Quickly refactoring the U.S. Constitution

post by lc · 2022-10-30T07:17:50.229Z · LW · GW · 25 comments

Contents

  Legislative Branch
  Executive Branch
  Judicial Branch
  Amendment Process
  Bill of Rights
None
25 comments

Presented mostly without comment, but see the footnotes. The game is that it can't look out of place on Earth, so no futarchy. Bugfixes encouraged.


Legislative Branch

  1. There is only one house of legislators, named The Senate, and it contains 100 senators.[1]
    • With a 50/100 senator majority, The Senate can repeal laws.
    • With a 55/100 senator majority, The Senate can pass or amend a new law, which will be enacted by the chief executive.[2]
  2. Senators are voted in for eight year terms and cannot be re-elected.[3]
  3. Senatorial elections are timed so that results are announced a month before the end of the calendar year. [4]
    • After election announcements, previously elected senators immediately abdicate their roles and take a ranked snap-vote for their "trainee", whom they will help transition and counsel into their new roles.[5] Incumbent senators will have the opportunity to learn about their new job and get national security briefings for about a month, and after the dawn of the new year senate elections will start.[6]
  4. Senators are not voted in directly. Instead, during Voting Season, 160,000 "jurors" are lotted from the American populace. These jurors in turn do ranked voting to elect 4,000 "delegates", and those delegates do ranked voting to decide the 100 senators. [7]
    • All jurors and delegates vote for all positions at the same time[8]. Ranked voting systems determine the 4,000 and 100 that win, respectively.
    • Jurors and delegates must vote for at least 100 delegates and 20 senatorial candidates, respectively. There is no maximum.[9]
    • Jurors and delegates have two weeks and one month to vote for candidates, respectively.
      • Jurors cannot vote for themselves. They can however be voted into delegateship by other voters.
      • Delegates are sequestered from each other and direct contact from the public while they do research, and their communications during the month are monitored.
      • Delegates cannot vote for themselves. They can however be voted into senatorship by the remaining delegates.
    • Jurors and delegates can abstain, but must do so explicitly at the beginning of the process. If they don't abstain, they get grants pegged to national income from the government to cover living expenses and research while they take time off from work. The grants for delegates are 5x larger than the grants for jurors.[10]
    • Direct campaigning for senate or delegacy races is illegal.[11] 
      • In particular, directly lobbying individual jurors or delegates for votes is illegal ALA "lobbying" jurors in the criminal justice system.
  5. Senators must wear body cameras and be accompanied by a cleared FBI agent whenever they are outside their homes. The footage from body cameras gets encrypted locally and sent to an offsite location where it can be reviewed with a warrant by federal police during criminal investigations.
  6. Senators cannot be older than 50 at the time of appointment.

Executive Branch

  1. There are no "general presidential elections". The chief executive, which enforces the laws The Senate writes, is elected by The Senate for four year terms; one month and four and a half years after the senators are elected, respectively.[12]
  2. There is no term limit for the chief executive.[13]
  3. At any time, The Senate decide can recall the chief executive and start a process to elect a new one, to serve the executive's remaining term, with a 60/100 vote. However: 
    • The chief executive can appoint and dismiss whoever they want into cabinet positions without senate confirmation.
    • The chief executive retains their veto, which cannot be overridden by The Senate.[14]
  4. The chief executive no longer has a pardoning power.[15]
    • Instead, there is another general election for the Councilor of Mercy. The Councilor of Mercy is elected by 1600 jurors and 40 delegates, in the same manner as The Senate. The Councilor of Mercy can vacate up to 1,000 federal convictions a year - this is their only government job.
  5. The body camera provision for senators applies to the chief executive and their cabinet secretaries.
  6. The chief executive cannot be older than 55 at time of appointment.
  7. There is no vice president.[16]

Judicial Branch

  1. The Supreme Court is split into two bodies: legislative court and constitutional court.
  2. The legislative court system functions much like our current court system, except it does not rule on disputes of constitutional law or grant authority for warrants and wiretaps under the fourth amendment.
    • Supreme legislative court has nine members.
    • Supreme legislative court members are elected by the senate via ranked vote for 8 year terms (synced with the chief executive appointment). They have no term limit.[17]
    • Supreme legislative court members cannot be older than 50 at time of appointment.
  3. The constitutional court system does rule on disputes of constitutional law, and grant authority for warrants and wiretaps, and can strike down laws from The Senate or actions by security services & the chief executive as unconstitutional. 
    • The initial set of nine constitutional court members are selected by the people responsible for organizing the reform or overthrow of the current United States and installing and formalizing these constitutional revisions. 
    • Supreme constitutional court positions are lifetime appointments and can normally only be vacated when that justice hits the age limit, voluntarily resigns, or dies.
    • When a member of the supreme constitutional court vacates their position, the remaining constitutional court members do a ranked vote to decide their replacement.[18]
    • Members of supreme constitutional court must retire at age 50.

Amendment Process

  1. With the approval of 67/100 senators and 33/50 state governors, The Senate can pass a constitutional amendment and/or begin a replacement vote for members of the supreme constitutional court.

Bill of Rights

  1. These are actually pretty good.
  2. The infamously and hilariously specific no-quartering-soldiers amendment is removed.[19]
  3. The fourth amendment is extended explicitly to cover electronic communications and financial transactions between American citizens.
  4. A new amendment is introduced guaranteeing the government provide its citizens and banks with access to physical currency.
  5. A new amendment is introduced banning the practice of seizing an American citizen's property or freezing an individual's assets except as an explicitly-enumerated-in-law penalty of a criminal conviction.
  6. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is incorporated into the constitution as an amendment.
  1. ^

    If we want smaller states to have a larger say, we give members of smaller states an explicit vote multiplier, instead of having an entire separate house of legislators ballooning the amount of time it takes for us to pass laws.

  2. ^

    My libertarian bias is showing, but passing laws is like writing additional lines of code in that it has a hard-to-see complexity penalty. We would probably be better off overall if passed laws were more unanimous and it was easier to get rid of "legal code" than it was to pass a new law.

  3. ^

    Re-elections necessarily mean senators will do political maneuvering instead of voting their conscience. That's probably bad. Shorter terms than 8 years means the United States can't have a consistent foreign or domestic policy for very long, and that stability and consistency of governance is important.

  4. ^

    The timing here is important. All elections happens around the same time. This helps keep government policy consistent for a long stretch.

  5. ^

    Just like college!

  6. ^

    Consequentially, there will be no "senate-elects". The senator in power will always be the one who was most recently elected.

  7. ^

    For the same reason we appoint jurors to sit on juries, we should appoint jurors to vote for politicians. And just as how we elect legislators to vote on and pass laws instead of doing direct democracy, we can probably afford for national elections to do one layer of indirection, in which (hopefully) jurors will focus on selecting delegates with a shared ideology and more expertise or intelligence to vote for the actual political positions.

    Also, this method of voting means legislators are not associated with, or voted in by, specific "districts" or states. There are no "electoral districts" to be gerrymandered. All voters vote for all of the positions at the same time by ranking their preferred delegates and senatorial candidates and then (at the end) letting Single Transferable Vote or some other system rank the top 100 candidates.

  8. ^

    In particular, there are no "electoral districts". Each senator is just a bog standard federal legislator tied to no specific geographical area. If jurors and delegates find it important to elect delegates and senators from their own state, they can do that; otherwise they can just vote for whomever they want.

  9. ^

    First, as a soft means of preventing everybody from voting for the same people, since there are a high number of open candidates at each stage. Second, to make campaigning more difficult and to get people to actually list a number of miscellaneous candidates they actually like instead of a few party chairmen.

    This laborious provision is also why voters get mandatory time off, like on a jury.

  10. ^

    To cover the increased annoyance of being a delegate.

  11. ^

    This is one of those awful requires-a-judge rules, but it's better than nothing.

  12. ^

    >200 years of history since the constitutional convention have shown that the vast majority of risk of internal democratic backsliding comes from the chief executive and their military, not the legislature. The chief executive is the person who directly commands the guys with guns. The legislature, being made up of many different people with different ideologies, not only finds it very difficult to organize coups, but also has little to gain in the first place from consolidating government in the hands of autocrats. The first thing any dictator or oligarchy does after seizing control of the police and military is abolish the legislature and say "I/we make the laws now", because obviously, a dictator doesn't need a legislature! I completely reject the argument that making people who write laws also govern their provision "centralizes power in the legislature" in a somehow more dangerous way than having there be this third guy, also elected by the public, who not only controls the police but also can't be removed by the legislature without a ridiculous amount of consensus in a crisis. This is blockchain governance tier security theater.

    More effective at restraining government power than patting yourself on the back with with this separation of government bullshit: 

    - Requiring a supermajority to pass laws.
    - Requiring a very large supermajority to pass constitutional amendments.
    - Having strong civil liberties in your constitution.
    - (Optional) Requiring an even larger supermajority to pass constitutional amendments that remove civil liberties.
    - Having an independent not-appointed-by-congress judiciary which enforces those civil liberties and bills of rights.

    Which is what we do here instead of that other thing that only works in people's minds.

    Another (probably more pressing) problem with having a separate general election for the chief executive, is that, as it happens, you will occasionally see a person from one political faction or party in charge of the enforcement of laws, and legislature dominated by a completely different political faction. The result tends to be significantly worse on average than having a consistent, united coalition. To solve this, have the legislature, which already authors the law anyways, appoint the person who enforces the laws they write. 

  13. ^

    My intuitive sense is that having the president be a little more accountable to the group responsible for writing the law in the first place is fine. Open to objections.

  14. ^

    If the senate wants to pass a law the Chief Enforcer of Laws doesn't like, they can recall the Chief Enforcer of Laws and then appoint a new one. Don't force someone who doesn't want the law to exist to take the job of enforcing it! That's madness!

  15. ^

    The problem with giving the chief executive the ability to pardon arbitrary people is twofold. First, they are The Most Important Person In Government, and you might like the option to prosecute them (or people close to them, whom you might want to flip as witnesses) for crimes. Second, as it stands now, the Chief Executive is appointed by the legislature, and is in charge of enforcing the law, so is kind of in a weird conflicting position to decide which people need to be set free by the justice system. Instead...

  16. ^

    Useless.

  17. ^

    Court rulings and legal interpretations should mostly by be stable over time by default. The Senate can always just pass a new law.

  18. ^

    Constitutional law judiciaries should be adjudicated by the people that wrote it, and their interpretations of it should remain the same over time, except when congress decides to amend. If legislature and executive branches should have input on who is seated on the supreme court, that means they can just change the law by appointing partisan members.

  19. ^

    There's some more general amendment here against wartime abuses that I want to make that would maybe cover things like the Japanese internment camps, but I don't know what that amendment would be.

  20. ^

    For the same reason that the chief executive (of the law) is appointed by The Senate, the body of lawyers designated to interpret The Senate's laws should also be appointed by The Senate.

25 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Anon User (anon-user) · 2022-10-30T18:56:20.480Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Insufficiently tested, not ready to be placed in production. Test in a sandbox (city, or a small state) first.

comment by ejacob · 2022-10-30T08:27:46.708Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Do you have strong reasons for why the age limits are not +/- 10 years from the values given or are they meant more as ballpark figures?

The intent is obviously to avoid the gerontocracy of today, but I'm curious why you chose those specific numbers.

Replies from: lc
comment by lc · 2022-10-30T08:34:36.783Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

IQ tends to decline pretty dramatically after age fifty, and AFAICT the most competent people in academia/industry seem to be between 25 and 50. So I want people in office to be below the age of fifty.

This reminds me that I should raise the age limit at-appointment for chief executive to 45, to be more consistent, since they only have a four year term.

Replies from: lc, ben-lang
comment by lc · 2022-10-30T15:37:31.118Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Ok, I'm bumping the age limit 10y after a conversation with a friend. They make the point that people in private industry and academia might reasonably tend to want to finish their careers and then move on to senatorship, which makes sense to me. I'm generally against gatekeeping government positions to career government officials.

Replies from: gworley
comment by Gordon Seidoh Worley (gworley) · 2022-10-30T18:09:48.577Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This seems rather valuable. People between the age of 40-60 are generally the most productive people in industry, specifically because they are typically in managerial roles that are somewhat analogous to roles in governing, and that seems to me to be the sweet spot for age you want for government leaders: enough experience that they have some wisdom to draw on, but not so old they are in cognitive decline or totally out of tough with the needs of younger generations.

comment by Ben (ben-lang) · 2022-10-30T17:55:14.064Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Do you actually want "the most competent" people in the senate though? At least in my mind a government delegates optimization problems to the civil service and the elected officials are more like "alignment". So them being too old could result in issues relating to older people having priorities that are not quite lined up with the overall population, but similar issues could equally arise from them being disproportionately rich/poor male/female minority ethnic. Ideally the senators are setting targets and checking that the civil service is pursuing these goals without simultaneously doing bad things.

comment by quanticle · 2022-10-31T05:03:29.831Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

With a 60⁄100 senator majority, The Senate can declare war. [3]

^3: Defensive wars will probably receive a high vote no matter what. And America seems to have made an oopsie when it comes to 2⁄4 of its last offensive wars, which should merit the caution. I’d raise the bar higher but then you run the risk of The Senate figuring out a way to declare war without declaring war.

It's important to note that none of the US wars since World War 2 have involved a formal declaration of war. Korea was a "police action", endorsed by a UN resolution. Vietnam was justified by the Gulf Of Tonkin resolution. The Gulf War was, like Korea, endorsed by the United Nations, as were the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo. Afghanistan was justified by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, another joint resolution. The 2003 Iraq War was justified by the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed the House of Representatives with a 416-0 vote, and the Senate with a 88-2 vote. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed the House of Representatives with a 420-1 vote and the Senate with a 98-0 vote. The Authorization for the Use of Military Force In Iraq, by far the most controversial of the three, passed the House of Representatives with 296-1 vote and the Senate with a 77-23 vote.

I don't think your proposal meaningfully limits the US's willingness or ability to engage in offensive war.

Replies from: lc
comment by lc · 2022-10-31T05:32:05.389Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Didn't know any of that lol. I'll remove the portion.

comment by Ruby · 2022-10-30T17:35:05.707Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Quick mod to note that I frontpaged this since the frontpage vs personal [LW · GW] is mostly about timeless vs non-timeless content, and while much political content is not timeless (of interest years later) and therefore usually placed on personal blog, this does seem like it would be of interest years into the future.

comment by ChristianKl · 2022-11-01T15:06:11.952Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Why don't you just call the chief executive prime minister? That's the usual term for a head of the executive that's elected by a parliament. 

Replies from: lc
comment by lc · 2022-11-02T12:20:45.505Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Chief executive is more descriptive of the chief executive's actual duties.

Replies from: ChristianKl
comment by ChristianKl · 2022-11-02T12:31:43.006Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

How does it differ from the powers that prime ministers usually have?

Replies from: lc, Ansel
comment by lc · 2022-11-02T16:50:04.875Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It's the same class of powers, it's just that chief executive is a better and less ambiguous name for the CEO of law than "prime minister", which out of context could mean anything - what do those ministers do? Also, in the United States we call our ministers cabinet secretaries, not ministers, so it wouldn't make sense to call the chief executive the prime minister.

comment by Ansel · 2022-11-02T14:02:27.521Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

One would expect a Prime Minister to be Prime over Ministers. I don't see the need to rename everything Ministry of This or That, so Prime Minister doesn't really seem appropriate.

comment by quanticle · 2022-10-31T20:14:14.268Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

There is no vice president. [16]

  1. Useless.

So what's your plan when a madman shoots the President? What happens when the President dies in the middle of a world war?

Replies from: Dagon, lc
comment by Dagon · 2022-10-31T20:59:51.061Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Presumably similar to what happens today if the Pres and VP are both removed at the same time.  Speaker of the House, pres pro-tem of the Senate, Secretary of State, and so on.  

I might tweak it a bit, though, and have the Pres and at least some of the cabinet be declared on the ballot - instead of VP, include Sec of State, Treasury, and Defense on the ballot.  If we want to keep "president appoints their successor" functionality, move sec of state above speaker of the house.

comment by lc · 2022-11-01T04:05:45.237Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Very silly question. The line of succession would just be different. We have an entire line of succession past the vice president today.

comment by Dentin · 2022-10-30T21:02:42.997Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'd go way more limited:

  • No elected person may hold another elected position in any branch of government for at least one year and one day after the last day of their current term, even if they do not complete their term.

  • No branch of government may have direct control over the parameters or structure of elections or appointments for any position within the branch. This includes districting, type of voting system, timing, and election rules. If elections are for all branches, an independent party must be responsible for elections.

  • All elected and appointed officials must make full financial and tax records public for a period of no less than five years, prior to declaring candidacy for a position; if records are not made public, the candidate cannot be placed on a ballot and cannot be accepted as a write-in candidate. If elected or appointed, they must continue to make records available for a period of at least five years after the last day of their elected term, even if they do not complete their term.

  • "First past the post" election systems are disallowed for any and all government elections.

I'd like to add something about isolating inspectors general and making them more powerful, but I haven't really stumbled across anything I feel good about in that area.

The basic idea is instead of reworking all the things, let's fix some of the most basic transparency and election aspects of our representative system. The above would be much less invasive than the OP, some of them might actually be implementable, and they would have very wide ranging effects that IMO are a lot easier to reason about.

comment by Sable · 2022-11-02T18:36:01.224Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Two parts of this that I really like:

  1. Maximum age limits, for obvious reasons compared to today. I'd suggest minimum age limits like the ones we have today as well (no younger than 30ish for Senate, 40ish for President, etc.)
  2. Easier to repeal a law than pass one. I think this is really powerful and under-discussed. So far as I am aware, our current system treats passing laws and repealing them equally.

Particularly 2. Laws that prove to be bad should be easy to get rid of. In general we want to err towards less government, so design the system such that less government is easier to achieve than more government.

What this lacks:

  1. Any real discussion of the federal bureaucracy and how it's managed - is this completely up to the Senate? The President?
  2. What powers are reserved to the states? What role do states play in the federal government (e.g. a constitutional amendment can come from 3/4 of the states currently, I think).

What I would add:

  1. Mandatory 50-year sunset clause on all laws that are not constitutional amendments, with an option for the senate to renew a law with the same majority that passed it.
  2. Permanent yearly IRS audit of legislators/executives/judges until they die; if it's proven they benefited financially from their positions for ~20 years after they leave, they go straight to federal prison.
Replies from: ChristianKl
comment by ChristianKl · 2022-11-08T12:36:38.997Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Mandatory 50-year sunset clause on all laws that are not constitutional amendments, with an option for the senate to renew a law with the same majority that passed it.

This might increases bureaucracy by creating must-pass laws where it's easier to add new provisions.

Permanent yearly IRS audit of legislators/executives/judges until they die; if it's proven they benefited financially from their positions for ~20 years after they leave, they go straight to federal prison.

What do you expect those people to do after they leave their job? If someone spends a decade in their job, in most cases you can argue that they financially benefit in the next job they take from that decade.

If your idea is basically that many politicians have to take minimum wage jobs after their government careers, that is going to reduce the quality of the people in office substantially. 

Replies from: Sable
comment by Sable · 2022-11-18T20:35:08.139Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

This might increases bureaucracy by creating must-pass laws where it's easier to add new provisions.

Perhaps. Without any kind of expiration date, though, laws will pile up like rotten code until the whole thing becomes unmanageable.

What do you expect those people to do after they leave their job? If someone spends a decade in their job, in most cases you can argue that they financially benefit in the next job they take from that decade.

I think there's plenty of room between "used political power for personal financial benefit" and "learned things on the job that carry over to the next job". I'll admit there is plenty of subtlety here, which is why a full audit should be done - I wouldn't trust any cursory scrutiny to be correct, either to the former politician's benefit or to their loss.

I do also somewhat think that if, for instance, someone serves on a Committee that deals with e.g. Oil and Gas, they should probably not be allowed to work in that industry afterwards. There's too much opportunity for politicians to favor industries or companies in exchange for jobs/careers/cushy benefits after the politician leaves office.

comment by bvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbv · 2022-11-02T11:54:43.775Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Why can't jurors vote for themselves if there is no maximum limit to the number of vote?

comment by bvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbvbv · 2022-11-02T11:52:37.961Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm interested in knowing your opinion on one of my ideas:

Instead of selecting 16 000 people at random and give them a vote. Select 16 000 people at random and give them a vote that can be passed up to 3 times to another person the former finds more competent/smart/informed.

I can totally imagine competent and smart people being sad of being selected at random while having not enough time to handle it (what if you just had a baby? etc) and would much prefer one of their trusted acquaintance do that.

The expected consequence would be that instead of having 16 000 people selected you'd have 16 000 people selected as competent by their close peers.

Also to reduce the possibility of threatening someone to pass their vote, the random phase would have to be secret (your abusive partner wouldn't know you got selected).

comment by Mr Bones (mr-bones) · 2022-10-31T17:22:08.144Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Senators must wear body cameras and be accompanied by a cleared FBI agent whenever they are outside their homes. The footage from body cameras gets encrypted locally and sent to an offsite location where it can be reviewed with a warrant by federal police during criminal investigations.

 

Not sure I understand the goal of this. Is this to deter crimes committed by senators and executives, or following the principle that people in power should be held to a higher standard while conducting themselves in public?

The Judicial Branch seems exempt from this rule, is this intentional? 

Replies from: lc
comment by lc · 2022-11-01T04:07:47.779Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Is this to deter crimes committed by senators and executives, or following the principle that people in power should be held to a higher standard while conducting themselves in public?

The goal is to prevent corruption and criminal activity in general by very highly placed government officials, the same goal of police body cameras. The footage isn't streamed live to the public.

The Judicial Branch seems exempt from this rule, is this intentional?

No.