumond is ten times worse. Dukakis had no direct links to Horton, who took advantage of a Dukakis-backed furlough program to commit rape and robbery. There is hefty evidence Huckabee had gotten a parole board to free Dumond, whom Clinton-haters believed was a victim of Clinton's "injustice". Dumond went on to rape and murder at least one more victim. Despite his protests, Huckabee has too many fingerprints on this case. If he becomes the GOP candidate, rape victim advocacy groups (for one) are going to hound him until the end of time on this one issue.
• ODDS: He's been a stealth candidate for awhile, but in the past few weeks with Giuliani and Romney both faltering on the religious issues Huckabee is gaining ground. Even with the anti-tax crowd upset with his record, they could well give him a pass if it means keeping a more tax-positive Dem out of office. It's not Ron Paul that's the dark horse of this primary run: it's Huckabee. The only serious obstacle he's got is the Dumond story: the more he keeps denying it the more opposition he's going to face about it.

Duncan Hunter (CA)

• PROS: Ummm... Okay, okay, let's be fair. He's a long-standing Congressman from a major state who has been a consistent conservative voice in the party. He has a military service record, unlike a bunch of other losers in the party who talk the talk but don't walk the walk. He's vocally Pro-Life, vocally Anti-Illegal Immigrant, vocally Pro-Nuke Iran, all pluses among the GOP primary voting base.
• CONS: He's one of the third-tier guys, someone in the running who honestly doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell. His positions may be popular with the GOP base but it'll destroy him come general election time when everyone else (who tend to be more Pro-Choice, Pro-Immigrant Amnesty, Anti-Nuke) gets a say. And even now he's only getting 3 percent (or less) of said base. While he hasn't been directly indicted in the ongoing criminal investigation into the Wilkes bribery scandals, there are some connections there that could get more scrutiny should he win the nom.
• ODDS: Remember the part about "Snowball's chance in hell?" He's running simply on principle if anything. At best, he's got his name out there on the national stage and could position himself as a possible Vice Presidential running mate (major state, major party member, on the 'right' side of issues, etc.). With all the chances he's had he's not impressed anyone yet the way Huckabee and Paul have, and he doesn't have the political machine backing him the way Romney and Giuliani do.

John McCain (AZ)

• PROS: Positioned himself as the most seasoned, experienced leader on the board. His personal biography (prodigal son who follows his father into a military career; his refusing preferential treatment of getting out from a Viet Cong POW prison in the face of vicious torture; years of public service) is epic compared to his rivals. Still has a solid following from his 2000 campaign. The media still portrays him as a maverick even though he's toed the party line and paid his dues (AKA all that ass-kissing of Bush in 2004). Decent oratory skill. Has righted his campaign after early months of problems and missed opportunities. His anti-torture position may not win him the GOP base but it's garnering him support from the remaining moderates and paleocons horrified by the neocons' warmongering. Among the GOP candidates, despite the hostility among the far left bloggers, McCain is the one that has most appeal to moderates and Dems (AKA he plays well with others: if Jon Stewart likes him, he's not THAT evil...). The only scandal in his career (the Keating Five) was almost another lifetime ago, and it isn't even an issue anymore. His positions on Iraq, while still pro-war, show better sensibility than most of the other candidates in both parties. Early victories are possible as Giuliani and Romney could stumble.
• CONS: He was almost Reagan's age when he ran in 2000, he's 8 years older now. Health issues are unavoidable. Despite his overall popularity across the country, most in the GOP base do not view him favorably. The Religious Right don't like him, and during the 2000 campaign McCain had dissed their major leaders Falwell and Robertston. His early attempts to appease them created major stumbling blocks that alienated McCain's base, and failed to win over the Falwell/Robertson crowd. Others are not too thrilled about his legislative record (the McCain-Feingold act for one, viewed as too complex and in violation of free speech rights). While he's staunchly anti-torture, he didn't raise a finger when Bush signed away the hugely popular anti-torture law he pushed through when the Abu Ghraib scandal hit. He's ironically a candidate that could win the nation but not first win the party.
• ODDS: Still a second-tier candidate trailing Romney and Giuliani, and without the current OMG buzz of Huckabee and Paul. McCain is popular with the media, which keeps him in the public eye. He still has a chance if he can secure good numbers in the early races, especially if Rudy loses ground.

Ron Paul (TX)

• PROS: Name one other candidate running right now that is stirring up as much passion and support as Ron. Not even Obama is pulling in these numbers, and Obama actually has a chance! His political positions on taxes and spending, and on the war in Iraq, the War on Terror, and the War on Drugs put him in the Libertarian wing of the party, which is mighty PISSED right now at Bush's screw-ups. And anger is a great motivator. Among the candidates, he doesn't waffle or spin; at least, he hasn't been caught doing it yet. Among the GOP candidates he's the only one who wants military withdrawal from Iraq, which alone explains a lot of his appeal to voters (and to the military: he's the biggest GOP fundraiser with that crowd!) as Iraq is a major issue. The really impressive thing is that he's scaring the hell out of the GOP leadership, which has discreetly pinned their hopes to other candidates (cough Rudy cough Mitt). His performances at local straw polls have gotten so good that the party leadership is seemingly canceling them to prevent him from winning. A far Right blog, RedState, has banned his followers and any discussion about him: I don't think they've even done that to Hillary! He's Perot without... well actually he does have the same ears as Perot. Has anyone ever seen those two together in the same room...?
• CONS: My God, have you actually seen some of his positions?! It's not so much he's anti-war in Iraq as he's Isolationist (he favors pulling out of NATO and the UN altogether). If Paul carries through on even half of his promises regarding economics, government spending cuts, free trade, deregulation... the shock to the system that would cause could lead to massive financial upheaval across the globe. As a Keynesian by nature, I'm not a fan of Paul's Austrian School leanings. And while Paul appeals to Libertarians (as well as anti-war activists, UFO nuts, and Barry Manilow)he won't appeal to Dems, moderates, or sane people.
• ODDS: His official polling numbers put him in the third-tier category, but by God the straw polling, creative fund-raising, and Internet buzz on him puts Ron Paul up there with Elvis (or Hannah Montana). If these numbers do translate to votes come Primary time, would the GOP leadership cancel the whole thing like they canceled the San Francisco straw poll...? To be honest, however, Ron Paul won't secure the nomination: the party shadow bosses will see to it he flame out somehow...

Mitt Romney (MA)

• PROS: Can you say "Designated Winner?" Has most of the money to work with on the campaigns. GOP polling numbers put him at the top: this is basically his nomination to lose. He's a Republican from a notoriously un-Republican region of the country, who could pull those states to the GOP. Has almost no major controversies (save one) and unlike Giuliani - his major rival - Mitt has no skeletons in his closet (no scandalous affairs, no cronyism with crooked and slimy individuals, etc).
• CONS: Do you notice how Romney doesn't have too many PROS for him? Outside of the "official" numbers Romney has issues across the board. Even among Republicans, Romney's constant flip-flopping on issues makes him look opportunistic and insincere. Considering how many of the other candidates flip-flop as well, that Romney looks like the worst of the bunch... that takes some doing. He's trying to appease certain voters at certain times and bound to alienate everyone in the process. In all honesty, he may be coming from Massachusetts but there's no way he can really win that state (or any state above the Mason-Dixon line). Romney also stumbled badly when he himself told a story about a situation involving the family dog back on a road trip years earlier (my parents were horrified, both by the poor treatment of the dog and by the fact Romney was stupid enough to think his handling of it showed leadership skills). I doubt any pet lovers will forgive him. Romney's hawkish stance on Iraq rings hollow compared to his efforts to avoid Vietnam, and his sons' avoidance of serving in the military now reeks of hypocrisy. He's more plastic than a LEGO statue of Andy Warhol. And that's not even touching on his greatest, gravest controversy of all: He's Mormon. In a GOP increasingly controlled by hardcore Far Right conservative Protestant evangelicals who view Mormonism akin to Scientology, Romney has been dancing furiously to appease that voting base that his being Mormon still puts him on their side and on the side of the Baby Jesus. His religion (and Giuliani's corrupt soul) is a VERY good reason why Huckabee is gaining so much ground in the primaries.
• ODDS: Like I mentioned, he's the guy in the lead in the official polls. Officially, he's the guy the party leadership would like running come November 2008 (especially as Rudy keeps looking worse). Unofficially, he's having a very hard time of it convincing actual voters.

Tom Tancredo (CO)

• PROS: More far to the Right than Duncan Hunter. Which takes some doing.
• CONS: His stance on illegal immigration has become so vicious against Hispanics that he's a major reason the GOP is losing what could have been a viable voting bloc. For all their criminal evildoings, even Rove and Bush can count, and they've tried sensible immigration reform that could have won Hispanic voters over for generations to the GOP: Tancredo ruined it, and he's officially persona non grata among the Bushies (and on that, if there's anything the Bushies are consistent with is they never forget nor forgive). Trust me, anybody who insults Miami Cubans has GOT to have a serious death wish.
• ODDS: Like Hunter, he's got virtually no chance to win. If by a miracle Tancredo gets on the ballot, even as a Veep candidate, odds are 99 percent every registered Hispanic voter is gonna vote Democrat for the next 20 years (with 1 percent margin for what-the-hell).

Fred Thompson (TN)

• PROS: Was practically drafted into running by parts of the GOP that were less than thrilled by the lack of charisma of Romney and Rudy. Has the most exposure to the public with a long film career ala Reagan: only McCain comes close in terms of media exposure. His positions on taxes, abortion, federalism and social issues are consistent with the GOP base, and he could sell them to the public without as much hand-wringing or horror that some of the other candidates would.
• CONS: There was so much talk of getting him drafted into the GOP campaign, and since then... snoring noises. Thompson's slow-as-molasses campaign style might have worked running for the Senate in Tennessee, but it's boring the rest of the nation right now. He came on early as a Ronald Reagan but is looking more like a Sonny Bono, more of a celebrity than a genuine leader. Has yet to really WOW anyone the way Paul and Huckabee have done.
• ODDS: The current buzz now is that Thompson's more than likely going to be the presumptive choice for Veep: not as offensive to national voters as Hunter or Tancredo, or any other potential Vice President picks, and not as threatening in the leadership category to whomever ends up with the Presidential nom. His best feature is that he's not a Cheney.

I'd throw in Alan Keyes if only because Tim Meadows needs the work. ;) But outside of showing up for a debate, there hasn't been much else heard from Keyes.


And that's it for the Republican ticket. I'll cover the Democrats in a few days.

Reviewing Sabato, Part III: The Election System

As part of my looking at Larry Sabato's Amendment suggestions of his own, the next set of ideas relate mostly to the election process itself:

• Write political parties into the constitutional framework by adding an article governing partisan Presidential elections.

I'm not entirely sure what Sabato is getting at here as I need to read in full what the Moderate Voice points to in his book. Something about having the states and regions having more of a say in the four-year election cycle for the Presidency. For what I know of the Constitution, it *was* designed without partisan politics in mind, a serious shortcoming by the Founders. This amendment depends entirely on how it can rein in the more vicious partisanship of the two-party system we have, and if it can ensure viable third party start-ups.

• Enact a four-region primary system, with the order selected by lottery at the beginning of the election year. Primaries would occur in the four months preceding the August conventions (one region per month, with states choosing the specific day within their region’s month to hold their primary or caucus).

I am entirely opposed to the idea of a divided primary. Whichever region goes first is essentially going to choose the leading candidates for the Presidency, to the detriment of the remaining three regions. The only fair way is to have ALL states vote their primaries at the same time, something a lot of other Americans agree with.

• Mend the Electoral College by increasing its membership, making the assignment of electoral votes automatic, and ending the ‘unit voting’ rule in the event of an election being thrown into the House.

I'm one of those who, if given a choice, would prefer to scrap the Electoral College system altogether. The 2000 election chaos essentially proves that it's not a good way to represent the majority view of the nation's voters. It also forces the campaigns to focus entirely on states that would secure an Electoral victory and not ALL the states the way a President should, at the expense of getting a majority of voters from across the board.
I understand why there was an Electoral College set up in the first place: the Founders did not trust the voting majority. They didn't even have full voting rights (slaves obviously couldn't vote, nor women, and it may surprise people today to find out that back then even those who didn't own property in any way were barred as well) for every citizen. From what I've read, the Founders at the Constitutional Convention really wanted the Electoral College to blunt any popular vote, force the states to be represented by easier-to-control Electors, and even fail to declare a clear winner to force the results into the House and have the Representatives choose the 'Winner'. Something we've had a few times (1824, 1876), and both times complete disasters.
The thing is, our nation has evolved since the beginning of our federal government to grant nearly everyone in the country to have a vote (the only limits now are set on felons, illegals, and those under 18 years), with the caveat that you have to actively register to vote - something most citizens don't do anymore (insert sobbing noises here). We have evolved to where we directly vote for our Senators: why can't we evolve the system further to have the President directly voted for too? As is it now, the Electoral System means we elect a President who represents certain states, and not the whole nation.
The only positive I can think of for keeping the Electoral system is that, by its counting method, it can grant an elected President the illusion of having a "Mandate" to lead. For example, in the 1980 election Reagan beat Carter by 10 percentage points, 50 percent of all voters to 41 percent (with the remaining 9 percent split among the Indy candidate John Anderson and other minor parties). But the Electoral College result was a whopping 489 to 49. Does that not impress you? By pointing to the Electoral count, Reagan could claim a Mandate to do whatever the hell he wanted to do. Many elections have it so that the winning candidate is only up on the loser(s) from 1 percent to 5 percent, something that would look like a razor-thin win that would lack authority.
However, that one positive note I provided is even now a very flimsy reason: Bush the Lesser, who barely had an Electoral lead (271 to 266) in 2000, still claimed a Mandate to lead. He got worse on his 2004 re-election (286 to 251, which was still rather close compared to other Electoral results), convincing himself to push a massively unpopular agenda in 2005 (Social Security privitization, anyone?) that seriously hurt his political standing. I'm of the opinion now that any President can claim a Mandate to lead regardless of the Electoral lead, but if he's a stupid idjit he's bound to screw it up royally. So... no more Electoral College. Thnxbye.

• Reform campaign financing by allowing Congress to limit “spending by the wealthy from their family fortunes, and mandate partial public financing for general election House and Senate campaigns.

Okay, I do think this was poorly written, by focusing a little too much on candidates who are personally wealthy. Yes, I did complain earlier about how only the rich get to run as they're the only ones to afford it, but the way this idea is written out those rich guys are being unfairly singled out. Part of the problem also involves the well-connected, those who can get their wealthy buddies to foot the bill, something Sabato's idea seems to overlook.
The real solution is to cap all fund-raising for elections to only the specific year that the election takes place: no stockpiling, no warchests, none of that. The part of the amendment making public financing mandatory for elections is a good one, but make sure the amendment leaves no wiggle room or confusion of any kind.
The amendment also focuses on the Congressional elections: I don't see any caps on the Presidential elections. I would rewrite this one, Sabato, think it through a little better.

• Eliminate the requirement that Presidents be natural-born citizens, replacing it with a twenty-year citizenship floor.

Ahh, this. The original intention behind the Presidential limit that you need to be natural-born came from the European experiences of having foreign-born princes take over other countries. England was at the time led by the Hanoverian kings of Georges Uno, Dos and Tres. Amazingly George the III was the most English of the set (disregard George the IV, I think most Brits did then and do now). You had European nations fight over Spanish Succession during the early 1700s. The fear back then was that a fledgling nation like the U.S. could be tempted into having an established "name" guy from overseas moving in to a nice home in Boston, and then immediately take over the reins of government without adequately understanding American values and political niceties.
Do we still need a limit today? The United States is an established power of its own: our own culture has established a kind hegemony on a lot of other nations. Our values are well-known, our political system well-recognized and stable. As a nation supposedly formed from a wellspring of immigrants, allowing immigrants a chance at representing us as Chief of State would appear sensible. Some could also argue that the arriving newly minted citizens are more passionate about being citizens and about fulfilling their duties to this nation than many natural-borns who take it all for granted and do nothing about it.
The thing is, this is a middling issue at best. Immigrants can still represent as Congresspersons and other elected officials. The President as Chief of State does indeed represent this nation to all other nations: to an extent, it has to be one of our own, someone who has been directly born into this culture, into this lifestyle, and imbided since childhood with the core beliefs of being an American. This isn't a key issue, and it's not really needed.

Well, that's all I can discuss at this time. Next up: a Constitutional Amendment requiring Peppermint Ice Cream be served at all times of the year and not just October to December.

Expanding Congress?! Part II: The Doomage

One thing I didn't touch on in my earlier post was the suggestion of expanding the House of Representatives from 435 to an even 1,000. My first response, like I figure a lot of others' response would be, was "What?! We need MORE corrupt bastards in office?"

Sabato's focus is on improving statistical balance in representation: we're currently at 650,000 per Representative (in the states that have multiple Congresspersons), which he feels is too many to properly represent. So he's looking at increasing the number of Reps, and then balancing the numbers out to get that number down to about 150,000 per Representative.

The problem here is that there's still no guarantee of effective representation: most Congresspersons care more about their lobbyists and special interest support groups than they do their own constituents. If we did have effective representation in the House, by Representatives actively responding to their constituents' needs and beliefs... Cheney would have been executed for high crimes months ago, and Bush standing before the Senate on about 100 counts of impeachment.

Going to 1,000 Representatives would make more sense if we had guarantees that those Representatives would actually listen to the voters. So... for now, not buying it.

I *would* consider shifting the Representation to have the small states start off with 3 Representatives rather than a lone one (to balance out the suggestion I have of bumping up to 3 Senators per state), and then balancing out the Representatives from there.

Another reason to hate our Primaries system

You know things are rotten in South Carolina when even Stephen Colbert can't get on the ballot.

The whole event regarding Colbert's half-humorous attempt to get on the primary ballot for either the Democrats or the Republicans (he tried getting on both) may have been over-the-top media melodrama, but it does expose the mechanics of how the primaries work, and how the system is rigged:

• Even before you can put your name up for the ballot, it's gonna cost you. Colbert couldn't afford to get on the Republican ballot because that costs $35,000. Colbert has got to be making at least hundreds of thousands of dollars on his media contract/book deal/t-shirt industry, and even THAT was too expensive for him (wasn't Doritos paying for his campaign?)! The Democratic ballot was cheaper: between $3000 to $4000. Do YOU know anyone in the middle-class that can afford even $3000 up front for something like that? This is why the only ones you ever see running for office are lawyers, corporate businessmen, doctors, and the idle rich: the ones who can pay to run. This is why you won't see teachers, nurses, small farmers, self-employed businessmen, low-income people who have more at stake any time soon on any ballot.
• The next stumbling block Colbert ran into was a party board that screens the candidates: basically they get to decide who gets on the ballot or not. They get to decide who's "serious" and who isn't. Basically they make sure only "their" candidates, the insiders, the big names, the elites, get on the ballot. If you're not in their circle of friends, well...

Both blocks that Colbert ran into highlights one of the great failures of the electoral process: the two major political parties have a stranglehold on who gets to run, without fair consideration to giving the people genuine choices. To be fair, this isn't a pure democracy, where people can vote for whoever they want: if this WERE a full democracy where people voted on who they liked, we'd be in Denzel Washington's third term. So it does help to establish a means of selecting and weeding out people, something the party primary system could do. But the system is now skewed, unbalanced, unfair. It's forcing people to make selections for candidates they don't want.

Just look at the Republicans. The Far Right wing of that party is getting caught between two choices they DON'T want: Guiliani, whose lack of morals and hard-to-ignore northeasterner librulism makes the religious righties sick to their stomachs, and Romney, who's Mormon. But the party elite has them as their top two candidates. (This is why Huckabeee and not Paul is the dark horse candidate to keep an eye on) Don't be so surprised there's a lot of loose talk about the Dobson crowd jumping ship and running their own third party candidate: their primary system is not responding to their wants.

Yes, the Primaries system is broken, in more ways than this, but right now the key concerns are that it caters only to the wealthy who can afford to run, and that it caters only to the inner circle of elites who seek to maintain status quos even at the expense of the voters' desires.

So how can we fix this?

I'm still partial to Emperor Norton's solution on August 12, 1869 of banning political parties altogether... ;-)

Past that, we need to look at public financing of campaigns, to cut back on the high cost of filing for ballot placement, of ensuring that people have more choices for their candidates. We need to see about opening up the election process so that viable third parties exist to break the two-party monopoly that's kept the electoral system so twisted and corrupt to favor their own needs (if there's anything the Republicans and Democrats agree on, it's keeping it Republican and Democrat).

Oh, and I'd ask around about write-in votes. It's possible to pencil in a name for someone not on the ballot. But it depends on the rules in your state. Which are probably very restrictive anyway. Like I said, the two parties want to keep the system this way...

Expanding Congress?!

Sabato's book A More Perfect Constitution addresses primarily how to fix the mechanisms of the three branches of government, which I think is a smart play here (he's avoiding the divisive social issues like abortion and flag burning that always pop up in amendment discussions). They've got a summary up at the Moderate Voice and I'm going by that, although I plan on finding the book and reading it meself asap...

The first thing up is Congress, and how Sabato wants to reform it:

• Increase the size of the Senate by adding two additional senators for each of the ten most populous states and one extra senator for each of the fifteen next most populous (to be determined by each census).
• Allow former presidents and vice presidents to hold the position of ‘national senator’, participating and voting in the Senate but not holding seats in the Electoral College.
• Mandate nonpartisan decennial redistricting for the House of Representatives based on the guiding principles of compact districts, increased partisan competition, and the needs of voters.
• Expand membership in the House of Representatives to approximately 1,000 members (keeping staff resource allocations steady to level the playing field).

There's a few other items under the reforming of Congress, but I'll start with these four.
The things that leap out first is that Sabato is arguing for MORE representatives in both Houses, which brings up the knee-jerk reaction of "OMG more CORRUPT BASTARDS in the halls of power!" Once we work past the automatic disdain Americans have for elected officials, we have to look at the reasons Sabato is giving for increased representation. First, representation in the House of Reps, which is always based on state population. Originally it was 1 Rep per 60,000 voters. Thing is, populations grew. States grew. The size of the House of Representative sexpanded until at some point the PTB realized if they didn't cap the number of Reps they would run out of floor space. So they capped the number of Representatives at 435, and from then on they shift the proportion of representation. It's now closer to 1 Rep per 600,000, give or take a city. Sabato has to be arguing that the level of representation is now far too meager, far too spread out, for 1 Representative to be representing so many people. So he wants to increase the body count of Representatives to try and get representation down to a more manageable number, and to where a Representative may be more responsive to their constituents. My problem with that is that there is still no guarantee that you will get better representation even with more Congresspersons: more that likely, you're just going to make it more expensive for the lobbyists and deep pockets to buy up more Congresspersons.
The argument Sabato is making to increase representation in the Senate doesn't fly either. He wants to allow the 10 largest states to get 2 additional Senators, and the next 15 largest to get 1 additional. He's obviously thinking again that larger states need more representation. There's a problem: THE FOUNDERS DID NOT SET UP THE SENATE THAT WAY. Remember the Great Compromise? The Senate is NOT BASED on population counts: large states have to have the same count of Senators as the smaller states. That way the smaller states can place a check on any large-state majority push that would come at the expense of the smaller states. By giving the larger states more senators, the smaller states will have no stake in the governance of the nation.
If Sabato wants more representation for people in the Senate, he needs to think more broadly, and ensure that the small states benefit as well as the big ones. There's a simple solution: bump the total of senators up to 3 per state. You increase the current count of Senators up to 150, and that should ease any staffing/committee issues you might have. It might also free up various logjam procedurals that occur more often in a smaller body of Senators. Better yet, it aids in the term schedules. Senators serve 6 year terms, with the states electing each Senator on a staggered schedule. With 2 Senators, there's been an open election year: With 3 Senators, each election term now will have a Senator on the voting bloc, and each state a chance to redefine their Senatorial representation each election. Bumping to 3 Senators works better than just letting the big states have more Senators.
His idea of putting former Presidents into the Senate as 'National Senators' reeks of the age-old problem of "What should we do with Ex-Presidents?" I'm not sure a lot of people would like to see Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or George W. anywhere near a political office again. Not every Ex-President is going to be a Harry Truman, doc.
The non-partisan, non-gerrymandered voting district suggestion is, of course, a fracking NO-BRAINER. WE NEED TO GET RID OF THE GERRYMANDERS.

More to follow.

There's a book on suggested amendment ideas!

Many thanks to Jeremy Dibbell's Charging RINO blog, who has pointed out a new book from U. of Virginia's Larry Sabato, A More Perfect Constitution.

Dibbell's working a summarization of the book on another blog, the Moderate Voice, going over each amendment proposal. I'm gonna go take a look...

(long look)

Okay. I've got some issues with Sabato. This is gonna take some time... first up, his ideas about enlarging Congress (?!?!?).

The right to petition and address grievances should be direct to Congress

One trend in the political polling is the overall disapproval the public has with both President Bush the Lesser and with the Democratic-(mis)led Congress. The polling shows nearly a 33 percent Approval / 64 percent Disapproval on Bush (which goes to prove how politics in this country is divided into threes: Conservative / Moderate / Liberal, with the Conservatives backing their boy no matter what at 33 percent and with the Liberals despising him forever at their own 33 percent, with the Moderates defining the ever-morphing ups and downs of the middle 33 that goes either way. For the Moderate polling to now be totally alienated against Bush (and for so long, no President has had MULTIPLE YEARS of constant negative polling like this...) shows how terrible a job he's actually done. But I digress), and most disconcertingly a 29 Approval / 65 Disapproval for Congress. While the Bush Backers like to exclaim that this is because Americans despise Commie Libruls, it doesn't explain the more telling numbers from the poll for questions 7. and 8.:

7. (IF CONGRESS ACCOMPLISHED NOT MUCH/NOTHING) Who would you say deserves most of the blame for that (President Bush and the Republicans in Congress) or (the Democrats in Congress)?

Bush and Republicans   Democrats in    Both    Neither     No
        in Congress         Congress      (vol.)    (vol.)   opinion
9/30/07            51                25           20        2         2

8. Which political party, the (Democrats) or the (Republicans), do you trust to do a better job handling (ITEM)?

9/30/07 - Summary Table*

                                                      Both    Neither   No
                             Democrats  Republicans  (vol.)   (vol.)    op.
a. The situation in Iraq         49          34         3       11       3
b. Health care                   56          26         2       12       5
c. The U.S. campaign 
   against terrorism             41          40         5       10       4
d. The economy                   51          33         2       11       3
e. The federal budget
   deficit                       52          29         2       12       5
*Full sample asked items a-c; half sample asked item d; other half asked item e.

It shows most Americans prefer Democrats over Republicans on almost all issues.

So why the hatred for Congress? Why are they polling so low, even compared to perhaps the most unpopular President of all time?

One consideration is the fact that the Democratic leadership is failing to stand up to Bush. On nearly every issue, the Democrats keeled over, played dead, allowed the Republicans to dictate issues and remain on the offensive (as well as remaining offensive).

What has happened to the voter base is a spreading sense of ennui, of a failure to achieve anything, of a massive disconnect between the people and the leaders who are ignoring them, that all attempts to end the madness that never will end are driving us headfirst into a brick wall.

Some of this is due to a standard political defense mechanism: defend the status quo. Most politicians, even the ones who campaign on a platform of change, really don't want to do so once they're in power. They don't want to rock the boat (which is why Newt Gingrinch still has his followers even after all his massive failures: when Newt did seize power he actually did rock the boat and made changes even though those changes ended up being disastrous for the nation).

However, the major reason for the massive disconnect between Congress and the people who voted the Democrats into a majority there is due to the lack of direct contact Congresspeople really have with the majority of voters. Most people never ever meet their own Congressman/woman (I work at a library where a representative for our representative meets once a month for the Airing of Greivances: guess how many people came by for the monthly chat? Amazingly, one!) Try to book a meeting with a Congressperson up on the Hill: you'll have to wait, sometimes days sometimes months, and/or fill out paperwork and/or jump through hoops, and even then if you're representing a whole lot of angry people you may never see him/her at all. Meanwhile, the Congressperson is spending hours upon hours a) chatting with fellow Congresspersons, b) chatting with the media 'punditry' that's almost as isolated and out-of-touch as government is, c) having lunches and dinners and having contacts with lobbyists and campaign financiers in such a way as to skirt any election and ethics law.

Your Congressperson probably knows the clerking intern of their favorite lobby group more than they know you.

And while lobbyists are supposed to be performing a necessary function of a representative democratic republic - representing and petitioning for special interests seeking aid, relief, protection and intervention from government - they are in fact crippling democracy by making Congress tone-deaf to the issues that are really important to the American majorities. Congress hears all day from lobbyists screaming for relief for corporations that want more tax breaks; they hear from lobbyists screaming for protection of their particular special interest (be it guns, social security, guns, abortion, guns, the right to sell tobacco to kids in China, guns, and oh yeah the all-important macedamia nut industry); they meet with lobbyists more concerned with one issue rather than all issues concerning everyone.

We are not getting true representation in Congress. Not in today's government. In some respects we never really did.

We need an Amendment to make it easier somehow for Americans to directly petition Congress. To get on Congress's case. To not use lobbyists more interested in playing games on the Potomac, but to directly address a grievance and to have something done about it. While the First Amendment spelled out that the public cannot be blocked from petitioning and addressing grievances, it never defined exactly how the public CAN petition and address grievances. We need an amendment that does:

• Congress must allow a majority of no less than 60 percent of registered voters from any state to directly petition and speak before Congress on a given issue, and to allow the petitioning group to present to Congress a referendum on that issue to be voted on in open committee, and if the referendum passes the committee to be voted on in open quorum in each house of Congress.

Now, this IS going to open a HUGE box of flesh-eating worms of ultimate doom, I know. We're gonna get a whole bunch of angry, eager-to-argue petitioners from every state coming before Congress to air nearly every divisive argument and issue on the books. We're gonna have pro-lifers stampeding onto the floor screaming for an anti-abortion amendment. We're gonna have libertarian wingnuts trying to abolish Social Security and the Income Tax. We're gonna have JFK conspiracists wanting Congress to open investigations into Roswell Aliens that were standing on the Grassy Knoll.

But you wanna know what? This will actually be good for the country, in the long run. We will finally, FINALLY be addressing issues that have been festering and clawing at the edges of the political discourse, simply because Congress can't be bothered to touch any of them (Social Security, Tax Reform, Abortion: in truth all three of these issues and many more scare the crap out of politicians who don't want to be nailed to any side of any of these issues lest they lose their voting base).

And for any of the wingnut groups able to succeed in getting a majority of their state's voting base to that 60 percent cap to bring an issue directly to the floor of Congress, there's bound to be 20 other more rational groups able to get 60 percent of their states' voters to allow them to petition Congress in turn and prevent those wingnuts from overstating their case, keeping them in line and making Congress aware that there are more sane people than not in this country.

By allowing voters to directly petition Congress, to let the congressional leadership learn just how voters REALLY FEEL about certain issues, should go a long way to convince them that it is in their interests to do what the voters want. The voters want us out of Iraq. The voters want us to stop violating the Constitution. The voters want health care for their kids. The voters want an end to the corruption and incompetence of the Bush administration. We just need the means to TELL CONGRESS TO WAKE UP AND DO THEIR DAMN JOBS!

I do like it when the polls go my way...

Having already argued here, for the 3 to 5 people who've actually seen this blog, that we need a nationwide one-day primary, I was heartened to find out via Wonkette pointing to a NYTimes poll that a majority of Americans agree with me on wanting a nationwide one-day primary.

Thank you, my fellow Americans. Now if I can get that 3/4ths of the nation to actually DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT... :)

Thanks W., You've Just Killed the Rule of Law

From Firedoglake: Bush commutes Scooter Libby's sentence to no jail time.

Ever since before the trial, people knew this outcome was coming. Bush would never allow any of his top insider people see the inside of a jail cell (they know too much: one hour of jail and you know these babies would be blabbing their heads off for leniency). And while the Scootster had been convicted months ago, it wasn't until the recent appellate rejection of Libby's request to await final ruling on bail that Bush realized Scooter could be jailed soon and so... this.

And while the GOP elite will be celebrating that one of their own is free, refusing to recognize their hypocrisy, their self-serving greed and illegality, that their party now has no shred of integrity left, the rest of us who have to abide by the laws of the land will have to just sit here and vote them out of office next year.

Oh, there are things we can do: we can push harder for impeachment proceedings against Cheney and Bush; we can call the Congressional Judiciary committees and demand further investigations into Bush's criminality; we can go (we OUGHT to go, where the hell is everybody?) into the streets to protest. But it's not really going to do much to change the fact that Bush, Cheney and their cronies have broken nearly every security law on the books, and shredded the legal system in the process.

One thing this action has done, it has highlighted one of the absolute powers that a President has: to issue pardons and clemency except in cases of impeachment. This is one of the few powers where Congress has no say, where they cannot pass legislation limiting who and when a President can invoke this right. This is one of the few powers that the courts cannot block, if the President pardons or commutes someone's sentence that's it end of the case.

The only thing that can limit the President's power of pardon is the Constitution itself. Which needs to be done in one very specific area: limiting the ability to pardon your own friends, cronies, and underlings.

This happens often enough, and I didn't even think first about the pardon Ford issued Nixon regarding Watergate, which was the last time a pardon created massive political backlash (it cost Ford his own election in 1976). There's also been:

• Bush the Elder's pardoning of people, including friends and coworkers, for their roles in Iran-Contra.
• Bill Clinton's pardoning of colleagues of his brother-in-law (the Gregorys), Susan MacDougal from the Whitewater scandal, and Marc Rich a wealthy fugitive whose wife made large campaign contributions to the Clintons.

I was sure Lyndon B. Johnson would have questionable pardons under his belt, but dang I guess all his cronies got off scot-free.

Something to point out with the Iran-Contra pardons and the Clinton pardons was how many of those benefiting from this Presidential power were close allies to the same President who issued the pardons, commutations, and other acts of clemency. Which smacks of two things: cronyism and conflicts of interest. It's a great way for a President to commit criminal acts:
1) get your buddy underlings to do something illegal;
2) when the crime leaks to the press, blame said underlings;
3) manipulate the investigation one way or another to ensure the whole truth never comes out, leaving said underlings held responsible;
4) wait out the trials to see if your buddies get off;
5) if they get convicted, use your power of pardon to clear their records and close the investigation.

This needs to end. The President and his administration must always be held accountable to the law. He, and his friends, should not benefit from a "Get Out of Jail Free" card. There needs to be an amendment to the Constitution spelling this out:

• The President's power to issue pardons and other acts of clemency cannot be granted to people who worked for that President's administration at any level, nor to people who financially contributed to any political campaign run by that President at any time.

If people from the White House break the law, they're going to have to pray for mercy from future administrations: they should not have to count on an easy exit from their patron when the bill comes due. It should be that simple. And now is a good time to pursue this much-needed correction to the Constitution to ensure all future Presidents respect the Rule of Law.

Needs To Be Said Dept: Romney

I normally don't want to blog about current news as much, since I want to be more about tossing out ideas. But I couldn't let this pass:

Presidential candidate Mitt Romney once tied his family's dog to the roof of a car for a 14-hour roadtrip.

The dog ended up pooping all over the pet carrier and onto the car itself, whereupon Romney got out, cleaned off the poop, and kept driving with the dog on top.

Two things here, boss: 1) if your dog is pooping everywhere, don't you think you ought to at least take the dog in somewhere for a checkup? And 2) Being tied onto the roof of a speeding car can make anyone, man and dog, literally sh-tless.

And his excuses now? Now that his wonderful little anecdote he tried telling as a way of showing his level-headed decision-making skills is making negative waves? "OH, the Dog LOVES being on the roof of the car!" Excuse me, boss: when someone takes a sh-t on something, that person ain't enjoying a damn thing.

Swear to Dog. There is no WAY now any dog owner, hell any pet owner, is going to vote for this slimeball.


/rant

Redistricting: destroying all mankind through map editing

I just caught this during a surf of political websites, many thanks to Charging RINO for highlighting this. Theres a site called Redistricting Game that, okay once you get past the Flash movie that opens it, allows you to mess around with communities in fictional states to show just how devastating gerrymandering can be to our political system.

I suggest you take a look, play the game, and read up on the reform proposals offered. This is a big issue that needs serious reform, and this demonstrates it better than any quick one-sentence amendment proposal I can come up with (which I can: the amendment idea would be to just get rid of districts and have the whole state population choose all their House representatives. It would have the effect of eliminating 'safe' incumbent seats, force candidates to appeal to a broader range of voters, and... well give me a moment I'm going to have to think this out a little further...).

Summer Checklist 2007

I just want to take this opportunity to establish some of the amendment ideas I've brought up before continuing, just so I can keep track of what's p-ssing me off the most at various moments.

• First up, an amendment securing the checks and balances between the three branches of government, above all spelling out that the President is NOT above the law.
• Second, limiting elections from these ongoing, always-in-cycle eternal campaigns down to campaigns that can only be held and funded in that one year that the election actually takes place.
• Third, anger over campaign mudslinging, and the overall deceit of elected officials and their mouthpieces, brought up the fix that lying is not protected speech. I feel I will need to come back to this issue later.
• Next, seriously (if we look past the silliness of my Christmas wish list), came an amendment proposal to fix the elections primary chaos and improve the odds of electing a Presidential candidate who represents the whole nation instead of just representing New Hampshire and South Carolina.
• The last one I just posted went into the horrific lapses of memory by certain "Loyal Bushies" and that if anyone has that kind of problems remembering their own jobs they ought to be pushed out for their and our own good.

So there we stand on amendment ideas. It'd be nice if people could take note, and also take note that they can resolve these issues themselves, but still. I have a few more amendment ideas to table, such as tweaking the war powers responsibilities of both the Congress and the White House, or something about eliminating the office of the Vice President, or something to get rid of fleas I hope... no wait...

Total Recall Amendment

This has been brewing in my head for some time, ever since Attorney Doofus Alberto Gonzales testified before Congress about the partisan US Attorney firings... and didn't testify to much because he kept saying "I Don't Recall" or variations to that effect.

71 times. 71 "I Don't Recalls". I've known Alzheimer's patients with better memories (many thanks to the Marine who kept count).

We've now got another Dept. of Justice employee, some guy named Schlozman, with such poor memory you gotta wonder what's in their diet. This "I Don't Recall" problem is growing, spreading like a virus among our elected elite to where we may have all of them suffering from severe memory loss. Hey wait... maybe if they forget how to get out of beds in the mornings... hmmmmm...

Of course, there's really nothing wrong with their memories. Not at all. It's just these guys are getting caught now committing all these sins that when brought up to testify under oath they're not about to tell the truth (because it will get them arrested) and since they don't want to get caught lying (because that will also get them arrested) they take the third route: ACTING STUPID. It's the Middle Schooler Defense: trust me, catch a 7th grader in the act and their immediate response is "I don't knowwwww..."

So here's a wonderful little Amendment proposal I've got, which is something I'm sure Congress would love:

• Any person called to testify before Congress, regardless of being under oath, who answers any question with "I Don't Recall" or in any way feigns ignorance or cluelessness, shall immediately lose their employment, and will be barred from any federal employment, as their poor memory will clearly hamper their performance.
• Their position shall immediately be filled by someone from an opposing political party. At double salary and benefits.
• Dunce Caps will be optional.

I think that ought to ensure people at least testify like they're supposed to.

Florida is moving up their primary. Again.

Post was edited as soon as it was published. I noticed I missed a link.

The state of Florida is looking to move up their Presidential Primary again, as part of a race between all the states to try and dictate the outcomes of the elections. Currently Florida is looking at a January 29 date, trying to move ahead of South Carolina. And while a part of me is thrilled that a small extremist state won't be able to dictate the early standings of the primary, I'm still horrified by the fact that our election process has been so corrupted, twisted, complex, to the point of near collapse.

I'd argued before that individual states should not hold separate primaries. Because it gives one candidate an undue early lead if he can convince the extremists in one state to choose him before the extremists in other states chose another. Whoever gets an early lead along with the most money tends to be the winner (winning the first state sometimes not, but the second and third ones, you get those you pretty much win the whole thing). Because early winners can say one thing to win in the early states and then flip-flop in the other more moderate states while the early voters get screwed by the betrayals. Because no one state should choose before another.

The problem now is that we've got the Primary equivalent of an arms race. Now South Carolina is threatening to go to the first week in January. Michigan is looking at January as well. New Hampshire is looking at Thanksgiving of THIS year. Iowa, I've heard, is looking into temporal quantum mechanics to see about getting their primary held in 1876.

The political parties are also threatening to block any primary electors if Florida hosts the primary before Feb. 5th. Also to punish any candidates who campaign in Florida before Feb. 5th as well.

Will someone finally recognize the Primary system is broken and flawed and needs replacing? It may be better than the smoke-filled backroom dealings of previous election cycles, but this isn't democracy. It's pre-packaged failure of choices. We need to replace it with these elements:

• No election campaigning, fundraising, or ANYTHING until the actual year of election for all elected offices. It'll cut down on these prolonged drawn-out mudslinging wars (and replace them with swifter weapons of mass distraction instead, I know...).
• All Presidential primaries to be held on the same day in June. Gives people six months to campaign from January on, well enough time to establish how much of a crook everyone else is.
• All Presidential candidates must campaign evenly in all states and districts that are able to provide Primary representation. They can't ignore New Hampshire or North Dakota and focus on California, Texas and/or Florida. ALL states need to see the candidates and choose. And for all the small staters who can complain that this hurts their representation, let me note: you get representation from your Senators, and your Congresspersons. The President represents THE WHOLE COUNTRY. So the WHOLE COUNTRY should have an equal say.
• Another idea tacked on: The Presidential candidate determined by their party's primary system cannot choose his/her own Vice-President. That is to be determined from the convention attendees. And no nominations: all write-in votes. It won't stop people from campaigning for the job at the convention, but at least it'll make the convention interesting. And it may provide a nice hiccup to one wing of a party taking over the whole campaign: The Presidential candidate could well choose someone like-minded, to the detriment of others in the party (for example, Cheney choosing HIMSELF for the Veep role. THAT should have sent up red flags immediately, but noooooo.). This gives the other wings (moderates, fringers, single-issue manaics, whoever didn't get their boy elected to the top post) a chance to have a say in who's running. Say if we get another Clinton for the Democrats (please let it be Chelsea, please let it be Chelsea), those in the Democratic groups who didn't support her could team together and force a Veep candidate like a Howard Dean to keep the liberals involved. Of course, whoever wins the write-in could well turn it down, as is their right. Still, like I said this would make the conventions more interesting than they are now.

I've beaten this drum already a few times. I seriously think we ought to push for this. If not at the national level then certainly the state one. Please post comments. If there's anyone out there...

Amendment Suggestion: Dealing with Primary Chaos

I spotted recently in my local paper this opinion piece from the Washington Post:

By this time next year, the races for the Democratic and Republican presidential nominations are likely to be over. Bemoaning the front-loaded primary calendar has become a quadrennial event, but this campaign could be more speeded up than ever and even less healthful for the democratic process. Under the plan, the Democrats' 2008 sprint starts with caucuses in Iowa (Jan. 14) and Nevada (Jan. 19), followed by primaries in New Hampshire (Jan. 22) and South Carolina (Jan. 29). New Hampshire, angry that its first-in-the-nation status is being threatened, could move its contest even earlier, to 2007.

But the worst news is that a number of larger states, including California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Florida, are considering moving their primaries to Feb. 5, the first permissible date for other states to hold contests. On the part of each individual state, this is a rational act: Why should voters from smaller states determine the outcome while big-state voters are shut out? But the overall result will be a worsening of all the ill effects of front-loading, and for both parties: In most states, the Republican primary is held the same day.

I'd argued this before: it made little sense for the smaller states like New Hampshire or South Carolina to start the calendar for Presidential primaries. The reason why was front-loading (thanks, Post, I was wondering what word could be used to describe this):

Front-loading benefits better-known candidates with big bank accounts more than it does dark horses who might be able to do well and gain momentum in a more rationally paced system. It deprives most voters in most states of having a say in who their party's nominee will be. It short-circuits a process that could test candidates' capacities for connecting with voters and conveying their views.

The Post's editorial finished off with this note:

The National Association of Secretaries of State has proposed a calendar that would allow Iowa and New Hampshire to go first, followed by four regional primaries held every month from March through June. The regions would rotate their positions on the primary calendar each cycle. We supported the plan in 2000, when it seemed the process couldn't become much crazier. Now, when that campaign looks sedate by the standards of 2008, we agree more than ever.

The problem is this still doesn't fix the problem of front-loading. Whoever wins Iowa and New Hampshire will have momentum going into the regional primaries. You'll have candidates dropping out between NH and Regional One. And whoever wins the first regional primary still gets massive momentum, with only a quarter of the nation having any real say. And you'll have more candidates drop out. By the Regional Two, there's no contest. No real choice. And it will still be unfair to those voters and those states that didn't get to go first.

There is honestly only one true solution:

• Amendment Idea Number Three: All primary voting for political parties choosing their Presidential candidate must be held in all states at the same time.

All primary votes all on the same day, mid-June (Flag Day!). All parties with primary candidates doing it on the same day. Why, do you ask, is this the one true solution?

Think of the President in terms of who and what he/she represents. Compare the President to say a Congressman. Congressman represents a district. Senator represents a whole state. President represents the whole nation. So the whole nation should get to say who should be their choice to run for President.

The argument against individual states running their own primaries at their own times has already been made: why should South Carolina get to choose before California? Why should California choose before Texas? Why should Hawaii choose before Indiana? Why should any one state's primary winner get the momentum over the other candidates, if only because that winning candidate does well in that one state? That winning candidate may appeal to voters in New York, but he/she may not sell well in Arizona, Oregon, Alabama and Minnesota.

I keep harping on the 2000 GOP Primary, because it was when I realized how screwed the primary system was. I was, back then, a McCain supporter. I took one look at Dubya and knew that guy should get nowhere near the White House. Now, McCain won New Hampshire, and this was in spite of the massive fundraising Dubya had going for him, so I was hoping that the right candidate would be getting a shot at securing the nomination. And then South Carolina happened. And while I've got major issues about mudslinging that will be discussed elsewhere in a later post, I realized someone like McCain didn't sell well in a socially conservative state like SC (which explains why McCain is now so desperately sucking up to the religious right for 2008). By the time McCain had a shot for Florida (which was soon after), he had basically dropped from the race and was no longer actively campaigning (he left his name on the ballot but had stopped stumping). He had to: the party money was already backing the Shrub, and with South Carolina McCain had lost his Mo.

What happened to McCain in South Carolina got me mad: I screamed aloud "Why does a state like South Carolina get to decide?" I noted how large-populated states like Florida, Texas and California didn't even get a chance to make a true choice. I thought, even with the Jeb Bush political machine in Florida, that McCain had a true shot at winning Florida (it was more of a hope: like I just noted, with Jeb here his brother George pretty much had this state in the bag). I knew Texas wouldn't vote against their own Favored Son, but I knew McCain would have done well out West and would have gotten California. If only...

Ever since then, I don't want any one state getting to choose who wins any early primary, not even Florida, or even California: it's simply unfair to all other states if one state gets to give the Big Mo to one candidate over any other. So the simplest and best and most fair solution is to have all states run one primary at the same time.

But, say the naysayers and status quoers, having ALL states at the same time is blatantly unfair to the small-population states, whose votes won't count compared to the large states. You'll have candidates focusing on the ten biggest states at the expense of the ten smallest. How is any of that fair?

Those are solid complaints; however, they can be fixed by additional passages in the amendment, such as this one:

• All candidates for President must campaign evenly among all states. This will include spending, advertising, personal appearances, and any other methods that are used in campaigning.

This is clear: if you want to run for President, you run in all 50 states. You can't pick and choose: you can't just focus on California and Texas and Florida and New York and expect to secure enough primary convention seats to claim victory. You gotta make plays in North Dakota and Montana and Wyoming and Delaware and Alaska too.

This should do a couple of things:

• It will ensure a consistent message from a candidate during the campaign.

Even in this day of instant global news, and of YouTubing, candidates go from primary to primary changing their messages and campaign slogans and topics of interest. You goto New Hampshire and talk up labor and job protection. Then you go to South Carolina and talk God and immigration reform. Then you go to Florida and talk tourism and beach erosion. Then you go to Texas and talk oil drilling and the evils of sodomy. And you don't have to worry if you flip-flop from any earlier statements: If you've already run and won in an early primary, those states can't reneg on you if you change your campaign focus in the later states. If you run one big national campaign, it will get to be tougher to 'massage' your messages and flip-flop from state to state. What say if you do a big thing about how 'Sodomy Is EVIL' in Texas and 10 minutes later your opponent gets to shred you in front of voters in sodomy-friendly New York, who now get to vote at the same time as Texas? It will really hurt if your opponent gets to shred you in New York without alienating the voters in Texas. As a result, campaigning candidates will have to get real careful about what they say in one state, else they worry about the votes they lose in other states. You'll see candidates focusing more on the Big Picture items that Presidents need to focus on anyway, rather than bouncing from topic to topic that would only be of interest to specific states (and that could even be detrimental to the nation as a whole).

• Another thing is that it will ensure getting candidates who appeal nationwide, rather than those who would appeal to the states that would vote early.

The current system of primaries favor the extremist wings of the parties. The early primaries for the Democrats in 2008 are set for Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina (interesting in that NH doesn't go first this time, although Iowa has had informal Caucuses before the Hampshire primaries before). Small population states, each one. And in these states, even a socially conservative state like South Carolina, the Democratic voters are going to skew to the more extreme far left. Small states tend to have specific issues, which have a polarizing effect. Large population states tend to have greater diversity regarding issues because there are more topics of interest, and with more people providing differing views. With small states, all you need is one candidate who sells well on one topic. With large states, you need a candidate able to appeal to a broader scope over more topics. With the whole nation on the clock, you need a candidate able to appeal to all issues, something that the more extreme far right and far left candidates never do. You should get, hopefully, a better quality of candidates when you require them to appeal to the whole nation rather than to the regional/state extremes.

There is, of course, one negative to requiring that a candidate campaign evenly among all 50 states: that guy is gonna need a sh-tload of money to spend evenly between Maine and Hawaii and all states inbetween. That's why it's important that we include this amendment along with Amendment Idea Number Two: if we cap the campaigning to that specific year of election, it will prevent the candidates from raising any early massive warchest. No one candidate will have an advantage or momentum over another as of Jan. 2nd. They will have, since the primary will be held off until June, six months to cover all 50 states, roughly the amount of time they campaign already from state-to-state. Combine this with additional legislation providing for equal fund sharing (publicly-paid campaign funding is an idea bounced about), and this ought to fix any issue relating to fundraising nationwide.

An all-at-once primary campaign is one of the best ways to fix our broken nominating process for choosing Presidents. It will prevent front-runners who are good at fund-raising within the party and appealing to single-issue extremist voters but lousy at actual leadership from outpacing other candidates who are honestly more qualified but lack the money, momentum, and partisanship that exists with the current system.

The only other option is to remove the primary system altogether and replace it with a reality T.V. show: Who Wants to Be President? with voters calling a 1-800 number to cast their vote, or send a text message to vote because phone companies make more money that way. I think the all-at-once Primary is more honorable...

Amendments Wish List 2006

Tis the season to worship mass production and mass consumption. Um, wait.

Tis the season to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas and do the Snoopy dance to that wicked awesome jazz score. Ah, better.

And now, for my note to Sanity Clause.

Dear Santa:

I have been extra good this year and voted to make Katherine Harris pine for the days of 2000. I hope all is well at the North Pole and that you're planning a sweet vacation to Jamaica when December 26 rolls around.

I hope it's alright if I send you a wish list of amendments I'd like to see passed by this new Congress and sent around to the states for ratification. A lot of these are ones I know are kinda frivilous, but if passed they could really improve our lives in subtle and moving ways.

• I'd like an amendment that anyone making accusations of others acting in a treasonous fashion without hard evidence as required by the Constitution be ever after labeled a douchebag, even to where such label gets put on that person's driver's license, resume, business card, phone listing, blog, byline, what have you. Hello, Limbaugh/O'Reilly/Coulter/Malkin/Savage/God knows how many other right wingnuts out there. you're gonna have to find other ways of insulting liberals, moderates, progressives, libertarians, antiwar supporters, basically the 60 percent and growing population out there...
• I'd like an amendment that anyone decrying 'San Francisco Values' be forced to travel to Colma, the Necropolis of San Francisco, and pay their respects to the Emperor Norton. Afterwards, that person will be required to eat Rice-A-Roni the San Franciso Treat for the rest of his/her natural life.
• A neat amendment would be a requirement that all organized team sports that sells tickets for persons to attend their games use a postseason playoff system of no less than 4 teams. While this won't do a thing to nearly every team sport out there, this will finally force the NCAA to get rid of that godawful B(C)S system and go with a playoff system that would really settle the college football national champion issue ONCE AND FOR ALL. Sheesh. P.S. Go Gators. Actually, this year, Go Boise State! Stay undefeated and claim the title when Florida whomps Ohio State...
• An amendment to get Esquire magazine editors to admit they don't worship Jennfier Connelly for her eyebrows, but for her breasts.
• An amendment to make all Beltway talking heads to relocate to Billings Montana and work the weekly farm reports after 4 years of service. There ought to be a term limit for media hogs more so than for politicans. At least we can vote out the idiot pols.
• An amendment to make Hugh Hefner date a woman the same age he is. Or at least mix his harem with brunettes. Dammit man, all those blondes, you're gonna go blind from the peroxide shine!
• An amendment to make Dennis Miller funny again.
• An amendment to get Tom Tancredo to say those things about Miami right in the middle of Little Havana.
• An amendment requiring that the political party that votes with greater numbers for a war have its college-level supporters go fight that war.
• An amendment changing our national anthem from 'Star Spangled Banner' to 'Theme from Shaft.' Oh cmon, the Olympics will get that much funkier.
• An amendment allowing people to have their cable companies and satellite dish providers allow them to pick and choose which channels to have sent into their homes. That means you can trade in a worthless network like FOX News for something more relevant like, oh, the Anime Network (um, have they gotten Girls Bravo yet?).

And Santa, oh please let me have this one amendment idea for sure this Christmas time:

• An amendment making Bill O'Reilly celebrate Mithras instead of Christmas. He'll have to pay for his own bull to sacrifice, too.

What The Democrats Should Do The Next Two Years

Well, I had gotten caught up in a few other projects, namely a National Novel Writing Contest that naturally I'm not going to finish in time (sigh). I had tried writing up a post just before the Nov. 2006 midterm election about the horrific amount of mudslinging and election-day dirty tricks that had been going on, and any suggestions on how to fix our electoral system so that our elections are honest, fair and smudge-free. It's still on my draft board, and someday I'll get around to it.

Instead, with the election over and with the Democratic Party now in firm control of both houses of Congress, the big topic inside the Beltway has been "How evil and backstabbing" that mean ole Wicked Witch of the West Nancy Pelosi is. Sigh. Some things don't change, do they? Seriously, the big topic has been "What will the Dems do with their control of Congress?"

Some issues are unavoidable. Iraq has become such a mess that 'Civil War' is now the only way to describe the situation there.

Some issues are so easy to highlight. One example: Raising the minimum wage was practically the only nation-wide campaign theme the Dems had going. Considering that at the state level EVERY STATE that had a Minimum Wage Increase referendum passed their referendums (meaning that this is something voters across the board WANT), you know the Dems will be voting a national wage increase first chance they get.

Some issues had been stealthy. No one wanted to talk about how a Democrat-controlled Congress will fare against a Bush Administration that had gotten used to doing things their way under the last 6 years of One-Party-Rule. But now it's here. And now you have to consider the increase in congressional subpoenas that are going to head down Pennsylvania Ave come January...

So, here it is, my laundry list suggestion of things the Democrats should, and could, do now they have control of Congress.

I've divided this up into three sections: Domestic Issues, Foreign Policy Issues, and Reform Issues.

Domestic Issues:

• Obviously, boost the minimum wage. Nearly every newspaper editor, TV pundit, and street-corner prophet knows the Dems will make this a signature opening move on Day One. You may hear screams from the pro-CEO crowd that increasing wages will force companies to raise prices (eek! Inflation!). But things have been increasing in price already without the salary adjustments to average American wages since the last wage increase. Businesses haven't been including Cost-Of-Living increases to people's Annual Evaluation increases (or in some cases the other way around) in the last 25 years, whereas before both COLAs and Evaluation increases used to be the way of things in the 1950s and 1960s, back when wages really meant something. There ought to be ways to ensure that the coming wage increase won't affect inflation. The priority is to improve people's wage earnings: there are far too many families sliding toward or are now under that Poverty Line...
• Another suggestion I have is add a Salary Cap to CEOs. Oooooooh, that's gonna touch a nerve. Back in the 1950s, CEOs were making roughly 20 times more than the average middle class worker. Today: it's over 200 times more. CEOs and upper management get massive salaries not to mention perks that average workers don't get, and along with that they also get better Annual Evaluation boosts to their earnings (I saw an USA Today article, swear I did, that showed CEOs getting 25 percent increases where the average worker got a 2-5 percent increase. I am still looking for that article and will cite ASAP). If companies are serious about holding down costs, why don't they do something about how expensive their top employees really are? Oh, right, we'd be taking away their ability to pay for that 5th executive golf course country club they joined yesterday. And that 5-car garage mansion with 10 extra dining rooms they never use but love to show off. So here's my suggestion: Put a Cap on any CEO/President of a company employing more than 100 people to where said CEO/President's salary (combined with perks such as stock options, performance bonuses, company-owned items like cars planes and vacation homes) is 20 times more than the average non-management level employee. It should do two things: cut down on high-priced CEO salaries, and increase the employees' wages so that their average wage goes up to give said CEO justalittlebitmoremoney. Don't call me a communist: Call me a fan of the NFL. Thank you Pete Rozelle. Woot.
• Do something about Medicare. The 'reform' package passed under Bush's watch has proved too expensive (that they lied about the costs to Congress before the bill passed remains one of my major grievances with the Bushies). The costs of pills, one of the biggest items on any bill for those on Medicare, have not gone down. There are serious flaws in the Medicare program, and while a majority of Americans don't see it as a higher priority (Iraq, Iraq, and oh yeah Britney's impending divorce) they still feel it's a major problem in need of fixing. Personally, I'd suggest doing something to lower prescription costs, again doing it in a way that the costs don't get shifted somewhere else; I'd also do something about the increased bureaucracy and cut back on that. And there's something about how Plan B on Medicare got twisted to where it will collapse on itself by the next decade: That doesn't sound good.
• Alternate Energy Programs: Very simple reasoning. Let's get rid of dependence on foreign fuel. We're in the Middle East because of oil: we want peace in the region to improve our access to it (and there are some who want war in the region to hinder our access and increase the value of the oil we can get). We wouldn't care much about Venezuela being run by an egomanaic if there wasn't oil there. Oh, and a lot of the renewable 'alternate energy' resources don't pollute as much as oil and coal and nuclear power do.

Foreign Policy Issues:

• Obviously. Iraq. Oh, yes, let's talk about cutting and running. Because that's pretty much the only option left to us. There may be a blue-ribbon committee coming out with its recommendations soon, but what options we have aren't healthy ones. We can't stay, that much is obvious, and sooner or later our troops need to exit Iraq (and head back to Afghanistan where we're losing the one real victory Bush had against the Taliban and Al Qaida). Other options include partitioning Iraq, effectively Balkanizing the nation into its three ethnic sections: North Iraq becomes Kurdistan; Central Iraq for the Sunnis; South Iraq for the Shia. Problems with that? Most times a nation gets split up like that, the surviving new nations hate each other with a vengeance (try India and Pakistan) and immediately go to war on each other (hello, what's left of Yugoslavia!), especially when they'll be stoked to anger by their neighbors (wanna trust the Sunni nation to Syria and the Shia nation to Iran?). Plus, Turkey will not be thrilled with a Kurdish state at their border while Kurdish insurgents inside their nation will be pumped with the urge to have their parts of Turkey annexed to the new Kurd nation. Our other options would include getting other nations to take over the rebuilding process (no one will want the job); increase our troop deployment and go back to waging a full-time war against the insurgents and outside agitators (we don't have the manpower anymore: the Two-Front Army planned for years has finally been stretched too thin); a more drastic option would be to spread the war to the nations most likely supporting the failures in Iraq as a way of cutting back the horrors in Iraq (meaning invading Iran and/or Syria, which would inflame more Islamic extremists across Asia and Africa into thinking this is a full-out Christian Crusade against Islam). One option that makes the most sense is getting Iran and Syria into direct negotiations and barter out a deal to end their support of the insurgency. My suggestion would be to bring in all Middle East nations to such a summit: Turkey, Syria, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Kuwait, Qatar, UAB, even Egypt and some of the former Russia-stans in the region. I wouldn't bring in Israel or Gaza Palestine into it, either in discussion or by inviting them to said summit: we do that and Syria and Iran will go out of their way to make Israel their bogeyman issue and intentionally fail the talks. I'd bring Lebanon into the mix, but their issues with Syria right now would prove distracting, so that one I'm not sure about. We have got to get all the Middle East nations to recognize that a stable united Iraq is in their mutual best interests. And if it means we have to flat-out bribe some of them into supporting a stable Iraq, well then we'll need to invite China because they've got all our money right now.
• It's not much, but Congress could do something to improve our international image, which isn't much right now thankyouverymuchGeorge. I dunno, maybe send all the other nations a nice whipped-cream-topping cake, or hey cupcakes from magnolias Bakery mmmmm that ought to work...

Reform Issues:
Corruption turned out to be a major voter-turnout issue, not surprising seeing how the GOP-led Congress was filled to the rafters with lobbyist payoffs, nespotic-like incompetence, self-serving greed, blind ignorance to the criminal activities of colleagues, etc. Now with the GOP out of favor, what can the Dems do?

• Go back to the Roberts Rule of Order! The GOP during its tenure of power had been very naughty ignoring committee protocols, hiding meetings, refusing to follow voting procedures, what have you. Enforcing rules of order, even on themselves, will go a long way toward making voters trust Congress more than they do now.
• Strengthen the Ethics Committee. While the Ethics committee for Congress has been notoriously lax in enforcing any kind of ethics on their fellow legislators, under the Gingrinch/DeLay years (forget Hastert, he was following DeLay's lead more often than not) the committee became a flat-out joke. When DeLay got caught committing major infractions no one could ignore, his buddy Hastert simply got rid of the committee members they didn't trust and installed lackeys who would look the other way. There were a handful of other things the Ethics Committee never got around to facing, and Abramoff was at the center of most of it. If there was anything the Ethics Committee did right... it was probably in their selection of what breakfast pastries to have at their morning sessions. If I were the Democrats, even though this might come back to bite their own party on their collective ass, I would grant the Ethics Committee more independence from Congress to prevent tampering the way DeLay/Hastert did; I would grant them greater investigation enforcement powers, and the ability to issue criminal charges where warranted; I would do whatever it took to end all of the blatantly criminal activities going on between congresspersons and lobbyists, and even all the subtle sh-t too.
• Make no-bid contracts illegal. Investigate the existing no-bid contracted companies and make sure they stop ripping us taxpayers off.
• Protect the Constitution from Bush/Cheney's attempt to seize all the power under the Executive branch. Make the White House accountable to the law. That does mean subpoenas and investigations into a lot of the criminal activity, and yes it is criminal what they are trying to do.

There. That's my laundry list. Now, back to figuring out how to end mudslinging without destroying the First Amendment...

What amendment could stop mudslinging?

I had started writing this before the November 2006 election, but had gotten distracted by RL issues. This is a continuation post-election, with concerns about how negative campaigning will affect the 2008 elections:

The closer we get to an Election Day, the more negative advertisements you get on your televisions. And your radios. And your telephones. If the campaigns had a way to broadcast directly into your heads, we'd be having psychic mudslinging 24/7.

Here's a set of examples from 2006:

• Incumbent Mike DeWine (R) running an ad claiming his opponent Sherrod Brown (D) hadn't paid unemployment taxes years ago... whichwas false (the tax lien was paid but the paperwork on it wasn't filed by the government until recently). Even after the facts were laid out, the GOP refused to back down from the claim.
• In Tennessee, well if I just say "Tennessee bimbo" you'll immediately recognize the infamous race-baiting ad that Republican Bob Corker had running that insinuated his African-American Democratic opponent Harold Ford had a thing for white women. (Sidenote: the SOB responsible for the ad, Terry Nelson, had been hired by John McCain to assist on McCain's 2008 Presidential bid. One more reason I no longer support McCain).
• In Connecticut, Joe Lieberman pulled out a cartoon bear that attacked his primary opponent Ned Lamont of association with Lieberman's ancient opponent Lowell Weicker, implying that Lamont will share Weicker's weaknesses (absenteeism, wacky voting record, stealing people's picnic baskets, etc.).
• Here's a site factcheck.org which has a list of some of the worst mudslinging across the nation, from both Republicans and Democrats.

And these are just the ones I can fit here. There's bad blood in nearly every state in nearly every election.

I'm not the only one complaining about this: here's a link to a Slate commentary on it. Pick your choice of newspaper and you're bound to find an editorial comment decrying the mudslinging and how worse it's become. Because, sad to say it, this sort of crap has been flung about ever since the parties came into existence here...

Let's go back to the first true open election, the one in 1796 when George Washington refused to serve a third term. For the love of all that's holy, we had mudslinging back then between the Federalists and the Republicans (they would evolve into Democrats waaaaaay later). And that was just the beginning of open partisan politics.

• The election in 1800 was worse than that. Sally Hemmings *is* the original scandal girl.
• Let's try 1824, with the mudslinging directed at Andrew Jackson, and specifically at his wife: her divorce hadn't been finalized when they married, so critics accused them of bigamy. She died during the election year, and Jackson believed those mudslingers had killed her.
  
• Try 1860 and 1864. Southerners burned Lincoln in effigy in 1860, which kinda made it tough for him to campaign in those states. Race-baiting Democrats for the 1864 election, in the midst of the Civil War, actually invented a new word miscegenation to accuse Republicans of wanting black men to marry white daughters.
• Try the greatest election scandal ever in 1884 when Grover Cleveland was running for the White House: "Ma! Ma! Where's my Pa?" Which the Republicans were using to hide the fact that their candidate Blaine was caught in business and financial scandals. Mark Twain famously noted that as Cleveland was honest in politics and Blaine honest in private life that Cleveland should be elected to public office and Blaine left to the private life.
• Try 1964. LBJ's campaign painting Goldwater as a nutcase. The infamous Daisy ad, implying Goldwater would call down a nuclear countdown, the crowning achievement of mudslinging advertisements.
• Try 1988. Willie Horton.
• Try the Clinton years. Oh ye Gods. The Republicans are still throwing mud at Slick Willy, and he's not even in office anymore.

And again, I could go on.

And the problem is, how in God's name can we stop this?

Mudslinging may be traditional but it's a horrible one: it forces voters to look at the negatives, and sometimes those negatives are fabricated or unrelated to the issues at hand. Why worry about failing schools and low wages and almost no job security when you could worry instead about the snuke in Hilary's crotch?

The problem is, for all intents, this gets up close to the First Amendment if not fully under its protective umbrella. The rules allowing for free speech, for the right to assemble, to petition grievances. You have the right to point out the flaws of others, and especially the right to point out the flaws of potential political leaders. But honestly, does that give the right to insult and defame, which is all we really get anymore?

One possible solution at hand is to point out that not all speech is protected: Speech that could could form a clear and present danger, for example, any speech that would incite violence or rioting - that's not protected speech. Calling out 'FIRE' in a crowded theater when there is no fire, almost certain to cause a stampede of doom, is certainly not protected speech. We should extend that a little further:

• Lying is not protected speech.

That should be a given anyway. Hell, aren't we getting hammered for the need to put the Ten Commandments into our courtrooms and classrooms and offices and all? Isn't there a Commandment against false witness? Gee, you'd think a lot of politicians would support an effort to make false witness/lying a crime in all circumstances, right...?

The judicial system has penalties in place for things like Obstruction, Perjury, and Lying to investigators. We need something like that in the public arena of the media and in official political statements. Libel and slander laws don't seem to cut it anymore. We need laws that say a politician, or a spokesperson, cannot make statements that can be proven false. If we do have a law like that on the books (and why does it look like we don't?), then it needs to be renewed, reinforced, re-established. With succifient penalties to back it up.

If you think that would force politicians into revealing state secrets, relax. They can always rely on a truthful statement like "I cannot comment on that." There. Truthful without having to say anything. Of course, if your spokesman has to keep saying "No Comment," you're going to have problems of some kind anyway so...

All I'm saying is: If we can penalize those in office who lie, or those running for office who lie, that should have the proper effect of reducing a lot of the mudslinging and negative campaigning out there. Less mudslinging = more positivie campaigns = more voters with a positive view of elections and commitment to civic duties.

UPDATE: Oh great this is originally showing the post-date of October 2006, when I first started writing it, rather than the date I finally got around to finishing it (April 12, 2007). Wonder if this updating will fix it...

Amendment Suggestion 2: this is one I've offered before

This was something I'd posted at my WittyLibrarian site last year...

• No candidate for elected office can announce, raise funding for, or organize a campaign until the first month of that year of election.

This was the original point I'd made then, and it's still relevant today:

This is a response to how the Presidental campaign has devolved. When you've got Senators and Governors already polling and setting up campaign groups for 2008, three years from now (Hell, we've had Ah-nold campaigning since 2003 for an amendment to let him run for President), then we've got problems. Problems in the form of money that they need to keep these campaigns afloat for so long; ergo, problems in the form of political dealing they make to keep that money coming in.
This is an attempt to shorten the campaign process, and to lessen the costs of an extended campaign. It's to keep campaigns focused, and interesting: people lose interest after two straight years of nudging and posturing and mudslinging and flat-out campaigning. By November of a three-year campaign, people are tired of it. By November of a one-year campaign, there's (with hope) only mild fatigue.
There are no problems to having a shortened, one-year campaign: in this day of instant media across the whole planet, there is no need for extended times to ensure the word gets out. The California Recall (NOTE: dang, was that 2003?) proves that a short, three month campaign at a state level was doable: a nationwide year long campaign should work as well if not moreso. England and other countries are able to hold elections within months of declaring for one.
The only ones who benefit from a multi-year 'campaign' are those who fund them, the lobbyists and deep-pocket groups that want to use their money to buy the influence they need to stay in power. ADDENDUM: The idea is that, the smaller the warchest, the fewer numbers of Quid Pro Quos the elected official will have to pay back. Everyone else benefits (even the candidates, who have to be under serious stress from the greet and meet, see how many of the good ones burn out from the extensive campaigning) from a shortened campaign period. This ought to be a no-brainer amendment to pass...except that the status quo will fight it to the last dollar...

When you look at politicans today, they are in a constant mode of Campaigning. Constantly asking for funds. Constantly building up warchests. Even in years they are not running for office. All that money, all that need for money, can put even the most noble political wonk in serious debt to people who are going to expect their money's worth. If there is any way to cut back on that, we ought to take it.

Also, this amendment should add a second item:

• No funds collected from previous years, either directly by the candidate or by any group or party that would seek to fund that candidate, can be used in that year's election.

This means that any warchest saved over from previous elections no longer exist. This means the deep pockets can't hold in escrow or in any kind of saving account or lock box (sorry, Al, had to borrow the symbol) for their favorite friends running for office. Everyone starts from scratch at the same spot: zero.

And as I noted before, the status quo is going to fight this amendment idea tooth and nail. The buying of politicians is how they reap billions later from the earmarks and the pork barrels and the tax cuts and the favorable anti-union, deregulatory decisions and... yeah, keep adding. That's what they do.

Amendment Suggestion 1: Checks and Balances

Here's the first amendment idea I want to toss out there:

1. The President of the United States is NOT above the law.
2. The checks and balances established in the Constitution of the United States shall be upheld at ALL TIMES.

The George W. Bush administration has, in its last 6 years of operation, gone out of its way to assume, take, and seize political power and authority away from not only the two other branches of government but also from the states. This is a product of the last 40 years of Republican planning: ever since the era of Nixon, hell even before, the GOP had its factions obsessed with Authoritarianism, of having power reside in a powerful unyielding Chief Executive who would never have to answer to the whims of a crowded noisy Congress or an intrusive, 'activist' Court. Think back to what Nixon said to David Frost in the post-Watergate interview he gave in which he expressed the theory: "If the President does it, it's not illegal." See, if a Senator does it, it's illegal. If a soldier does it, it's illegal. If an average citizen does it, it's illegal. But if the President does it, for him and him alone, it's legal.
Under that theory, the President can suspend habeus corpus, not Congress, and the Courts will have nothing to say about it because without habeus there's nothing they CAN say. The President can ignore any treaty he feels like, without the Senate raising a stink. The President can ignore any law Congress passes without even worrying about the Constitutional requirement of a Veto, simply by signing a statement on how he interprets the law as he sees fit. The President can knock over gas stations if he felt like it, under this idea of the President being Above The Law.
This theory is best found under the title of Unitary Executive Theory: that the President is vested by Article II of the Constitution to 'Take care' that the laws are faithfully executed. But if you read that wiki article I linked to, you will see that at nearly every time the President used that theory to expand powers, the Courts struck it down or limited that administration's reach. In the few times that the Courts failed to enforce their ruling, such as when Andrew Jackson ignored the Supreme Court's ruling that he could not force Indians out of their tribal lands, the results were inhumane and ended up being a dark stain in our nation's history.
If you do look at the history of when the President overreached his authority - Jefferson's refusal to seat Adams' midnight judges that led to the Marbury v. Madison; Andrew Jackson's explusion of the Cherokee from Georgia that led to decades of wrongs committed against the Native Americans; Lincoln's suspension of Habeus Corpus that led to Ex Parte Milligan; FDR's internment of Japanese Americans that led to reparation payments after the war; Truman's strike-breaking effort that led to the Youngstown decision; Nixon's domestic spying abuses - there is something wrong with this whole idea of a super-powerful Executive. And as you see there's been a pattern of abuse by these previous administrations, all overshadowed by the horrific excesses of the current administration, that shows something, ANYTHING, needs to be spelled out in black-and-white.
This amendment is meant to spell it out: The President has his limits, and it's the law. Anything defined as illegal by Congress, he can't do, period. Anything ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, he can't do, period. This is a reminder that power is shared in this government, that there is a series of checks and balances, that the President cannot make the law or define the law, he just enforces it and does his job and does it right.
The second part of this amendment idea is that the laws are to be upheld at all times under all circumstances. John Yoo, George W. Bush's legal defender on authoritarianism, argues that during wartime power shifts to the Executive branch. The problem is that becomes an excuse to use the powers as he sees fit, even if they don't relate to the War Effort. And legal history has proved Yoo wrong: Lincoln's suspension of Habeus during the Civil War was ruled Unconstitutional; Truman's strike-break efforts were during the Korean War, again was ruled Unconstitutional. The Courts, interpreting the Constitution as is their authority to do so, has determined that the President cannot claim wartime as an excuse to override the laws of the land. The second part of my amendment spells that out clearly, so there will be no confusion or deception regarding this: THE PRESIDENT IS NOT SHOULD NOT WILL NOT BE ABOVE THE LAW. EVER.
This isn't the best legal argument anyone can make: but it's the right argument to speak for.

Apologies

I've been busy in the real world with a move to a new job and a new home.

I've also been swamped by the thought of figuring which amendment idea I'd like to toss out there first. Given the sheer scope of stupidity and criminality going on out there, it was hard to think on which amendment would be a surefire argument starter that will get me branded as a traitor or delusional.

I think I've got a good one to start. See you tomorrow with it.