From starrd@mary Mon Aug 15 23:01:49 1994 Path: hollywood.cinenet.net!babbage.ece.uc.edu!news.kei.com!MathWorks.Com!news2.near.net!info-server.bbn.com!jpg From: jpg@bbn.com (John Gunshenan) Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns,misc.legal Subject: Constitution Enforcement Amendment Followup-To: talk.politics.guns Date: 14 Aug 1994 20:50:52 GMT Organization: Bolt, Beranek and Newman Inc. Lines: 112 Distribution: world Message-ID: <32m03c$q8e@info-server.bbn.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: labs-n.bbn.com Xref: hollywood.cinenet.net talk.politics.guns:1736 misc.legal:1082 Folks, Like many citizens, I'm pretty disgusted and frustrated by the poor performance of our political system. I think I have an idea as to how we might improve it. I'd be interested in hearing some feedback, so I'm posting it to the nets. What better way to get feedback? =8-} I'm not a lawyer, so please try to look past my legal ignorance and consider the idea. The Problem =========== Here's the problem as I see it. When Congress passes a bad law, we're stuck with it until the judiciary declares it unconstitutional. We can't get rid of it until a case comes along that goes through the court system & causes the judiciary to throw out the bad law. Such cases are often slow in coming, if they come at all. I believe we have a tremendous amount of bad laws, policies, agencies and regulations on the books. I'd like to see them cleaned out. It seems to me that during the world wars and the cold war, We the People allowed the Federal Government to greatly expand its power over the citizens. We sacrificed some freedom to gain some security. I believe it's time we took that freedom back. We won the wars, but in doing so we allowed out government to really mess itself up. I believe it's time we cleaned up that mess and went back to the kind of government intended by the framers of our constitution. I believe it's time we enforced the *entire* constitution, especially including the bill of rights. It's clear we can't trust the politicians with this task. I'm hoping we can empower the judiciary to do so. The Amendment ============= Suppose we were to start a grassroots movement to amend the constitution such that any act of Congress had to pass a judicial review before it became law, and that the judicial review would determine whether the act is constitutional, and especially whether it falls within the constitutional powers of Congress. If not, the act is annulled. To perform this judicial review, this amendment would create the "Constitution Enforcement Agency" (CEA) within the Judiciary Branch of the Federal Government. This amendment would further specify that the CEA review all previous acts of congress that are currently "active" laws, starting with the most recent acts and working backwards. Anything Congress did that was beyond it's Constitutional charter would be annulled. Federal Agencies and Departments would also be subject to this review. Their existence, charter, policies, or programs would be annulled wherever they fell outside the Constitutional charter of the Federal Government. The annulments would take effect immediately, except in cases where there is a threat to National Security. In such cases, the CEA could set the annulment to take effect up to one year in the future. (For example, you don't want something like the Nuclear Regulatory Agency to disappear before you can build a legal replacement.) By annulment, I mean that the offending law, policy, regulation, agency, or department instantly ceases to exist. Funding, is cut, any employees have to find new jobs, etc, etc. The CEA would not direct the Fed to fix itself. The CEA would have the power and the obligation to amputate whatever doesn't fit within the constitution. It would be up to the Fed to bandage the wounds & reassign the people & assets, and figure out how to function without the amputated parts. We could further specify that the budget for the CEA would be defined to be exactly the same as the budget for the legislative branch. We'd spend just as much on cleaning up as we do on the mess-makers. Each judge would be paid on the same scale as supreme court justices. These judges would not be appointed by politicians. They would be nominated and elected by the federal judiciary. We could charge the Supreme Court with the responsibility of initially setting up the CEA. Once established, the CEA would be independent and run itself, just like the Supreme Court. We could require that any funds saved by these annulments be applied to reducing the deficit. If the deficit is paid off, these funds would be distributed to the states in proportion to their populations. We could call this the "Constitution Enforcement Amendment". It would serve to go through and clean up the existing system, throwing out federal laws, agencies, and policies that should not exist, according to the constitution. What It Would Mean ================== I'm concerned about the "Law of Unintended Consequences". It seems to me that if we force the Fed to obey the constitution, mostly good things would happen. We may throw some babies out with all that bathwater. We'd have to rely on Congress to come up with constitutional ways to rescue those babies, or the States would have to pick them up. For example, what would happen to the EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Agency? I want to take back our government. It seems to me that over the years, the politicians have been steadily increasing their power, while the Judiciary has remained fairly static. I think the original balance of power among the branches of government has shifted too far toward the Legislative and Executive branches, and away from the people. I think we might be better off if we pushed the balance back toward the Judicial branch. If we can enforce the Constitution, it seems to me the power will dramatically shift back toward the people. To my mind, this approach should be tried long before the constitutional convention advocated by some, or the armed rebellion that many folks are preparing for. If this approach works, the constitutional convention and armed rebellion should be unnecessary. I'm concerned that the government resulting from an armed revolution or a constitutional convention could be *much* worse than the government we have now. Does anyone think this kind of approach might work? Are there folks out there with the time, energy, expertise, and inclination to make such a constitutional amendment happen? The last amendment I know of happened in 1971. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that we could amend the constitution again in the '90s. What do folks think about this? John Gunshenan This and many other similar files can be found on the Patriot's Archive on the Internet. The Patriot Archive is mirrored to many ftp sites on the Internet. (If you are interested in having it mirrored to your site, please contact starrd@iia.org) Home site for the Patriot's Archive is: mary.iia.org Home directory: /pub/users/patriot Textfile directory of Patriot's Archive: descript.ion Questions, comments or submissions: starrd@iia.org *** All files available via e-mail or ftp ***