Quickly refactoring the U.S. Constitution

lc30 Oct 2022 7:17 UTC
7 points
25 comments4 min readLW link

Presented mostly without comment, but see the footnotes. The game is that it can’t look out of place on Earth, so no futarchy. Bugfixes encouraged.

Legislative Branch

  1. There is only one house of legislators, named The Senate, and it contains 100 senators.[1]

    • With a 50⁄100 senator majority, The Senate can repeal laws.

    • With a 55⁄100 senator majority, The Senate can pass or amend a new law, which will be enacted by the chief executive.[2]

  2. Senators are voted in for eight year terms and cannot be re-elected.[3]

  3. Senatorial elections are timed so that results are announced a month before the end of the calendar year. [4]

    • After election announcements, previously elected senators immediately abdicate their roles and take a ranked snap-vote for their “trainee”, whom they will help transition and counsel into their new roles.[5] Incumbent senators will have the opportunity to learn about their new job and get national security briefings for about a month, and after the dawn of the new year senate elections will start.[6]

  4. Senators are not voted in directly. Instead, during Voting Season, 160,000 “jurors” are lotted from the American populace. These jurors in turn do ranked voting to elect 4,000 “delegates”, and those delegates do ranked voting to decide the 100 senators. [7]

    • All jurors and delegates vote for all positions at the same time[8]. Ranked voting systems determine the 4,000 and 100 that win, respectively.

    • Jurors and delegates must vote for at least 100 delegates and 20 senatorial candidates, respectively. There is no maximum.[9]

    • Jurors and delegates have two weeks and one month to vote for candidates, respectively.

      • Jurors cannot vote for themselves. They can however be voted into delegateship by other voters.

      • Delegates are sequestered from each other and direct contact from the public while they do research, and their communications during the month are monitored.

      • Delegates cannot vote for themselves. They can however be voted into senatorship by the remaining delegates.

    • Jurors and delegates can abstain, but must do so explicitly at the beginning of the process. If they don’t abstain, they get grants pegged to national income from the government to cover living expenses and research while they take time off from work. The grants for delegates are 5x larger than the grants for jurors.[10]

    • Direct campaigning for senate or delegacy races is illegal.[11]

      • In particular, directly lobbying individual jurors or delegates for votes is illegal ALA “lobbying” jurors in the criminal justice system.

  5. Senators must wear body cameras and be accompanied by a cleared FBI agent whenever they are outside their homes. The footage from body cameras gets encrypted locally and sent to an offsite location where it can be reviewed with a warrant by federal police during criminal investigations.

  6. Senators cannot be older than 50 at the time of appointment.

Executive Branch

  1. There are no “general presidential elections”. The chief executive, which enforces the laws The Senate writes, is elected by The Senate for four year terms; one month and four and a half years after the senators are elected, respectively.[12]

  2. There is no term limit for the chief executive.[13]

  3. At any time, The Senate decide can recall the chief executive and start a process to elect a new one, to serve the executive’s remaining term, with a 60⁄100 vote. However:

    • The chief executive can appoint and dismiss whoever they want into cabinet positions without senate confirmation.

    • The chief executive retains their veto, which cannot be overridden by The Senate.[14]

  4. The chief executive no longer has a pardoning power.[15]

    • Instead, there is another general election for the Councilor of Mercy. The Councilor of Mercy is elected by 1600 jurors and 40 delegates, in the same manner as The Senate. The Councilor of Mercy can vacate up to 1,000 federal convictions a year—this is their only government job.

  5. The body camera provision for senators applies to the chief executive and their cabinet secretaries.

  6. The chief executive cannot be older than 55 at time of appointment.

  7. There is no vice president.[16]

Judicial Branch

  1. The Supreme Court is split into two bodies: legislative court and constitutional court.

  2. The legislative court system functions much like our current court system, except it does not rule on disputes of constitutional law or grant authority for warrants and wiretaps under the fourth amendment.

    • Supreme legislative court has nine members.

    • Supreme legislative court members are elected by the senate via ranked vote for 8 year terms (synced with the chief executive appointment). They have no term limit.[17]

    • Supreme legislative court members cannot be older than 50 at time of appointment.

  3. The constitutional court system does rule on disputes of constitutional law, and grant authority for warrants and wiretaps, and can strike down laws from The Senate or actions by security services & the chief executive as unconstitutional.

    • The initial set of nine constitutional court members are selected by the people responsible for organizing the reform or overthrow of the current United States and installing and formalizing these constitutional revisions.

    • Supreme constitutional court positions are lifetime appointments and can normally only be vacated when that justice hits the age limit, voluntarily resigns, or dies.

    • When a member of the supreme constitutional court vacates their position, the remaining constitutional court members do a ranked vote to decide their replacement.[18]

    • Members of supreme constitutional court must retire at age 50.

Amendment Process

  1. With the approval of 67⁄100 senators and 33⁄50 state governors, The Senate can pass a constitutional amendment and/​or begin a replacement vote for members of the supreme constitutional court.

Bill of Rights

  1. These are actually pretty good.

  2. The infamously and hilariously specific no-quartering-soldiers amendment is removed.[19]

  3. The fourth amendment is extended explicitly to cover electronic communications and financial transactions between American citizens.

  4. A new amendment is introduced guaranteeing the government provide its citizens and banks with access to physical currency.

  5. A new amendment is introduced banning the practice of seizing an American citizen’s property or freezing an individual’s assets except as an explicitly-enumerated-in-law penalty of a criminal conviction.

  6. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is incorporated into the constitution as an amendment.

  1. ^

    If we want smaller states to have a larger say, we give members of smaller states an explicit vote multiplier, instead of having an entire separate house of legislators ballooning the amount of time it takes for us to pass laws.

  2. ^

    My libertarian bias is showing, but passing laws is like writing additional lines of code in that it has a hard-to-see complexity penalty. We would probably be better off overall if passed laws were more unanimous and it was easier to get rid of “legal code” than it was to pass a new law.

  3. ^

    Re-elections necessarily mean senators will do political maneuvering instead of voting their conscience. That’s probably bad. Shorter terms than 8 years means the United States can’t have a consistent foreign or domestic policy for very long, and that stability and consistency of governance is important.

  4. ^

    The timing here is important. All elections happens around the same time. This helps keep government policy consistent for a long stretch.

  5. ^

    Just like college!

  6. ^

    Consequentially, there will be no “senate-elects”. The senator in power will always be the one who was most recently elected.

  7. ^

    For the same reason we appoint jurors to sit on juries, we should appoint jurors to vote for politicians. And just as how we elect legislators to vote on and pass laws instead of doing direct democracy, we can probably afford for national elections to do one layer of indirection, in which (hopefully) jurors will focus on selecting delegates with a shared ideology and more expertise or intelligence to vote for the actual political positions.

    Also, this method of voting means legislators are not associated with, or voted in by, specific “districts” or states. There are no “electoral districts” to be gerrymandered. All voters vote for all of the positions at the same time by ranking their preferred delegates and senatorial candidates and then (at the end) letting Single Transferable Vote or some other system rank the top 100 candidates.

  8. ^

    In particular, there are no “electoral districts”. Each senator is just a bog standard federal legislator tied to no specific geographical area. If jurors and delegates find it important to elect delegates and senators from their own state, they can do that; otherwise they can just vote for whomever they want.

  9. ^

    First, as a soft means of preventing everybody from voting for the same people, since there are a high number of open candidates at each stage. Second, to make campaigning more difficult and to get people to actually list a number of miscellaneous candidates they actually like instead of a few party chairmen.

    This laborious provision is also why voters get mandatory time off, like on a jury.

  10. ^

    To cover the increased annoyance of being a delegate.

  11. ^

    This is one of those awful requires-a-judge rules, but it’s better than nothing.

  12. ^

    >200 years of history since the constitutional convention have shown that the vast majority of risk of internal democratic backsliding comes from the chief executive and their military, not the legislature. The chief executive is the person who directly commands the guys with guns. The legislature, being made up of many different people with different ideologies, not only finds it very difficult to organize coups, but also has little to gain in the first place from consolidating government in the hands of autocrats. The first thing any dictator or oligarchy does after seizing control of the police and military is abolish the legislature and say “I/​we make the laws now”, because obviously, a dictator doesn’t need a legislature! I completely reject the argument that making people who write laws also govern their provision “centralizes power in the legislature” in a somehow more dangerous way than having there be this third guy, also elected by the public, who not only controls the police but also can’t be removed by the legislature without a ridiculous amount of consensus in a crisis. This is blockchain governance tier security theater.

    More effective at restraining government power than patting yourself on the back with with this separation of government bullshit:

    - Requiring a supermajority to pass laws.
    - Requiring a very large supermajority to pass constitutional amendments.
    - Having strong civil liberties in your constitution.
    - (Optional) Requiring an even larger supermajority to pass constitutional amendments that remove civil liberties.
    - Having an independent not-appointed-by-congress judiciary which enforces those civil liberties and bills of rights.

    Which is what we do here instead of that other thing that only works in people’s minds.

    Another (probably more pressing) problem with having a separate general election for the chief executive, is that, as it happens, you will occasionally see a person from one political faction or party in charge of the enforcement of laws, and legislature dominated by a completely different political faction. The result tends to be significantly worse on average than having a consistent, united coalition. To solve this, have the legislature, which already authors the law anyways, appoint the person who enforces the laws they write.

  13. ^

    My intuitive sense is that having the president be a little more accountable to the group responsible for writing the law in the first place is fine. Open to objections.

  14. ^

    If the senate wants to pass a law the Chief Enforcer of Laws doesn’t like, they can recall the Chief Enforcer of Laws and then appoint a new one. Don’t force someone who doesn’t want the law to exist to take the job of enforcing it! That’s madness!

  15. ^

    The problem with giving the chief executive the ability to pardon arbitrary people is twofold. First, they are The Most Important Person In Government, and you might like the option to prosecute them (or people close to them, whom you might want to flip as witnesses) for crimes. Second, as it stands now, the Chief Executive is appointed by the legislature, and is in charge of enforcing the law, so is kind of in a weird conflicting position to decide which people need to be set free by the justice system. Instead...

  16. ^

    Useless.

  17. ^

    Court rulings and legal interpretations should mostly by be stable over time by default. The Senate can always just pass a new law.

  18. ^

    Constitutional law judiciaries should be adjudicated by the people that wrote it, and their interpretations of it should remain the same over time, except when congress decides to amend. If legislature and executive branches should have input on who is seated on the supreme court, that means they can just change the law by appointing partisan members.

  19. ^

    There’s some more general amendment here against wartime abuses that I want to make that would maybe cover things like the Japanese internment camps, but I don’t know what that amendment would be.

  20. ^

    For the same reason that the chief executive (of the law) is appointed by The Senate, the body of lawyers designated to interpret The Senate’s laws should also be appointed by The Senate.

lc30 Oct 2022 7:17 UTC
7 points
25 comments4 min readLW link