I hate to say it, but the way things are going, it may be necessary to re-visit the US Constitution. The system is extremely broken right now. The French have had five republics. Most republics have to reestablish multiple times over the course of their history.
If you were the chairperson of the Committee to Reform the Constitution what reforms, including new amendments and repeal of existing amendments (if any) would you propose?
I'd go for a few broad points of emphasis.
1) Rebalancing the power between state and federal governments. America is a very diverse nation in so many ways. This diversity includes diversity of political opinions on a regional basis. I think most of us would be much happier with our government if more political decisions were made at the state and local level where those decisions are more likely to reflect the opinions of our immediate community. A clarification of the interstate commerce clause could be particularly helpful in this area. A century ago we passed the 18th Amendment because Congress's pre-existing powers were not understood to include the power to prohibit alcohol nationwide. Over the ensuing decades decisions such as
Wickard v. Filburn greatly expanded the meaning of "interstate commerce" to encompass essentially all commercial activity, and so Congress was later able to ban other drugs (and enact numerous other regulations pertaining to commercial transactions that don't cross state lines) without seeking a Constitutional amendment. I don't think this was wise and would like to rein in this type of behavior, bringing more decision-making power much closer to the people.
2) Ensuring more democratic representation in federal institutions. I wouldn't necessarily go so far as to scrap the electoral college and the senate, but I would smooth out the effects that population imbalances create in these institutions. In the first US census the biggest state had about 12 times the population of the smallest. That difference grew to 66-fold by 2010, and has increased a bit since then. To reduce the outsized influence that small states have, I would propose two reforms. First, double or triple the size of the House of Representatives. This would reduce the weighting of the two senators per state in the electoral vote totals. Second, allow large states to divide themselves into smaller states without Congressional approval, so long as the new states were each a certain multiple (maybe 5-10x) of the smallest state. If California or Texas want to remain one huge entity I won't stand in their way, but they shouldn't have to get approval from Wyoming and Rhode Island to divide themselves into entities that will be much more populous than either. In this same topic of more democratic representation, I believe all citizens deserve to have voting representation in Congress. To that end I would grant US territories a quick path to statehood if they want it, and grant them voting representation in Congress in the interim. I think it's also worth considering allocating a few seats in the House to citizens living abroad, as France has done.
3) Criminal justice reform. A lot of the Bill of Rights is aimed at ensuring fair justice by establishing jury trials and various other rights relating to trials. In current times a very small fraction of cases ever makes it to trial because of plea bargaining. Exercising your right to a trial, demanding that the prosecution lay out its evidence against you in front of an impartial judge and jury, should not be a huge risk that is likely to cost you years of your freedom. A right that the state will severely punish you for exercising is no right at all. And yet with the current plea bargaining system this is exactly what happens. Given a big enough disparity between sentences offered at the plea stage and sentences imposed after a guilty verdict at trial, accepting the plea bargain can be the rational thing to do even if you are completely innocent. I would add an amendment limiting maximum sentences at trial to a very small multiple of what was offered prior to trial. No more than 2x for sure. Trials are expensive. Having more of them is a feature, not a bug. We have the most prisoners in the world. Taking away someone's freedom
should be expensive, something that a prosecutor and judge have every reason to avoid if at all possible. Let's make it so. There are also huge racial disparities in criminal punishment that need to be addressed, but I have no concrete proposals here other than to listen to what people of color, particularly Black people, suggest.
4) "Renewing our vows." Almost no American citizen alive today had any influence into whether their state would be a State of the Union, subject to the Constitution thereof. The only exceptions are a few thousand senior citizens who were registered voters in Alaska or Hawaii back in 1959. The status quo bias built into the Constitutional amendment process is very strong. If the 2nd Amendment didn't already exist and was being proposed for a vote today, there's no way in hell it would earn the requisite two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and support from 38 state legislatures. And yet right now because it was ratified by 11 all-white, all-male state legislatures 228 years ago, keeping it in place merely requires the support of at least one-third of
either house of Congress
or at least 13 state legislatures. That's quite a striking difference! I would consider requiring some sort of re-ratification of the Constitution once in a generation. If the document as it exists doesn't have broad enough support across the nation, we should force ourselves to make changes until it does.
