Rumors of the death of the United States may be greatly exaggerated, but the advanced stage of the illness is real.
And the underlying cause is systemic, not merely incidental to this or that law or policy. The manner by which our laws and policies are enacted, interpreted and implemented is broken and corrupt, and our elected representatives are alternately incompetent and impotent, our unelected overlords unaccountable.
This is not news, of course. For a long time Congress has voted on bills that its members have not read, while Departments of Education and Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and others make rules that raise our taxes and threaten us with jail without due constitutional legislative process, and without We the People having the power to elect or recall the rule makers. Activist judges have long ignored the plain language of the Constitution to come up with such disastrous decisions as Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1856 that bolstered slavery and contributed to that little hiccup we call the Civil War; Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 that promoted racial segregation and Jim Crow laws, giving respectability to grown men wearing bed sheets; Korematsu v. United States 1944 that approved President Roosevelt's internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; Roe v. Wade 1973 which short-circuited the democratic process regarding abortion and ensured maximum acrimony and division over the issue; and NFIB v. Sibelius 2012, in which a penalty for failing to engage in a specific type of commerce, which was specifically deemed NOT to be a tax by its authors and promoters, was found – miraculously! – to be a tax after all and therefore permissible under the Constitution.
Therefore, to fix what ails our civic institutions, I hereby propose the following bold new amendments to the U.S. Constitution, to be ratified and implemented posthaste:
Amendment 28: No member of Congress shall be permitted to vote for any bill for which he or she is unable to pass a factual examination as to said bill’s contents.
Amendment 29: Congress shall pass no law except when at least 50 percent of the members are qualified to vote for it per the terms of Amendment 28.
Amendment 30: Congress shall make no law whose length of text exceeds that of the US Constitution.
Amendment 31: [1] The Supreme Court of the United States shall not have the power of Judicial Review, and shall not strike down laws duly passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President. Instead, the power of Judicial Review shall be vested solely in the legislatures of the states. Federal laws deemed unconstitutional by a simple majority vote of 60 percent of the state legislatures shall be null and void. The Supreme Court may issue non-binding recommendations and scholarly advice as it judges fit.
[2] The words of the Constitution are to be understood to mean exactly what they say. The intentions of the Framers are to be found in the Federalist Papers of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. The intentions of the authors of the various amendments are to be found in original documents contemporary with the enactment of said amendments.
[3] Supreme court justices may be impeached by a 60 percent majority vote of both houses of Congress, or by a majority vote of 60 percent of the legislatures of the states.
Amendment 32: The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution is hereby repealed. In restoration of the Framer’s orginal design, Senators from the various states shall be chosen by their respective state’s legislatures, not by popular vote.
Amendment 33: Secretaries of Cabinet-level administrative departments may be impeached by a simple majority vote of both houses of Congress, or by a simple majority vote of the legislatures of the states.
And, finally:
Amendment 34: No person shall be found qualified to serve in either house of Congress, nor as a member of the federal judiciary including the Supreme Court, nor in a senior cabinet-level administrative position, nor as President or Vice President of the United States, who is unable to pass a factual examination on the contents of the book ‘Basic Economics’ by Thomas Sowell. [States are encouraged to follow suit for their own constitutions.]
Now we just need two thirds of the Congress and three fourths of the state legislatures to agree. Piece of cake.
See How Congress Puts Itself Above the Law:
The only way to finally end the sorry tradition of congressional exemptions is with a 28th Amendment.
at The Wall Street Journal