This is an open ended brain storm on what type of constitutional amendment our states should ratify to limit the authority of our congress. These are my suggestions. Please feel free to add to or criticize this entry.
1. Repeal the amendment making senators popularly elected. This is not a feasible accountability system since the public forgets votes the senators made 6 years prior to their reelection. It would be redundant to have two popularly elected bodies with short terms. Therefore I propose that we return appointment of federal senator appointments to the accountability of state legislatures, but make their terms 2 years. Making state legislatures certify a senator every 2 years will give the voters a reason to take a greater interest in who they put in their local state houses.
2. Eliminate lame duck congress sessions or severely limit them to major emergencies. create a consitutional deadline for a budget. Limit the budget to a portion of gdp. Move election day to coincide with tax day. This would greatly increase accountability to the voters. Allowing them to operate under the cover of winter holidays and the opposite end of the year that taxes are due is a bad accountability system.
3. Create a formal limit on earmarks, the number of pages the bill, the number of days allowed to read it, making it available to the public, and make a formal limit on the scope of the bill (no more omnibus bills).
4. Create a new judicial body. Charlie Rangel was recently censured after aggrevious tax fraud. He is one of the few congressmen to be censured by the congressional judicial body since the 20th century. Censure is just a verbal rebuke of that members behavior. He should have been immediately expelled but instead his trial dragged on for more than a year with a lame result. It is clear that congress cannot police itself. We need a new accountable version of checks and balances for congress. The ideal judicial body would be one comprised of representatives of the voters. It can't consist of the representatives themselves and it is impractical to elect a body to exist only for the purpose of punishing congressmen. With nothing else to do, a congressional punishment body could become overly restrictive on congress. I propose that each state's attorney general be automatically integrated into a federal accountability board. One potential problem I see with this is that not every state's attorney general is popularly elected. Some are appointed by governors. This body would then have to appoint some sort of committee that decides which cases to review.
5. Congress shouldn't be getting rich off the tax payers back. I understand the intent of paying congressmen well to limit the influence of bribes, but obviously making $100,000+ a year with other benefits didn't prevent the Louisiana rep from keeping cold hard bribery cash in his freezer. I like Glenn Beck's suggestion that congress should be tied to military pay. Perhaps the aforementioned judicial board could be in charge of setting the pay rate as well as approve gerrymandering maps.
6. I would also like congressmen to spend some time in the private sector. Perhaps some bureaucrats working for the judicial board (paid for by a state contributed fund) could keep track of years of public and private service. We could set a minimum of 10-20 years in the private sector in combination with a limit on years of combined public service (also 10-20 years). We should count lawyers as public service per one of my earlier posts. The intent behind this is to get representatives that are truely representative of their communities.
7. RECALL. Give the people the ability to recall unfit congressmen and senators. This is the ultimate remedy to bad behavior.
*8. Bonus Accountability: The Fourth Estate. The Media needs a check and balance too. Find out why they ingratiate themselves to the government and limit it. My suspicion is that they share dinners with politicians. Hobnobbing between the media and the government should be illegal. Gifts should also be outlawed. I suspect that easy interviewers attract politicians, so there should be transparency built into the booking process to prevent politicians from being able to hand pick softball interviews from Larry King.
I would like the media to be term limited as well. Maybe it would be more difficult for them to find Tom Brokaws and Sam Donaldsons, and Ted Koppels if they were term limited to 4 years. why not term limit the media? The free press is a legitimate part of healthy government. It should be subject to checks and balances. I'm not talking about setting a standard for regulating free speech. Im talking about breaking down the government/media complex. I wish the media was accountable to the free market but it is clear after decades of losing market share to talk radio, fox news, and the internet, they refuse to change. They aren't responding to the free market, which means they are no longer free market entities. Therefore term limit anchormen to 4 years. That includes Hannity and O'Reilly. Strictly enforce equal opportunity hiring by making the hiring of an anchorman a fully transparent job. I would even consider holding elections for anchorman positions. I don't know enough about editors to know how to accomplish this, but they too need to be held accountable. perhaps their party affiliation and donations should be published on the front page of their papers much in the same way that cigarette labels are prominently displayed on packaging. columnists should also be forced to put their affiliation at the top of their columns for full disclosure. of course the unintended consequence of this is people registering with 3rd parties. Maybe the law should make the election records of journalists public record for their entire lifetime.
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