Constitutional Convention

A previous post talked about how we should have a Amendment to the Constitution that would clarify the Second Amendment. I've been thinking about that since then, and I think we should have a Constitutional Convention. It's a process allowed by the Constitution, and it would (ideally) be the people of the United States hashing out our Constitutional problems in a structured way, with new Constitutional Amendments clarifying our current ambiguities.

Things I'd like to see in such a Convention:

• Universal ban on torture, including rendition for the purposes of torture.
• Clarification of the powers of the Congress to regulate the President's power as Commander-en-chief.*
• Defining when a person gains their "personhood", thereby settling the legal issues associated with abortion.**
• Eliminating most of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution, returning the power of electing Senators to the State Legislators.
• Clarifying the Second Amendment Rights of Americans
• The Equal Rights Amendment
• An amendment that mandates an economic study for every new bill that goes through Congress by a newly created Oversight Office (that is politically independent somehow). No bill could be passed until such a review was processed.
• The previously mentioned Oversight Office would also conduct reviews about the effectiveness of federal programs.***
• I'm not exactly sure how I'd phrase this one, but something like this: "A bill shall be considered law if it receives the signature or affirmation of a majority of the members of both houses of Congress."****
• Universal Health-care Amendment, I don't see how Universal Health-care can be constitutional without an Amendment.
• Eliminating Term Limits, but barring anyone being re-elected to a federal position as an incumbent.*****
• An amendment to have state districts laid out by an impartial committee, ending Gerrymandering.
• District of Colombia Voting Rights
• Ending the absurd notion that Corporations are persons in Constitutional terms.

There's some interesting stuff here. I like the one barring presidential pardons until someone's actually been convicted of a crime. 
The Bricker Amendment is neat too.


*For example, people like Richard Cheney believe that the President has the power to invade, arrest, or assassinate anyone, for any reason, and the Congress's only recourse is to eliminate the budgeting for those projects. Other people would limit the President's military authority to conducting specific invasions in the event of a declaration of war. There's probably a point in between these two positions that isn't insane.

**The Bible doesn't prohibit abortion, FYI.

*** This would sink the reputation of the CAM (Center for Alternative Medicine) and Abstinence Only Education. It would probably undermine other ineffectual programs that I don't know about, since we don't have a board doing this at the moment, certainly not one that is independent in any meaningful sense.

****That is to say, if parliamentary procedure (like the filibuster) was holding a law back, the members of the Senate could just pass the bill around, collect 51 signatures, and register the votes into the Congressional Register, and it would be passed. The House would simply have to sign it in the same way. The affirmation bit is to allow congresspeople to approve laws without actually being physically present at the time. We're in the 21st Century people, have you heard of Telecommuting? This Amendment would also prevent the process where someone can tack an amendment onto an already existing bill to kill it. Any amended bill would have to start over with the signature collecting, but the original bill would still be floating around, ready to be signed.

***** Someone can run for President or Congressperson as many times as they want, they just can't run for the position if they're currently in that position. Obviously, we wouldn't allow people to quit the day before the election, either.

"Passing On" Cost

Republicans like to pretend that all taxes have a magic effect: the cost of the taxes will immediately fall onto the average citizen. An obvious example is gasoline; any sort of "carbon tax"* would just be a tax on the little people, since the gas companies would just up the prices exactly as much as the tax.

This is fiction. Companies don't base prices on the cost of production, companies base prices on the price people are willing to pay.

A good example is the PS3. Sony just announced that it finally costs them less to produce the PS3 than its retail price. That's right, for years, the PS3 has cost Sony more to produce than they've sold it for; every PS3 sold is a "loss" for the company. There are a variety of reasons Sony was willing to have temporary losses for a long term strategy, but one thing is certain: Sony certainly wasn't passing on the expense of production to the consumer.  If they were, the price of the PS3 would go down with the drop in production costs. Instead, the price of the PS3 is based on a long term marketing strategy that has nothing to do with cost of manufacture. People are willing to buy a PS3 at this price, so it will stay at this price until the market goes dry, then they reduce the price again.

A couple years ago now, the price of gasoline doubled. It wasn't sudden, but over the course of a couple months, it went from less than two dollars a gallon to about four dollars a gallon. No where in the world was there an interruption to the production of oil. I believe the price went up because of market speculation based on rumblings from the Middle East that never resolved into anything more disastrous than business as usual. The prices eventually went back down, although they ended up a little higher than when they started, naturally.

For other examples, look at the price of food, which doesn't even track with inflation, since marketers know that people notice increased food prices. In any world where prices reflect the costs, every price would track with inflation, since it's just as hard to produce something regardless of the value of the dollar.**

Another example of inflation craziness is wages. The American median wage has been going down for the past decade or so because of inflation. This includes the artificial wealth generated by the Bush administration, almost all of which went directly to the super rich.

Complete change of subject: Republicans want to eliminate the deficit, reduce taxes, and only make superficial cuts to federal programs while increasing our commitment in the Middle East with a military already stretched beyond its ability. The problem with Washington politics isn't partisanship, it's a complete separation from reality. I wonder if the Romans just became so secure in their self-evident superiority that they became completely divorced from the facts in the same way.

The Tea Party is right that we need a new political force in the United States, but they're almost exactly wrong on what that political force should be. We need a generation of realists willing to do hard work and make real sacrifices, and the Tea Party is even further from reality than our current government.

*A carbon tax is the best way to reduce emissions. It would be simple, raise money for the government, and allow people to continue savings with every reduction of carbon production. "Cap and Trade" is basically a joke, with caps set so high that even if they were strictly enforced, humanity will still be extinct in a century or two.
**Naturally, this isn't precisely true when you're dealing with two kinds of currency that change exchange rates, but that isn't really relevant.

Gun Rights

The Second Amendment of the US Constitution is the only part of our founding document that says why it exists. Sure, the beginning of the Constitution says that the government should "establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, and promote the general Welfare*", but it doesn't say which part of the Constitution provides for which part of this mission statement. Is the commerce clause there to "promote the general welfare"? That's how it's taken nowadays, but probably not originally.

This question of "The Founders' Intent"** is a persistent one. People see all sorts of intent throughout the Constitution, but it generally differs based on the person's preconceived notions of what's right and wrong. The Second Amendment is the only exception to this rule: "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", because "A well regulated Militia, [is] necessary to the security of a free State". Now, the Constitution Does Not say that the right to bear arms is limited to running a militia, so the extremists are closer to correct than the anti-gun folks. I say closer to correct because even the pro-gun extremists generally don't think a person should be able to own a battery of Howitzers, or helicopter gunships, or a private battleship patrolling the Erie Canal. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the Constitution doesn't just allow, it's what the Constitution demands.

The Constitution boldly says that a militia is necessary for freedom. This is an extreme position, there's no mistaking it. They don't mean some sort of Ren Fest organization with muskets or swords, they mean a modern fighting force. There's no point in having a militia that can't fight. Having a fighting military today means heavy weaponry on a scale that the founders could not have imagined. Three guys in a jeep have about as much firepower today as the largest gunships in 1776, if not more. If you concede that the United States is at least relatively free, or that it has been in the past 50 years, then you must conclude that the Second Amendment is factually wrong, since we haven't had a militia in the 1776 sense for at least that time. An intellectually honest people would take the honest approach and have a Constitutional Convention. We'd hash it out in the public forum, and we'd probably make a mess of it, but it probably wouldn't be any worse than it is now. Instead, we're sealed in some bizarre time paradox, where 1700's military thought governs 2010's social thought.

When Thomas Jefferson said things like "The dead shouldn't govern the living", and "there should be a revolution every 20 years", this is exactly what he was afraid of: An increasingly obsolete set of laws inflexibly enforced in a completely different world. I'm not saying we should reinterpret the Second Amendment out of existence, I'm saying we should make laws to suit the world we live in through amending the Second Amendment.

It's what The Founders wanted, after all.

*The fact that the word "Welfare" is in the constitution is why FDR and his policies used the word. Republican's ability to turn the purpose of our government into a dirty word shows that there is no such thing as a liberal media.

** I've always found "The Founders" to be an irritating phrase. It's fine to refer to "The Founders" as a group of people that fought over the creation of the country, but that's it. It is never appropriate to say that "The Founders believed X". Any room that has Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson would have trouble reaching consensus on a resolution on anything. Anyone who wears the cloak of "The Founders' Intent" to mask their actions is a cad.