Glenn has a few pretty good ideas here, even though it seems like they're offered in a less than hopeful or serious tone.
Reproduced in its entirety, from WashEx, HT: HotAir...
Sunday Reflection: Changing the Constitution
By: Glenn ReynoldsLast weekend I participated in an unusual event -- a conference on the prospects for a federal constitutional convention at Harvard Law School, co-sponsored with the Tea Party Patriots and Fix Congress First. (See the agenda at
www.conconcon.org). A wide variety of participants from both the left and the right mixed with surprising comfort and cordiality, and found numerous points of agreement. Something's just not right with the country, all agreed, and my comment that America has by far the worst political class in its history drew universal applause.
It's certainly true, as even a brief glance at the news will illustrate. When the country was founded, we had Jefferson, Madison, Washington and Franklin, among many other giants. Now we have ... well, a bunch of greedy pygmies, I'm tempted to say, except that calling them that would be an unfair insult to diminutive tribesmen.
But, of course, that in itself poses a problem for any new constitutional convention. The Constitution we have now is the product of Madison and those others. Would we get a better one from the likes of Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner? Probably not, and that was the cautionary note sounded by liberal Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe. Tribe's concerns about the risks of a new constitutional convention sounded surprisingly similar to the concerns expressed by right-leaning radio host Rush Limbaugh. On the other hand, both the liberal law professor Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas, and the right-leaning law professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown, are more sanguine: Anything new that comes out of a convention, they note, will have to be approved by three-fourths of the states, and it's unlikely that anything too crazy could pass that test.
We may find out, given that dissatisfaction with the current situation continues to grow. According to an August Rasmussen poll, only 17 percent of Americans think the current government has the consent of the governed, and in a Gallup poll from last week, 49 percent of Americans thought the federal government poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens. Those are warning signs, which our political leaders would be well-advised to heed. Perhaps the threat of a constitutional convention will help focus their attention, and bring about improvement on its own. As T. Clay Whitehead once put it, the value of the sword of Damocles is that it hangs, not that it falls.
At any rate, in the spirit of the discussion, I have a few amendments of my own to propose:
# I think the Ninth Amendment, which reads, "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people," should be amended by adding at the end "and we really mean it!" Ditto the Tenth Amendment, which provides "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
These amendments would underscore that the federal government is one of limited and enumerated powers, and that those powers are islands in a sea of rights -- rather than rights being islands in a sea of generalized federal power.# Any person, having been elected to the office of United States senator, shall be forever ineligible to be elected to the office of president of the United States. The purpose of this amendment isn't so much to protect the presidency, as to protect the Senate. Very few senators ever become president, but of the 100 people serving in the Senate at any given time, probably about 95 think they've got a shot. This causes them to treat their Senate service as a potential steppingstone, rather than an end in itself. Ban senators from higher office and you encourage them to focus on their jobs. Plus, a Senate that couldn't serve as a steppingstone might attract a better caliber of senator.
# The 16th Amendment, which provides for the income tax, should be amended to limit the progressivity of that tax. Right now, according to a 2009 report from the Tax Foundation, the income tax burden of the top 1 percent of taxpayers exceeds that of the bottom 95 percent. The top 50 percent of earners, meanwhile, paid over 97 percent of income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid less than 3 percent, and many not only paid no taxes but actually received money back via various refundable-credit schemes for low-income workers. You don't have to be an opponent of progressive taxation to recognize that such a narrow concentration of burdens poses risk in a democratic system.
# Make Congress a part-time legislature. Limit it to meeting for 90 days per year, and make it illegal for members to reside in the District of Columbia the rest of the time. With members dispersed around the nation, the influence of K street will shrink -- and so will members' disconnect with the problems of regular Americans.
On top of this, you might add the usual term limits and balanced-budget amendments -- though I'd prefer one that simply cut Congress members' salaries and staff allowances in half whenever the federal budget is out of balance. I'm lukewarm on these proposals, but they'd probably do more good than harm.
On the other hand, given that we barely follow the Constitution now -- just look what's been done with the Commerce Clause -- it's possible that amendments won't make much of a difference. If voters focus on the kind of government they want, and don't fall for the distractions that the political class routinely deploys, we won't need a new constitutional convention. And if voters aren't up to that, then a convention probably won't do any good anyway.
