US Constitutional Amendments I'd propose

[Metahive]

It also doesn't quite gel with the First Past the Post system which automatically silences the minority in favor of the majority. The US electoral system is in dire need of an overhaul.

[Lord Insanity]

Just so we are on the same page here, the purpose of the Electoral College is a check against the tyranny of the majority. It is supposed to give minority view points greater power.

But that is not a fair outcome. It values some votes over others. That is the problem he is trying to correct. You can't claim that the system is fair if one vote is favored more than the other.

You're still not catching it. The current Electoral College system doesn't value one vote over another. It increases every vote's value. By doing so it makes it possible that the minority candidate can win as opposed to being completly pointless. That is how the minorities' power is increased, by giving them a chance or at least requiring the candidates to acknowledge their concerns. Every canidate potentially benefits from the effect of increased voter power.

Running for President in the U.S. is not a single national election where the person with the most votes wins. It is 51 (including D.C.) separate elections that require a candidate to win multiple times across many states. Just like the previously quoted Baseball World Series analogy the person with the most "runs" (votes) doesn't necessarily win. The person that wins the most "games" (states) wins. It is fair because both "teams" (candidates) are playing by the same rules.

Remember the previously linked article flat out states physicist Alan Natapoff proved a mathematical theorem that shows individual voters have more voting power under the Electoral College. The system is not perfect by any means. In this article from MIT, Natapoff even suggests minor changes to make it better.

Natapoff's suggested tweak: keep the state-based determination of electoral votes, but change the way they're apportioned. Give the winner in each state the total number of popular votes actually cast in the state that day, plus one-quarter of the number of votes cast in the average state, to replace the two senatorial electoral votes per state awarded under our present system.

In Natapoff's proposed system, a voter also could choose to cast a blank ballot, which would not be counted for the winner. "This would let the supporters of the underdog punish a leading candidate who is hostile to them," he said.

The Electoral College is however already better than not having it at all.

[Simon_Jester]

If I might try to restate the basic idea here, what's going on here is that in any one election, it is very easy to make calculations like "if I bash gays, the 2% of the electorate who are gay will not vote for me, but the 5% of the electorate who are single-issue "family values" voters will flock to my banner," and decide to bash gays. Or for a sitting politician to just completely fail to address the economic and social concerns of minority voters, knowing that the majority will be more likely to vote for a politician who doesn't upset the status quo.

But in a district-by-district system, minorities tend to concentrate in certain districts and become relatively more important. This encourages politicians to make a career out of representing, say, "urban blacks" or "rural small farmers and businessmen" or the like, rather than everyone converging on the most common denominator.

[ZOmegaZ]

I'm not sure how someone could be that good at hiding assets. I mean, wouldn't they have to be homeless? Either way, that's an odd argument. "You're not poor, you've just hidden your assets so well I can't even tell if they exist. To jail with you!" I mean, how would you even prove that in court?

The same way they nailed Al Capone for tax evasion. If anything it would be easier today thanks to the proliferation of social media.

I would think there's a big difference between hiding income and hiding assets...

[ZOmegaZ]

I'm more interested in clarification. Right now, we have a very vague "right to bear arms". The details of that right have actually been defined by courts, which are unaccountable to the people and can change their minds at any time. That's a bad way of doing business. My proposals have terms that, yes, still have to be defined, but they're much more specific than what we have now, and yet still general enough to function over the indefinite future.

Gun control right now is this absurd debate, and I want to narrow the field of it. Trivial weapons can't be outlawed. Weapons of mass destruction should be outlawed. Weapons in between are subject to limited regulation. Guns, lasers, grenades, nukes, mustard gas, move the lines as appropriate for your time and context.

That is exactly what we do today. The reason it's a major political issue in America is because of a political deadlock between two factions.*

One faction sees the right to possess weapons as an essential mark of citizenship, thinking that if I cannot be trusted with a weapon, I am not truly 'free.'

The other faction is at best vaguely hostile towards the idea of an armed citizenry, feels safer with an unarmed citizenry, and is indifferent to the gun owners' protests of inconvenience, expense, or fear of confiscation associated with tighter gun controls.

Your amendments make you the enemy of the first faction, and will do nothing to abate the behavior of the second faction, therefore they are useless.

The fact that it's exactly what we do today is why I wanted to codify it. Again, there's a huge stretch between the wording of the Constitution and the actual function of it, and that's not a good place for society to live. As for actually getting amendments passed, that's less my concern at this moment. I'm more interested in the hypothetical "if we could pass any amendments, what should they be?"

And I'd say it is a government abuse of power. Right now in Tennessee, the majority party in the general assembly gets first billing on the ballot. The people in power are giving themselves an electoral advantage.

So mandate that ballot order be done in a nonpartisan way, without prejudice to which of many nonpartisan methods is used.

Why not just randomize it, then? That's about as non-partisan as you get.

By the way, you never addressed the person who pointed out that individual voters' influence is increased in a district-by-district election, compared to an election that samples a huge pool of 100 million people and treats them all identically.

You can't increase everyone's influence (within a single election). That's mathematically meaningless. There's a finite amount of "weight" to be distributed among a finite number of voters. The only thing that matters is relative weight, and district-by-district election makes some votes worth more than others. This is fine if you're trying to reach a political compromise to hold elections between entities with disparate population levels, and it's the only way to make the deal. But it's clearly a deviation from optimal democratic practice, wherein all voters are weighted equally.

Of course, we can resolve this by, say, creating a separate panel of senior jurists whose job is specifically to rule on questions of law: "Is it constitutional for us to do this, given that we haven't done it yet?" And to create some incentive for the legislature to consult these jurists on topics that raise constitutional questions.

But I'm not in favor of resolving it by extending the standard constitutionality-challenge format, because the entire point of challenging constitutionality in that format is that some specific person has suffered a tangible harm and is seeking redress.

If we want rulings on the constitutionality of the law itself, we must set up a court system designed to do that.

I'm good with that. Something like the Constitutional Council of France.

For example, nobody has standing to challenge laws violating the 27th amendment.

What legal support do you have for this statement?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-se ... djustments
A congressperson has been ruled to not have standing. It's also been ruled that an individual taxpayer doesn't have standing to sue over unconstitutional use of tax money. So who else is there?

As for the crackpots and repeated challenges, allowing fees to challenge laws should handle that.

One might hope so, but from the sound of it the fees won't be large enough to deter a determined set of cranks. If one thousand birthers ALL want to challenge the constitutionality of having a secret Muslim as president of the United States or whatever, how do we keep that from becoming a burden on the federal courts?

How large would you think the fees would need to be to act as a reasonable deterrent to crank cases?

If your goal is to ban mass wiretapping alone, you should rewrite the amendment as something like:

31-prime) The right of individuals to be secure in their effects against unreasonable search and seizure, shall extend to items and information held for that individual by a third party, to communication by that individual with whatever party, and to information that such communication took place. The federal government shall not authorize or perform any indiscriminate search of such information or communications, without a warrant issued by an open court, as described under the Fourth Amendment.

That makes it more explicit what you're talking about, and helps nail down the conditions under which the federal government is or is not allowed to engage in surveillance.

I like it. Thanks!

Here's the core of the problem: citizens actually don't have a right to hide things from the court system, when the court has requested them as evidence in a case, or the object of a search warrant. I would argue that they shouldn't have that right, either.

The accused's protection from self-incrimination is limited. They cannot be compelled to testify under penalty of perjury that they committed the crime, but they can in fact be compelled to offer up evidence relevant to the case, such as their financial records, such as physical items they are alleged to have used in commission of a crime, and so on.

If you remove this principle, then there are huge categories of crime that become almost impossible to investigate, because all the accused has to do is shout "I don't wanna!" and refuse to let the police enter his home, and no one can determine whether or not he's holding a kidnapped twelve-year-old on the premises or whatever.

I think we may be talking about two different things. All I'm concerned with is that the courts can't force a person to testify against themselves, which as far as I can tell is functionally equivalent to supplying any evidence against themselves. That doesn't mean the police need your permission to enter your house, search your records, or whatever.

[ZOmegaZ]

No retroactive copyright extensions:
37) Copyrights exist for a fixed term, defined at issuance of that copyright. In no case shall a copyright term be retroactively lengthened.

Sane copyright violation penalties:
38) Statutory penalties for copyright infringement, where the party convicted of infringing did not profit, shall in no case exceed ten times the market value of the item infringed, as determined by a court of law.

Orphan work licensing:
39) In the event a copyright-holder can not be identified or located, a court shall set appropriate license fees, applicable for a fixed time. Should the rights-holder become known before that time, they shall receive all fees paid, and have all standard rights to re-negotiate the license at the end of the fixed term. If the rights-holder does not become known before the end of the license period, the work shall enter public domain.

No incarceration for drug possession:
40) Simple possession of controlled substances shall in no case be punished by incarceration, nor considered in determining the length of incarceration for other related crimes, unless such incarceration is primarily for the purpose of treatment. This applies retroactively to all persons presently so imprisoned.

Elimination of mandatory minimum sentences. Note I'm not sure I think this is a fantastic idea; I'm reasonably convinced that mandatory minimum sentences are terrible, but that may be an implementation problem more than a conceptual problem. I'm definitely open to a better approach.
41) Courts shall have full discretion over the sentencing of convicted criminals. All mandatory sentencing laws are void. Presently incarcerated convicts shall have the right to have the length of their sentences appealed if those sentences were set by mandatory minimum laws.

Eliminate plea bargaining:
42) The state shall not offer persons accused of a crime any inducement to plead guilty, including the option of pleading to a lesser charge.


Eliminate private prisons:
43) The operation of prisons shall not be outsourced to any non-governmental agency.

[Simon_Jester]

The fact that it's exactly what we do today is why I wanted to codify it. Again, there's a huge stretch between the wording of the Constitution and the actual function of it, and that's not a good place for society to live. As for actually getting amendments passed, that's less my concern at this moment. I'm more interested in the hypothetical "if we could pass any amendments, what should they be?"

My complaints are twofold.

One is that the amendments we advocate are ones we seriously expect should help and be viable in the current political environment, more or less. We should not advocate amendments we know to be unrealistic; it's a waste of time and encourages us to engage in foolishness.

The other is that I don't think we should mandate the exact state of current law as the permanent state of our constitution forever. That practically forces us to make further amendments down the road when current customs seem silly or even evil to our grandchildren. It also means that there is no room for compromise or legislative policy changes in the existing law. That's fine for a subject like slavery where the only rule we'll ever need is "don't do it." But it's a bad choice for a subject like, oh, taxes, where we routinely have to change what the tax levels are and how they are levied.

I submit that gun control is more like taxes (where changes are needed often) than like slavery (where we've made up our mind and never need to change).

Why not just randomize it, then? That's about as non-partisan as you get.

Because randomizing the ballots makes them harder to read accurately and makes it more likely that the voter will make a mistake.

By the way, you never addressed the person who pointed out that individual voters' influence is increased in a district-by-district election, compared to an election that samples a huge pool of 100 million people and treats them all identically.

You can't increase everyone's influence (within a single election). That's mathematically meaningless. There's a finite amount of "weight" to be distributed among a finite number of voters.

That is not true.

What determines my "weight" in an election is not some constant multiplier attached to my vote. It is a question of how strong a correlation there is between my wishes and the outcome of the election.

Suppose I am on a parole board with two other men. One man always votes to grant parole, one man never votes to grant parole, and I sometimes vote yes and sometimes vote no.

For all practical purposes, I am the only one whose choice can alter the outcome. The other two men's votes cancel each other out.

Even if we award each of them fifty votes and give me only one vote, I am still the only one with any impact on the outcome... even though theoretically my vote has almost no impact whatsoever because the other votes are weighted as fifty times more important than mine.
___________________________

So what it comes down to is that the only highly-weighted votes are the indispensable votes, the ones that cannot be easily replaced by some other vote. If a politician can easily trade one gay vote for one homophobe vote or vice versa, there is little incentive for them to listen to either homophobes or gays.

Whereas if the same politician risks losing half a dozen gay votes to win one homophobe vote, those gay voters are indispensable- and therefore have actual impact on the outcome of the election.

A district-based system at least makes it possible for minority groups to gain enough impact in a few districts to have some influence in Congress and the White House. A nationwide system does not.

The only thing that matters is relative weight, and district-by-district election makes some votes worth more than others. This is fine if you're trying to reach a political compromise to hold elections between entities with disparate population levels, and it's the only way to make the deal. But it's clearly a deviation from optimal democratic practice, wherein all voters are weighted equally.

Why do you assume that this is optimal? Have you done a rigorous study on what voting practices are best calculated to give everyone a meaningful chance of affecting the outcome of an election? Are you familiar with the work of those who have done so?

Or are you just basing this on vague ideology and repetition of things drummed into you during high school social studies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-se ... djustments
A congressperson has been ruled to not have standing. It's also been ruled that an individual taxpayer doesn't have standing to sue over unconstitutional use of tax money. So who else is there?

I see. Part of my question then is, why does there need to be someone with standing to sue? This is a matter of state policy, no one is harmed directly or in any large way.

As for the crackpots and repeated challenges, allowing fees to challenge laws should handle that.

One might hope so, but from the sound of it the fees won't be large enough to deter a determined set of cranks. If one thousand birthers ALL want to challenge the constitutionality of having a secret Muslim as president of the United States or whatever, how do we keep that from becoming a burden on the federal courts?

How large would you think the fees would need to be to act as a reasonable deterrent to crank cases?

Unfortunately, large enough to make the system completely inaccessible to the poor and needy, which partly defeats the purpose of having it in the first place. This is why courts should be allowed discretion as to whether to hear constitutionality cases, and at the very least the right to throw such cases out on summary judgment. And penalties for frivolous constitutionality suits would almost have to apply.

I think we may be talking about two different things. All I'm concerned with is that the courts can't force a person to testify against themselves, which as far as I can tell is functionally equivalent to supplying any evidence against themselves. That doesn't mean the police need your permission to enter your house, search your records, or whatever.

No, "testify" does not mean "supply evidence." It means specifically to make statements, either during an investigation, on a witness stand. You have a right to not make statements that might result in your being prosecuted for a crime, or convicted of a crime.

You do not, however, have a right to keep the police off your land or out of your personal effects, if they have a valid warrant to go to those places or retrieve those items. And you do not have a right to render items unusable to keep them out of the court's hands- that is known as "destroying the evidence," and it's no more legal to do it with documents than it is to flush the drug stash down the toilet.

Even aside from that, here's the problem.

If the police have a right to search your home under a warrant, they have a right to ask you to open the door- that is a necessary concomitant. Sure, they also have a right to use a battering ram on your door if you say "no." But that requires extra time and effort. Unlike with actual spoken testimony, the state can still get at the evidence, and your noncompliance serves no purpose but to waste the court's resources.

A similar argument obtains with encryption- forcing the court to decrypt the evidence merely consumes state resources to no benefit.

No retroactive copyright extensions:
37) Copyrights exist for a fixed term, defined at issuance of that copyright. In no case shall a copyright term be retroactively lengthened.

Acceptable.

Sane copyright violation penalties:
38) Statutory penalties for copyright infringement, where the party convicted of infringing did not profit, shall in no case exceed ten times the market value of the item infringed, as determined by a court of law.

What do we do in a case where making one unauthorized copy makes it possible to create an infinite number of copies? If I put up a 99-cent song on a torrent site where it is downloaded ten thousand times, am I liable for ten times 99 cents, or ten times 9900 dollars?

Orphan work licensing:
39) In the event a copyright-holder can not be identified or located, a court shall set appropriate license fees, applicable for a fixed time. Should the rights-holder become known before that time, they shall receive all fees paid, and have all standard rights to re-negotiate the license at the end of the fixed term. If the rights-holder does not become known before the end of the license period, the work shall enter public domain.

Note that under this definition "orphan works" are not the same as "abandonware." Which is good.

No incarceration for drug possession:
40) Simple possession of controlled substances shall in no case be punished by incarceration, nor considered in determining the length of incarceration for other related crimes, unless such incarceration is primarily for the purpose of treatment. This applies retroactively to all persons presently so imprisoned.

Does this apply to someone who possesses ten tons of the stuff? Does it apply to extremely powerful drugs as well as to mundane ones? Does it apply to explosives? Disease germs? "Controlled substance" is rather vague.

Elimination of mandatory minimum sentences. Note I'm not sure I think this is a fantastic idea; I'm reasonably convinced that mandatory minimum sentences are terrible, but that may be an implementation problem more than a conceptual problem. I'm definitely open to a better approach.
41) Courts shall have full discretion over the sentencing of convicted criminals. All mandatory sentencing laws are void. Presently incarcerated convicts shall have the right to have the length of their sentences appealed if those sentences were set by mandatory minimum laws.

"All mandatory sentencing laws are void" also extends to mandatory maximums. Oops.

Watch your wording.

Eliminate plea bargaining:
42) The state shall not offer persons accused of a crime any inducement to plead guilty, including the option of pleading to a lesser charge.

Bad idea. Plea bargaining is routinely used on people who are actually guilty and is one of the few things keeping the court system from totally drowning. We need drastically more judges and court employees to handle the extra workload you're dropping on people, as modern cases keep getting more complicated and the population continues to grow.

The problem you have here is that people are being encouraged to plead guilty to lesser offenses because defending their innocence in open court is too hard. Address that problem, don't just blow up the plea bargain altogether.

Eliminate private prisons:
43) The operation of prisons shall not be outsourced to any non-governmental agency.[/quote]

[ZOmegaZ]

I'll respond to your entire post, but while I only have a second, did you mean to respond to that last point?

[Simon_Jester]

Actually, no, I have no problem with #43.

[Beowulf]

I think we may be talking about two different things. All I'm concerned with is that the courts can't force a person to testify against themselves, which as far as I can tell is functionally equivalent to supplying any evidence against themselves. That doesn't mean the police need your permission to enter your house, search your records, or whatever.

No, "testify" does not mean "supply evidence." It means specifically to make statements, either during an investigation, on a witness stand. You have a right to not make statements that might result in your being prosecuted for a crime, or convicted of a crime.

You do not, however, have a right to keep the police off your land or out of your personal effects, if they have a valid warrant to go to those places or retrieve those items. And you do not have a right to render items unusable to keep them out of the court's hands- that is known as "destroying the evidence," and it's no more legal to do it with documents than it is to flush the drug stash down the toilet.

Even aside from that, here's the problem.

If the police have a right to search your home under a warrant, they have a right to ask you to open the door- that is a necessary concomitant. Sure, they also have a right to use a battering ram on your door if you say "no." But that requires extra time and effort. Unlike with actual spoken testimony, the state can still get at the evidence, and your noncompliance serves no purpose but to waste the court's resources.

A similar argument obtains with encryption- forcing the court to decrypt the evidence merely consumes state resources to no benefit.

Forcing someone to decrypt documents authenticates that they had control over the contents of the document, just as forcing someone to open a safe does. Now, the contents of the safe may in themselves authenticate that the were owned by who the state says, but not necessarily. So by forcing a person to decrypt, you're forcing them to testify that they control the encrypted items.

Sane copyright violation penalties:
38) Statutory penalties for copyright infringement, where the party convicted of infringing did not profit, shall in no case exceed ten times the market value of the item infringed, as determined by a court of law.

What do we do in a case where making one unauthorized copy makes it possible to create an infinite number of copies? If I put up a 99-cent song on a torrent site where it is downloaded ten thousand times, am I liable for ten times 99 cents, or ten times 9900 dollars?

Ten times 99 cents. This shouldn't be a matter of amendment, but rather of law, however.

No incarceration for drug possession:
40) Simple possession of controlled substances shall in no case be punished by incarceration, nor considered in determining the length of incarceration for other related crimes, unless such incarceration is primarily for the purpose of treatment. This applies retroactively to all persons presently so imprisoned.

Does this apply to someone who possesses ten tons of the stuff? Does it apply to extremely powerful drugs as well as to mundane ones? Does it apply to explosives? Disease germs? "Controlled substance" is rather vague.

Is there an intent to harm? Is there negligence in their control such that someone may come to harm accidentally? Then who's the victim? If there's no victim, why are we punishing someone?

Eliminate plea bargaining:
42) The state shall not offer persons accused of a crime any inducement to plead guilty, including the option of pleading to a lesser charge.

Bad idea. Plea bargaining is routinely used on people who are actually guilty and is one of the few things keeping the court system from totally drowning. We need drastically more judges and court employees to handle the extra workload you're dropping on people, as modern cases keep getting more complicated and the population continues to grow.

The problem you have here is that people are being encouraged to plead guilty to lesser offenses because defending their innocence in open court is too hard. Address that problem, don't just blow up the plea bargain altogether.

If the courts get backed up, then that's an indication that either the courts aren't being funded enough, or that there's too many laws that don't help society. Plea bargaining is routinely used on people who are actually guilty... but it's also routinely used on people who aren't, but accept the plea because otherwise they're still ending up screwed by the system.

[ZOmegaZ]

A district-based system at least makes it possible for minority groups to gain enough impact in a few districts to have some influence in Congress and the White House. A nationwide system does not.

And what about the other people in that district where the minority is concentrated? Now they have no effect on the outcome, because within the new smaller election, they're the minority. All you've done is move the problem, by increasing the weight of some and decreasing the weight of others.

There are better ways to ensure minority representation, like proportional representation. Doesn't really apply to a single nationwide election, but I'm not sure it should.

The only thing that matters is relative weight, and district-by-district election makes some votes worth more than others. This is fine if you're trying to reach a political compromise to hold elections between entities with disparate population levels, and it's the only way to make the deal. But it's clearly a deviation from optimal democratic practice, wherein all voters are weighted equally.

Why do you assume that this is optimal? Have you done a rigorous study on what voting practices are best calculated to give everyone a meaningful chance of affecting the outcome of an election? Are you familiar with the work of those who have done so?

Or are you just basing this on vague ideology and repetition of things drummed into you during high school social studies?

Again, there's no need to get insulting. You're talking to a real live thinking person, not a parrot.

But yes, I've been operating exclusively from the idea that each voter should have equal weight, that being axiomatic to American democracy. I'd be interested to discuss other concepts (so long as they result in me getting greater weight, naturally), but that's a bit more blue-sky than I was going for with this particular set of ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-se ... djustments
A congressperson has been ruled to not have standing. It's also been ruled that an individual taxpayer doesn't have standing to sue over unconstitutional use of tax money. So who else is there?

I see. Part of my question then is, why does there need to be someone with standing to sue? This is a matter of state policy, no one is harmed directly or in any large way.

Another of the axioms I've been operating from is that the people, collectively, can express their will in some fashion, and that this will is binding on the government. The idea that the government can pass laws expressly forbidden by the will of the people, and that the people have no recourse to address the matter, is thus a flaw to be corrected. I'm not saying this particular issue is a huge deal, just that it's a structural problem. If I'm proposing a giant list of amendments, no reason to leave out the little stuff.

How large would you think the fees would need to be to act as a reasonable deterrent to crank cases?

Unfortunately, large enough to make the system completely inaccessible to the poor and needy, which partly defeats the purpose of having it in the first place. This is why courts should be allowed discretion as to whether to hear constitutionality cases, and at the very least the right to throw such cases out on summary judgment. And penalties for frivolous constitutionality suits would almost have to apply.

I agree with that.

If the police have a right to search your home under a warrant, they have a right to ask you to open the door- that is a necessary concomitant. Sure, they also have a right to use a battering ram on your door if you say "no." But that requires extra time and effort. Unlike with actual spoken testimony, the state can still get at the evidence, and your noncompliance serves no purpose but to waste the court's resources.

A similar argument obtains with encryption- forcing the court to decrypt the evidence merely consumes state resources to no benefit.

Beowulf answered this well.

Sane copyright violation penalties:
38) Statutory penalties for copyright infringement, where the party convicted of infringing did not profit, shall in no case exceed ten times the market value of the item infringed, as determined by a court of law.

What do we do in a case where making one unauthorized copy makes it possible to create an infinite number of copies? If I put up a 99-cent song on a torrent site where it is downloaded ten thousand times, am I liable for ten times 99 cents, or ten times 9900 dollars?

Well, to "put up" a song on a torrent site would be to seed it from your PC to others. So I'd say it depends on your share ratio. If I download a song and never share it with anyone else, that's one copy, so $10. If I download a song and leave it seeding so that 1000 other people download it, that's $10,000. Of course, that means that two people can be punished for the same infraction, the seeder and the downloader. But that doesn't seem unreasonable, since both are breaking the law.

No incarceration for drug possession:
40) Simple possession of controlled substances shall in no case be punished by incarceration, nor considered in determining the length of incarceration for other related crimes, unless such incarceration is primarily for the purpose of treatment. This applies retroactively to all persons presently so imprisoned.

Does this apply to someone who possesses ten tons of the stuff? Does it apply to extremely powerful drugs as well as to mundane ones? Does it apply to explosives? Disease germs? "Controlled substance" is rather vague.

All good points. The wording of this one was less formal than one would actually try to pass, I think. Perhaps "illegal drugs" would be better. Though I'd say that possessing ten tons would be possession with intent to distribute.

Elimination of mandatory minimum sentences. Note I'm not sure I think this is a fantastic idea; I'm reasonably convinced that mandatory minimum sentences are terrible, but that may be an implementation problem more than a conceptual problem. I'm definitely open to a better approach.
41) Courts shall have full discretion over the sentencing of convicted criminals. All mandatory sentencing laws are void. Presently incarcerated convicts shall have the right to have the length of their sentences appealed if those sentences were set by mandatory minimum laws.

"All mandatory sentencing laws are void" also extends to mandatory maximums. Oops.

Watch your wording.

Quite right.

Eliminate plea bargaining:
42) The state shall not offer persons accused of a crime any inducement to plead guilty, including the option of pleading to a lesser charge.

Bad idea. Plea bargaining is routinely used on people who are actually guilty and is one of the few things keeping the court system from totally drowning. We need drastically more judges and court employees to handle the extra workload you're dropping on people, as modern cases keep getting more complicated and the population continues to grow.

The problem you have here is that people are being encouraged to plead guilty to lesser offenses because defending their innocence in open court is too hard. Address that problem, don't just blow up the plea bargain altogether.

I agree that we need drastically more judges and court employees. I'd call that the cost of having a civilization. If we're not going to spend money on elections and courts, we may as well just quit pretending to be one.

The problem with your suggestion is that people are being encouraged to plead guilty, even if they're innocent. The state is giving innocent people an incentive to put themselves in jail, by threatening to find them guilty anyway. They're offered a sure thing, against a chance of something much worse. Unless you can make the court system 100% correct, and give people 100% confidence in that, there's no other solution.

[ZOmegaZ]

Ten times 99 cents. This shouldn't be a matter of amendment, but rather of law, however.

An amendment seems like a reasonable way to prevent punishment that the people find unjust. Especially given as laws can and are bought.

[Simon_Jester]

Forcing someone to decrypt documents authenticates that they had control over the contents of the document, just as forcing someone to open a safe does. Now, the contents of the safe may in themselves authenticate that the were owned by who the state says, but not necessarily. So by forcing a person to decrypt, you're forcing them to testify that they control the encrypted items.

You make a good point, but I'd like to explore it a little more before I commit to a position on it one way or the other.

Does the same argument apply if you compel someone to unlock a door on their property? Or, perhaps more applicably, to unlock a box on the property? Is the act of producing a key to open the lockbox a form of testifying that you have control of the contents?

What do we do in a case where making one unauthorized copy makes it possible to create an infinite number of copies? If I put up a 99-cent song on a torrent site where it is downloaded ten thousand times, am I liable for ten times 99 cents, or ten times 9900 dollars?

Ten times 99 cents. This shouldn't be a matter of amendment, but rather of law, however.

Such a law makes it effectively impossible to recover damages when one's work is pirated; in effect you are saying that anyone can trivially copy anything and release it for free, and no one can stop them. The deterrent effect of copyright enforcement is thus reduced to zero, which is probably farther than you intended to go.

Is there an intent to harm? Is there negligence in their control such that someone may come to harm accidentally? Then who's the victim? If there's no victim, why are we punishing someone?

Just to be clear, what you really want to establish is that under no circumstances can simply having anything be a crime, assuming it is stored safely. But I'm not at all sure that should be true in all cases.

There are substances so dangerous that no one can be presumed competent to store them safely, unless some kind of inspection and licensing regime is in place: highly radioactive materials or medical waste come to mind.

There are items whose very creation process is inherently criminal- snuff flicks come to mind. Criminalizing ownership of the item in question thus becomes a very reasonable precaution, to help deter the crime of creating the thing.

There are substances whose widespread use presents an ongoing public health emergency- various hard drugs are like this, with drug overdose victims flowing into our hospitals on a regular basis. It might be bad policy to arrest people for possessing small amounts of such items for their use, but it's damn sure appropriate to arrest the people who possess large amounts for distribution.

Bad idea. Plea bargaining is routinely used on people who are actually guilty and is one of the few things keeping the court system from totally drowning. We need drastically more judges and court employees to handle the extra workload you're dropping on people, as modern cases keep getting more complicated and the population continues to grow.

The problem you have here is that people are being encouraged to plead guilty to lesser offenses because defending their innocence in open court is too hard. Address that problem, don't just blow up the plea bargain altogether.

If the courts get backed up, then that's an indication that either the courts aren't being funded enough, or that there's too many laws that don't help society. Plea bargaining is routinely used on people who are actually guilty... but it's also routinely used on people who aren't, but accept the plea because otherwise they're still ending up screwed by the system.

So if you intend to abolish the plea bargain by constitutional mandate, do you also intend to constitutionally mandate some kind of system for scaling the judiciary so that all cases are tried within a reasonable amount of time, and guaranteeing federal funds to make sure that this happens?

And what about the other people in that district where the minority is concentrated? Now they have no effect on the outcome, because within the new smaller election, they're the minority. All you've done is move the problem, by increasing the weight of some and decreasing the weight of others.

More realistically, the minority doesn't become a majority even in that concentrated area- but it does become large enough to have a real effect and get some real representation. Which they would otherwise not have at all in a single nationwide election.

Seriously, people have already linked to a study on this. Have you read it or thought about it? Because I'm not seeing the signs of that.

Please do not decide that the entire way we vote needs a revamp without actually looking at serious efforts by political scientists to quantify and understand what it really takes to make voting effective.

Another of the axioms I've been operating from is that the people, collectively, can express their will in some fashion, and that this will is binding on the government. The idea that the government can pass laws expressly forbidden by the will of the people, and that the people have no recourse to address the matter, is thus a flaw to be corrected. I'm not saying this particular issue is a huge deal, just that it's a structural problem. If I'm proposing a giant list of amendments, no reason to leave out the little stuff.

On the contrary; the people do have a recourse: if they don't like it, they can elect politicians who will repeal it. If the issue isn't one that can mobilize that much popular opinion, then it is not accurate to say that "the will of the people" opposes the action in question.

We reserve constitutionality suits for cases where "the will of the people" is not enough. Either because there is some immediate harm which may occur if a law is not stopped, or because the only victims of the law are a small minority that "the people" may not bother to stick up for.

If the public has a problem with a constitutional amendment they pushed into being in the first place (i.e. the Eighteenth Amendment), let them vote in a political leadership that will reverse it (i.e. the Twenty-First Amendment). Don't go crying to the Supreme Court.

I agree with that [about the need to have barriers in place to stop frivolous constitutionality suits]

Well, in that case you have a fundamental problem with making constitutionality suits a routine thing. If you aren't prepared to deal with the consequences of thousands of separate suits alleging that it violates the constitution to have a secret Kenyan Muslim communist atheist in the Oval Office, then maybe you should think twice about that one.

Sane copyright violation penalties:
38) Statutory penalties for copyright infringement, where the party convicted of infringing did not profit, shall in no case exceed ten times the market value of the item infringed, as determined by a court of law.

What do we do in a case where making one unauthorized copy makes it possible to create an infinite number of copies? If I put up a 99-cent song on a torrent site where it is downloaded ten thousand times, am I liable for ten times 99 cents, or ten times 9900 dollars?

Well, to "put up" a song on a torrent site would be to seed it from your PC to others. So I'd say it depends on your share ratio. If I download a song and never share it with anyone else, that's one copy, so $10. If I download a song and leave it seeding so that 1000 other people download it, that's $10,000. Of course, that means that two people can be punished for the same infraction, the seeder and the downloader. But that doesn't seem unreasonable, since both are breaking the law.

Your answer at least makes more sense, in that you're proposing a system that allows you to take theft-and-mass-reproduction of intellectual property seriously. It would be interesting to see the MPAA reduced to mass participation in small claims court to recover damages.

All good points. The wording of this one was less formal than one would actually try to pass, I think. Perhaps "illegal drugs" would be better. Though I'd say that possessing ten tons would be possession with intent to distribute.

But then you have to define "has ten tons of cocaine" as "intends to sell 99.99% of that cocaine," which may be tricky to prove. Still, that's a detail. More generally, the point here is that you need to be sensitive and aware about how you word things, because small changes in the wording of a constitutional amendment have BIG consequences in the long term.

I agree that we need drastically more judges and court employees. I'd call that the cost of having a civilization. If we're not going to spend money on elections and courts, we may as well just quit pretending to be one.

In that case, one thing you really need to do is modify the constitutional language guaranteeing a speedy trial by placing a constitutional mandate on the government, establishing what a speedy trial is. There are a few services the US government is constitutionally required to provide, after all.

[Rycon67]

I don't disagree with that. So let's back up and start with the bigger picture: how might one formulate a law that better balances public safety with the accused' right to be treated as innocent? Or do we hold that our balance is optimal now?

Make it so that the identity of a person can only be released at the time of trial, if a person pleads guilty to charges before a case gets to a trial stage, or if it for a serious crime that could potentially pose a danger to public safety(murder, rape, kidnapping, etc). It should also be taken into consideration the cooperation level of a suspect. If Bob is accused of manslaughter but doesn't attempt to run or hide and voluntarily cooperates, obviously more credit should be given than if Bob is accused of manslaughter and attempts to flee the country or gets in his car and runs when police approach him.

Make it so that until a person is convicted or voluntarily pleads guilty to any crime(s) no information will be entered into any municipal, state, or federal criminal records databases, and that if charges are dropped or the person is found not guilty, any information will be purged from publicly accessible databases(obviously law enforcement or courts would retain some information in case of future need for such information).

This of course doesn't take into account friends/relatives/coworkers/employers of someone arrested saying anything, nor does it take into account a victim or victims making public statements against a suspect.

[ZOmegaZ]

I finally got back to this. My last batch.

To eliminate NSA surveillance searches:

44) Any planned or ongoing gathering of information relating to a criminal investigation, where such gathering would otherwise violate civil rights, shall be considered to be a search, and as such must be authorized by the courts before it can take place. The agency seeking such a warrant must clearly demonstrate to the court why such a warrant is necessary. The target of the information-gathering must be limited, and clearly specified in the warrant. The person who is the subject of the warrant must be promptly informed of the search.


To eliminate TSA's abuse:

45) In cases where unwarranted searches are reasonable and otherwise lawful, the means of such searches must be established as both necessary and effective in a court of law prior to such searches being performed. Cases may be brought before the court for the express purpose of establishing same for any proposed means of search.


To eliminate Gitmo and other such abuses:

46) No person shall be held indefinitely without charge or trial, either within the United States or by any agency thereof. All persons held by the United States, regardless of geographic location, shall have swift access to the courts.


To eliminate extraordinary rendition:

47) No agency of the United States shall release a prisoner of any sort into the custody of another country or non-state agency if there is reasonable expectation that the prisoner's human rights will be violated in the recipient's custody.


To prevent "secret law" of any kind:

48) All laws and court rulings, both federal and state, must be publicly accessible without cost or restriction


To prevent abuse of the interstate commerce clause:

49) The federal government shall have no authority to regulate private property that does not in any case change owners, cross state lines, or otherwise have effect outside the boundaries of a particular state.

(Admittedly this may have massive consequences I wouldn't like. I'm throwing it out there for discussion, not saying I'm necessarily in favor of it.)

To prevent permanent loss of suffrage in cases of lesser crimes:

50) No person shall be deprived of the right to vote for conviction of a crime, except for crimes of violence, treason, or electoral fraud. Removal of suffrage can only take place after all judicial appeals are exhausted. Suffrage must be immediately reinstated in the event the conviction is overturned.


To clarify that states' ratifications of amendments are temporary and rescindable.

51) Any state ratification of a proposed Constitutional amendment shall only be valid for twenty years. This shall only apply to proposed amendments, and not retroactively to amendments already part of this Constitution.

52) A state has the right to rescind its ratification of a proposed Constitutional amendment, by means each state shall determine by law. This shall only apply to proposed amendments, and not retroactively to amendments already part of this Constitution.