Forum Post: what I would change about our government parts 1-6
Posted 12 years ago on Nov. 22, 2011, 1:47 p.m. EST by gandalf23
(1)
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
This is nowhere near complete, but here are some of the things we need to change, in no specific order for now:
1) When a bill is up for voting in either House of Congress, the full text should be made available to the public, and the Congressmen, for 72 hours (minimum) before voting on that bill is allowed. This is to allow the congressmen to be able to actually read the bill they are planing on voting on, and to give the public time to look it over and let our representatives know what we think about the bill. Obviously there needs to be exceptions, but I’m fairly certain that 95% or more of all the stuff they do can wait three days. I’d prefer a 10 day waiting period to let them cool down, but I’d settle for three days. Violating this law should have serious repercussions, so let's make a fine of $10,000 or more per congress-person that voted for a bill that was not displayed the minimum required time.
2) By the same token, once a bill is passed by both houses of Congress and sent to the president, he, or she, should make the full text of the bill available to the public (by posting it to the internet) for a minimum of five days before he signs it into law or decides to not sign it, again to give the American people time to read the bill and let the president knows their concerns with the bill, or their approval for it. There will be very few exceptions to this rule allowed, such as for declarations of war, and other true emergencys that must be handled in a time sensitive fashion. Violating this law should have serious repercussions, so let's make a fine of $10,000 or more per bill that the president signs into law that was not displayed the minimum required time.
3) We need to go back to the Senators being appointed by the state they represent. Originally the Senators represented the States and the House represented the People. Now, since we vote for both, both houses of Congress represent the people. So why do we have two houses then? Either get rid of one, which I think is not a good idea, or go back to making the Senators represent the interests of their state. Right now, who represents the 50 states? No one, that’s who. And that is not right.
4) The House of Representatives should have a term limit of 8 years, just like the president. And Senators should have a term limit of 12 years. So Representatives can get voted for four times (since they have two year terms) and Senators twice (since they serve for six years).
5) All bills will include in their text who added which earmarks. Government should be transparent as much as possible, and this would go a long way towards doing that.
6) No more voting by affirmation, or whatever it’s called (where they listen to how many Ayes or Nays there are and decide who won, but do not actually count the votes on each side). All votes should be recorded as to who voted what. Again, we the people need to know what is going on and who is doing what.
I'm pretty sure this is non-partisan, I think everyone should be able to get behind all of these. Well, except the currently elected officials :)
Any thoughts? Good ideas? Bad? Frikin' horrible?
Hi gandolf23. You've obviously put a great deal of time and effort into this forum post. I applaud you for your effort here. At the risk of coming off as rhetorical, democracy, even a republican (representative) democracy requires vigilance and participation of it's citizens. That, I think is what our #OWS Movement is about. People have been disgusted and disillusioned for a very long while because of riders on legislation and the deals that are often made in getting legislation passed. A bill should stand on it's own merits. Our elected officials need to be held to the highest standards of conduct and those who fail to do so should be kicked out of office. That official's vote on any legislation that was passed while they were in office would be then nullified and if their vote was the deciding one, the vote would have to be recast - passage would be nullified. With term limits, there would be a maximum time of 6 or 8 years from which legislation would potentially be affected by recall. Further, any salary paid to the representative would be required to be repaid to the people.
Everything.
parts 7-12
7) Require all bills to be read out loud, word for word, in each chamber of Congress respectively, by the chairman of the committee that approved it or one of the bill’s authors, before that chamber can vote on the bill. That should limit the number of 800 page bills, I’d think. Also then at least one person would have to actually read the damn thing before voting.
8) Within two weeks the itinerary and schedule book of the various congressmen needs to be published. If you’re accepting golf games from some industry, or eating with a delegation of businessmen, we need to know that. If you’re jetting off on a “fact finding” taxpayer paid shopping trip every three weeks we need to know that, too. For security reasons we don’t need to know now, and waiting two weeks should alleviate potential security problems.
9) New regulations and laws expire after 10 years automatically (sunset). If it’s a good law or regulation then congress should have no problem voting on it for another 10 years, but if it sucks, well, then we only have 10 years of a sucky law or regulation at most. 10 years lets the law last into the next administration.
10) When a member of either house of congress, or any elected official on the federal level, or appointed memembers of the executive or judical branches, decides to run for another elected office, he, or she, needs to resign from the position they now fill the day he, or she, declares that he’ll be running for another position. We have hired these people to do a job, and if they decide they want another job that is fine, this is America after all and we’re all about getting a New Job with better responsibilities and pay and benefits, but don’t expect to be able to work on your resume and entertain new prospective employers, and to not do your current job while on the clock. Either do the job you were hired to do or leave.
11) Every sitting and living former member of both houses of Congress and every current and living former President and cabinet member should be subjected to an IRS audit of their last five year’s tax returns. Any penalties and interest charges should be doubled for them, since they were in a position of public trust.
12) All holders of an elected federal office, their spouses and their entire staff, should be required to put their funds into blind trusts, rather than trade on them personally. They have too much access to insider information, information that if other people act on is illegal, but they are able to act on and get rich from under the current system. This should help reduce corruption, and should stop them passing laws (or blocking laws) to make themselves rich.
This is really interesting. Thanks. Please come to the NGA in Philadelphia with these ideas. thx
https://sites.google.com/site/the99percentdeclaration/
You should also post this at http://occupythiswiki.org/wiki/Main_Page