Our Constitution is showing its age, and every bad feature of it has a constituency that is absolutely committed to the its preservation. The Electoral College and the Senate allow minority rule. Trump’s clumsy attempts to overthrow the election show how the next would be autocrat can try to gain power.
The problem is, any attempt to rewrite the Constitution is perilous indeed. If the wrong people make the wrong choices, oligarchy, wealth concentration and social strife could be baked in. But I decided to put down my suggestions just to see what sort of ideas might come up in response.
First of all, Congress will only have one house. No Senate. Members would serve 4 year terms, with half up for reelection every 2 years. I decided that to make the Congress more representative, the district size should be set so that the state with the smallest population should have 2 representatives. This would result in a much bigger Congress, with about 1100 members. This would have the advantage that a smaller district might make representatives more accessible to people in the district. The Congress would be barred from having a rule requiring more than a simple majority do do any business, except for situations explicitly called out in the constitution. I want to make gridlock a lot less likely. Congress would still have the power to declare war, though I do not have any solution to the tension between that power and the tendency of the President getting involved in conflicts in today’s fast moving and anarchic world.
The Presidency would be pretty similar to what we have now. Maximum of 2 4 year terms. The big difference would be election by direct popular vote. Probably either ranked choice or approval voting would be used, to get a fairer and more legitimate result if there are more than 2 major candidates running.
The big change for the courts would be a limited term for judges, including the Supreme Court. 10 years seems about right. A judge could be reappointed to another term when his term is up. We will avoid someone like Trump being able to have such a powerful effect on society for 20 or 30 years.
The number of Federal jobs requiring Congressional confirmation would be reduced to judges and a limited number of top officials of the executive branch. If Congress does not act on an appointment, after a certain amount of time the appointment takes effect. No stunts like McConnell did with Merrick Garland. If Congress wants to stop an appointment, they have to go on record.
The Bill of Rights would be kept pretty much as is. The exception would be elimination of the 2nd Amendment. Universal suffrage would be guaranteed. Partisan gerrymandering would be prohibited. Election day would be changed to election weekend, with Friday, Saturday, and Sunday the official days, and those days would be a national holiday. States would be allowed to have further early voting and vote by mail. No person would have the power to unilaterally reject the results of the election, so no one would be tempted to try what they wanted Mike Pence to do.
Many of the other provisions of the current Constitution would be kept. The ban on a religious test for office, the ban on ex post facto laws and bills of attainder, the provision for the post office, and others would be retained. The provision that states must have a republican form of government is a lot more important than people realize and should be kept also.
One change would be that the federal government would be explicitly given the power to enact social democratic measures such as universal health care and Social Security, or some of the provisions in the current reconciliation bill..
The influence of big money in politics needs to be explicitly dealt with. I am open to suggestions on how to do this. Some form of public financing is needed. The constitution would explicitly allow regulation of campaign finance.
This new constitution will not come close to resolving all problems, but it might make things go a bit better. I am trying to figure out a much more radical system. If I ever do I will try to describe Constitution 3.0. The one thing I have decided is that it would need to have a post-scarcity economy to work.