It’s nice to see the senate opposition functioning.
Edit: 18 hours of holding the senate floor, giving voice to the american people. Lots of tears as american suffering is read out loud for the congressional record. Testiment from Americans across the country. This is the voice of the people. Please click the link, share and watch. The media needs to know we care about the opposition more than we care about trump rambling on a plane about fort knox.
Sure, idealism is great, but none of that will happen by November 2026. I’m suggesting we use the system that is already available to us before condemning its efficacy. Why is that sentiment worthy of contest?
Because the system is designed to give people like us zero levers of control.
The only idealist here is the person sugesting that reform from within the system is possible.
It does though. I agree with most of your statments in this thread. We don’t need to re-write the constitution. However we could if we wanted too. We can’t get 70% of america to agree on whats best for everyone. That’s not the government thats us. I’m open to hearing causes and solutions, but to act like we don’t have power is false. our government gives us power. 70% of the country doesn’t know how use it, or we can’t agree on how to use it. That’s my assessment anyway.
Social security is overwhelmingly popular but the majority of people can’t vote to save it. So when we finally cut social security and no one even votes out their congressmen I think we will discover its not the political system its us.
Rewriting the constitution is essential, or else the flaws in our government that permitted this state of affairs will not be addressed.
Rewriting the constitution is impossible, not only because of the polarized nature of our politics but because the existing system is designed to prevent amendments our rulers don’t want.
The government does not “give” power, it claims our power for its own and persists only because we allow it to.
I’ll say nothing more except to note that those who make peaceful revolution impossible also make violent revolution inevitable.
I’d be interested in your ideas on a new constitution? You seem like you’ve also been thinking about our situtation from many angles. We are certainly at a point in history where I am willing to throw a hail mary.
In short, we as a species have had a lot of practice designing governments in the centuries since the US constitution was written, and by their standard America is a dysfunctional backwater.
The checks and balances between the branches of our federal state were designed without political parties in mind, and they’ll need to be restructured to minimize interdepartmental collusion and prohibit self-dealing at least.
The executive should not be the sole issuer of pardons. The judiciary should be responsible for enforcing the penal system rather than the executive. The legislature should not be a competition between two sports teams. The Senate and electoral colleges shouldn’t exist. Representatives should be elected proportionally by state rather than winner-take-all for each congressional district. Recall votes should be implemented automatically if a representative trends down into negative favorability. The president must be subject to the law, and it should be easy for the citizenry to recall them as well. Judges should not be allowed to affiliate with political parties. Nobody in the government (federal or state) should be allowed to maintain ownership or control over commercial entities, and they should be audited frequently and randomly to ensure they have no conflicts of interest. The top marginal tax rate should be 100% and kick in as soon as an individual’s income exceeds some reasonable multiple of the minimum wage, which should itself be pegged to consumer price indexing of the cost to raise a family. Every elected position should have term limits. Etc etc etc.