Needed Constitutional Amendments for Post-Trump America
Whatever happens at the midterms, and whatever Trump’s reliably unhinged response will be, it is evident that we need new Constitutional amendments to ensure the great document not only survives, but also grows to serve America’s current needs, as the Founding Fathers intended.
For too long, and exacerbated under Trump and his Republican cronies, America/the People have been at the mercy of unchecked, corrupt political power, corporate greed and foreign influence.
The People have no choice but to ratify measures protecting our collective welfare.
The following is by no means a complete list of the changes that need to occur, but I feel they are the most important as this conversation begins.
CITIZENRY
A fair tax code
The rich protect the rich, and perfectly legal tax loopholes are just another example of how.
More Perfect Union produced an excellent analysis of which loopholes need to be closed so that billionaires do indeed pay their fair share. Examples include taxing capital gains at the same percentage a laborer’s income is taxed, and not letting luxury items, such as yachts and private jets, be written off as tax-free business expenses.
Healthcare is an inalienable right
I have always maintained that there are three institutions that absolutely cannot be run as a business: Government, hospitals and schools.
The purpose of a corporation is to perpetuate itself at maximum profit. Government, schools and hospitals have a nobler cause: serve the community.
Profit-driven healthcare is literally killing people. The fact that Amazon, through Prime Healthcare, is buying up hospitals, should tell you everything about how Americans’ health is just viewed as another money-making racket for the ultra-wealthy. Doctors are expected to take a Hippocratic Oath, yet shareholders are not. Perhaps they should be, and held just as accountable.
Regardless, this heinous greed must stop.
We must ratify healthcare as an inalienable right, and establish a National Health Service to provide it.
A nationwide insurance co-op could also help lower costs.
No more stagnant wages
Basic, livable wages must echo cost-of-living.
For example, if the cost-of-living raises 2%, wages must be raised 2%.
Codify women’s right to choose
The womb existed long before any civilization, any religion, or any government. It is sacred, beyond the laws of man.
And yet… religions, in their quest to control the population of their flocks, made women second-class citizens. These backward attitudes permeate into secular society to this day, affecting every aspect of life, from women’s unequal wages, to depictions in media, to even agency over her very body.
Until men can give birth, only women will be allowed to vote on whether a woman has a right to choose.
GOVERNMENT
Supreme Court peer review
The Supreme Court represents the ideal of a body answerable only to Constitution. In practice, justices have received kickbacks, and been so evasive during their confirmation hearings before Congress, that their testimony — compared to their partisan judgements later — has been perceived as lying under oath.
If the highest court in the land does not represent the law, there is no law.
Removing corrupt justices goes without saying, but the justices who were evasive under oath regarding overturning Roe v Wade need to be removed, and all of the cases from 2022’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization need to be re-tried under a new court.
In the future, the public should have the option to counter unethical or biased judgements via petition. The Supreme Court’s judgement would then be peer-reviewed by lower court justices randomly picked via a lottery to ensure no partisanship. The merits of the judgement will be weighed against the merits of the law, and that will be the final ruling.
Eliminate the Electoral College; Codify other election reforms
The [Electoral College] was enshrined in the Constitution to prevent a would-be dictator such as Trump from taking office, but, like the Supreme Court, it became politicized.
Whatever subsequent firewall measure is put up would also be politicized.
Twice in my lifetime, the winner of the popular vote has lost the presidential election. Had the popular vote been deferred to in 2000, it would have prevented war criminal Bush. In 2016, it would have prevented Trump.
We cannot afford the system to fail us again.
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The non-partisan nonprofit RepresentUs has laid out a series of reasonable government reforms, including open primaries and ranked voting choice.
What needs to take immediate effect is the overturning, by popular vote, of the Citizens United ruling that has flooded elections with special interest PAC money.
It is obscene, in a country where people cannot afford life-saving insulin, that hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every election cycle to buy politicians to stop them from doing things such as providing life-saving insulin.
The ideal solution would be to stop political donations altogether. To level the playing field, provide accountability and to curb special interests, all political campaigns that meet the required signatures should be allocated the same amount from a taxpayer-based fund to allow for one commercial, a website, and a series of debates. No more, no less.
The People’s vote of no confidence
By any metric, Donald Trump, convicted felon, jury-acknowledged rapist, implicated in the Epstein Files, should have been impeached, but the corrupt Republican Party he leads would rather stay in power, Constitution be damned.
The Republicans controlling Congress have been derelict in their duty to the American People by not removing Trump. Instead, they gave him more power!
When impeachment cannot be called, when the 25th Amendment cannot be enacted, there must be a measure in place, such as the People’s right to call a vote of no confidence in White House and Congressional leadership. Once the vote of no confidence is secured, the public would vote on whether or not to dissolve the current leadership, and, if they are voting “yes,” then decide on who the successors will be.
Articles of American Sovereignty
No one holding dual citizenship can be a government official, elected or otherwise. Allegiance must be to the United States, alone.
The sharing of intelligence with other nations is a matter of diplomacy, but American military and intelligence infrastructure must be decoupled from all other nations.
Likewise, the apparatus of that infrastructure must be publicly owned. No more government contracts to billionaires without government ownership of, and absolute control over, the technology provided.
The police state of warrantless spying on American citizens must stop.
Billionaires who build for-profit prisons have no interest in reducing crime. Who would fill their cells? This unsettling practice needs to end. Prisons are the remit of the government alone, accountable to the People.
MEDIA
Codify Fairness Doctrine measures across all current and future media
Post-truth.
Fake news.
Voting machine lies.
Pizzagate.
Calling the 2000 election early for Bush.
Sandy Hook children were not killed.
You’ve heard that yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater does not constitute protected free speech, but that is the equivalent to what conservative media does every day. Their business is selling outrage so you keep tuning in and making them money. That’s what it always comes back to. Today, they’re infuriating you about trans bathrooms, tomorrow, the Cracker Barrel logo.
Libtard.
Feminazis.
Nothing “fair and balanced” about such churlish names, and just two examples of how low national discourse has devolved since Republican Regan repealed the Fairness Doctrine, a measure that existed to provide actual fair and balanced news coverage.
Since the late 1980’s, the damage and divisiveness that conservative media has done to American society and government cannot be overstated.
Today, the model of partisan newspapers and television networks that made Rupert Murdoch a billionaire has been adapted into new media. Like a copy of a copy, each iteration becomes more insulting, more inflammatory, more extremist, more a mockery of actual journalist tradition than the last. It is and has always been opinion manipulatively parading as news, amplifying, legitimizing, extremist rhetoric and views.
This exploitative madness has to stop.
Anti-Trust media measures
News departments must be editorially independent from corporate ownership.
In conjunction with restoring the Fairness Doctrine, the definition of what constitutes a “news” outlet needs to be clearly defined in law and adhered to.
There needs to be a set, legal limit on how many media companies one company/individual/family can have ownership and shareholder stake in.
Conclusion
This article is the conversation starter. Unfortunately, Trump and the Republicans have put We the People in a position where every matter is urgent, and multiple fires need extinguishing all at once. We will meet that challenge. My previous editorial discussed immediate and long-term steps to take when Trump finally leaves office, two of which were mentioned here.
The further long-term goal of these amendments will help bulwark our Constitutional values against the selfish and destructive parasites of special interests, foreign influence, and political corruption.
