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AnthonyMouse 2 hours ago

> Five Constitutional amendments we need

Let's consider these then.

> Strike pardon power

What are you going to replace it with? What happens to someone who is convicted in a case where the law is both clear and clearly wrong? The courts can't help them when they actually did it but there are scores of laws that "innocent people" violate without knowing it on a regular basis. You need something else to address that if you're going to take away the thing that was intended to.

> First sentence of Article II changed to: “The President shall execute the laws of the United States of America”;

That sure sounds like the abolition of prosecutorial discretion, which is the same problem but worse. You would have to repeal the majority of existing regulations to keep the general population from overwhelming the prisons because existing laws are drafted to be overly broad to prevent "bad people" from getting away and then rely on prosecutorial discretion to prevent prosecutions when that's unreasonable.

The existing system sucks, but are people prepared for something that works very differently than that? Actual rule of law isn't flexible. People go to jail for breaking the law even when they're sympathetic and get off on technicalities even when they're unsympathetic.

> Abolish the electoral college

The electoral college is old and kind of silly and structurally very similar to the process for amending the constitution, thereby ensuring that the people who would have to do it continuously have the incentive not to.

That's why politicians complain about it -- they love to complain about things that are almost impossible to change because then people vote for them wanting it to change even though they can't actually change it, allowing them to run on it again next time having accomplished nothing.

> Congress may regulate money in politics

There are two ways you could try to do this.

The first is that they could only regulate money, but not in-kind contributions like a media outlet providing favorable coverage or a company sending employees to volunteer for a campaign. This would be completely pointless because they would obviously just use in-kind contributions instead and nothing would change.

The second is that you're passing the political speech version of the interstate commerce clause, because 100% of speech requires you to consume resources in order to do it. People talking about politics on the internet are contributing computer time, internet bandwidth and labor hours and their views favor one candidate over another. You would essentially be granting Congress the power to regulate political speech, which seems Very Bad.

> Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years.

This is like the pardon thing again. The executive is currently the only elected official with authority over executive agencies. Suppose the head of one of these independent agencies goes rogue. Who is supposed to rein them in? Creating something which is immune from public accountability seems bad.

markhahn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

the Executive is required to obtain consent of Congress to appoint principal officers; why not just require consent to fire them?

AnthonyMouse an hour ago | parent [-]

This is the "make repealing laws as hard as passing them" mistake. You want the process for taking government action to be deliberative because the cost of doing the wrong thing is orders of magnitude worse than the cost of doing nothing.

Using the same process to stop something that has already been set in motion is getting the equation backwards. When there is a steamroller on its way to flatten an elementary school full of children you want the emergency stop button to be accessible rather than bureaucratic.