Insufficiently tested, not ready to be placed in production. Test in a sandbox (city, or a small state) first.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quick mod to note that I frontpaged this since the frontpage vs personal 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very silly question. The line of succession would just be different. We have an entire line of succession past the vice president today.
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.
Two parts of this that I really like:
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:
What I would add:
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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
Executive Branch
Judicial Branch
Amendment Process
Bill of Rights
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.
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.
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.
The timing here is important. All elections happens around the same time. This helps keep government policy consistent for a long stretch.
Just like college!
Consequentially, there will be no "senate-elects". The senator in power will always be the one who was most recently elected.
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.
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.
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.
To cover the increased annoyance of being a delegate.
This is one of those awful requires-a-judge rules, but it's better than nothing.
>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.
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.
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!
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...
Useless.
Court rulings and legal interpretations should mostly by be stable over time by default. The Senate can always just pass a new law.
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.
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.
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.