If you could introduce a Constitutional Amendment What would it be

[Slander and/or Libel]

No, jobs that require you to be able to finance a year of applying for them require independent wealth.

[angus]

Let me be sure that I can understand you.  In the current system, we can attract lots of high-powered attorneys and businessmen, because they'd presumably be willing to serve their government for 400 thousand per year.  Many of those types might not be so attracted to government service if it only paid 100 thousand per year.    Farmers, public school teachers, janitors, firemen, and housewives, on the other hand, who do not give up substantial salaries when they accept a 100 thousand-dollar per year job presumably would not automatically be put off at my suggestion.

You somehow manage to observe that the most salient aspect of my proposed amendment is the fact that some working-class people (ultrawhite-collar working class, I might add) would presumably not be as willing to serve, and that this is tantamount to limiting the office to the non-working, independently wealthy class.  

I'm a bit baffled by your response.  The US Congress is hardly representative of the people, and I am trying to ameliorate that condition in three ways.  Of course I'm not suggesting that we do what the Texas state legislature does (and even it does not limit membership to the independently wealthy, although it does limit membership to those of means).  I'm merely suggesting that we limit it to those who really want to serve, and the wage I have suggested is already generously higher than the mean household--not individual!--income.

I do not think your snide attack on my proposed amendment is merited.  If however, you can present some data or case study that at least gives it a veneer of legitimacy, then I'll read it.  And, no, I do not consider your one-sentence response a legitimate defense of your remarks.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Nah, I'm good. Your post let me know that I have no further interest in interacting with you.

[angus]

Nah, I'm good. Your post let me know that I have no further interest in interacting with you.

Thank you.  And I'll thank you more if you put me on Ignore until and unless you have something intelligent to contribute.  I have enough idiots to contend with in real life.

You may be long gone, but this needs to be said:

The thread asked for "a" constitutional amendment.  That indefinite article implies one.  Not five, not three, not two.  One.  You clearly want to vetch about campaign finance reform.  That's your prerogative and it's a reasonable suggestion--although I'm not sure how you'd address it with only one amendment, and the OP certainly doesn't ask about rewriting the entire document.  

What you should never do is make your original complaint in the guise of commenting on mine.  "Jobs that require you to be able to finance a year of applying for them" ?!  Really?  In the first place, I don't know how you make your living, but it's not a year's salary for me, and it's not a year's salary for those making a 400 thousand dollars per year.  It's much more than that.  Sure, the cost of winning elections is a legitimate complaint, but it is tangential to my post.  Moreover, my post clearly stipulated that the terms should be longer, and precisely for the reason that you imply.

I support the creation of only one chamber, for reasons I don't mind defending, and I think that they shouldn't be in constant campaign mode, and I really think that it should be the people's chamber--not just the rich people's chamber.  I perceive those as three separate problems that could be reasonably addressed by one constitutional amendment and I made some suggestions to answer those three problems.  You took off in a different direction and did it in a way that misrepresents the thrust of my proposal and the nature of it.  I resent that.  This sort of thing happens in politics all the time.  I don't think people should get away with that sort of thing.  So I'm calling you out.  

Don't ever play me like that.  Or anyone else.  It's rude, it's unethical, and it's dishonest.  If you have your own original idea of a problem that might be addressed with one single amendment, then put that into words.  If the cost of calling you out for being disingenuous is me looking like a jerk, then I'll pay that price.  What I won't do is let you twist the substance of my post into something other than what it was intended to be.  

[Slander and/or Libel]

OK. I was too hasty last night and responded in an anger that I didn't like, and it appears you did so in kind. I'd like to take the accusations and personal venom down a notch, since I don't believe I ever started with any. If you feel that my post came across that way, then that's my failing and I apologize for that. But I was not trying to be disingenuous or dishonest or anything. Let me lay out a bit more precisely what I was thinking (which, I'll admit, goes somewhat beyond what you proposed, but is at least adjacent to it).

The time and cost involved with running for office is substantial. We can stipulate that, right? Even the time and effort and cost involved with investigating whether such a run is possible, or desirable, is likely substantial. Especially for any working class types who might not quite be living paycheck to paycheck, but who could likely ill afford the time and expense of running even if they were interested.

As such, I don't know that the salary ultimately associated with the job is much of a factor at all. You later made the assertion that we might drive moneyed types out of the job by lowering the salary because they wouldn't be interested in a job that pays $100K as where they would be interested in a job that pays $400K (side note: congressional pay is currently $174K/yr. Were you thinking of the presidency by citing $400K?).

But the benefits associated with holding high office in the government extend far beyond the pay. If super high earners were put off of holding office by lower salaries, we'd probably expect that Congress wouldn't be skewed so much by the very wealthy already, wouldn't we? After all, $174K isn't that great a salary for people with a net worth of over $1M (35.3% of Congress), over $5M (12.3% of Congress), over $10M (7.7% of Congress), over $50M (1.3% of Congress), or over $100M (0.7% of Congress). If there was such sensitivity to salary among high income people, we would expect to see Congress's population skewed differently, I'd imagine. (Source: Roll Call)

Mitt Romney wasn't running for President to earn the $400K salary. Donald Trump isn't running for President to earn the $400K salary. Neither is Hillary Clinton. They don't need the money, and they could make more by not running, but they did pursue (or are pursuing) the office vigorously. That makes me believe that in the case of jobs with significant influence and power, the top line salary isn't really a good predictor of how much people are going to want the job.

Besides all of that, my understanding is that a lot of the rigors of being a Congressperson involve expenditure of personal money, not just the Congressional salary. I'm not arguing that the salary is not generous, but rather that the job seems to have evolved into the type of thing where a lot of extraneous expenses out of the Congressperson's pocket are more expected than they may have been in the past (like often maintaining two households, costs of travel, etc.), making things more difficult for people not already in a position to self-fund such activities.

I don't believe that decreasing the salary of legislators would really hurt much, since ordinary folks are already not well-positioned to make a run for office, but I'm inclined to think it wouldn't really help anything either.

As far as the accusation that I was trying to use this to make a backdoor complaint about campaign finance reform, I really wasn't. I'm not entirely sure what constitutional amendment I would propose, and I've been thinking about it. In the meantime I've found the discussion in this thread about other proposals interesting and was commenting. That's all.

I'm not exactly sure what your complaint is with my observation that running for Congress is a full time job and requires the candidate to be able to fund themselves for the duration of the campaign, but I believe my post was worded confusingly, so that's on me. I was trying to say that the "application" process for Congress, running for the seat, incurs costs that are easier for the already-wealthy to bear, or to even consider bearing. And that's for a 50-50 chance of winning (sometimes much worse, obviously).

[angus]

Okay, I was probably pissy last night.  Anyway, apologies given and accepted all around.  Sincerely.

Well, you're right about campaigning being expensive.  

I suppose that I was thinking about the president's salary.   I looked it up and was reminded that the senators and representatives make 174 thousand per year.  

I'll stipulate that the benefits of serving outweigh the pay.  In fact, it goes beyond what you mention and is related to another issue, but I'll remind you that this thread only asked for one amendment.  To address the problems of venality and cronyism, you'd need to propose others.  (yes, I read your response that you really weren't trying to complain about this, but you cannot complain about expenditures, both personal on the job and for campaigning to get the job, without complaining about the spending expectations generally, which inevitably leads to a conversation about not only campaign finance reform, but about the influence of money in Washington.)

If we create enough offices to keep it local, and don't require them to have to get re-elected every two years, and remove the chamber that has archaic rules about order and has a membership disproportionate to the electorate, we will alleviate, or at least ameliorate, some of these problems.

Of course we'll still have the underlying problem of the influence of money in lobbying for bills and for favor, and in financing elections.  That has to be a different amendment, I'm afraid, and I've already spent my quota on this one.

[SillyAmerican]

The US Congress is hardly representative of the people, and I am trying to ameliorate that condition in three ways.  Of course I'm not suggesting that we do what the Texas state legislature does (and even it does not limit membership to the independently wealthy, although it does limit membership to those of means).  I'm merely suggesting that we limit it to those who really want to serve, and the wage I have suggested is already generously higher than the mean household--not individual!--income.

I think your proposed amendment has a lot of merit. I believe it would help to generate more citizen statesmen in place of the career politicians we currently have running the show. In my opinion, this is exactly the direction we should be going in...

[King of the Uzbeks]

Repeal the 18th Amendment.

[SteveRogers]

Repeal the 18th Amendment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-first_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Repeal the 18th Amendment.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-first_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

I'll be generous and point out that the 21st was not a clean repeal. It also gave the States power over the interstate commerce of alcohol that they have over no other product. So maybe ey was calling for a clean repeal, but I doubt it.

[Intell]

1. Protect the right of life
2. Provide Free Healthcare, Education, Job, housing to all
3. Make it mandatory to deal with Income Inequality
4. Make sure taxes on the top bracket don't reduce below 70%
5. Amendment creating strong rules against outsourcing
6. Protection of unions and workers
7. Ban campaign finance by corporations and a donation of maximum of 1000 dollars.
8. Abolish the senate and make stuff elected on state levels, by proportional representation.
9. Strengthen morality, tradition and religion in the public square.
10. Make government control and intervene in certain aspects of the economy
11. Nationalize the finance, banking and energy sector.
12. Government monopoly on drugs such as alcohol, marijuana etc.

[SteveRogers]

3.) Abolish the Senate as it is.  Replace with a chamber with proportional representation.

The Constitution actually makes this the one thing you can't amend.

[Slander and/or Libel]

3.) Abolish the Senate as it is.  Replace with a chamber with proportional representation.

The Constitution actually makes this the one thing you can't amend.

Amend the part that says you can't amend that part, and then amend that part.

I think the only way to make something truly entrenched is as follows:

Put everything about amendment in Article V, as it is. Add in everything you want not to be subject to amendment in there. Then add a statement at the end that says, more or less, "Provided that no Amendment shall in any Manner affect any Clauses in the fifth Article."

You could presumably include a similar entrenchment statement in amendment to make it unchangeable. I sort of hate to even put the idea out there, though.

[Clark Kent]

28th Amendment: Abolish the electoral college and the natural-born requirement for the Presidency. Adopt an IRV system to directly elect the President.
29th Amendment: Expand the size of the House of Representatives to 537 members (to be adjusted with changes in population) by adopting the Wyoming Rule. Also ban gerrymandering by requiring an independent, non-partisan organization draw the Congressional districts, and replace FPTP with an IRV system.
30th Amendment: Limit Supreme Court justices to ten-year terms (staggered, of course), after which they must be renominated and reapproved or step down and retire.
31st Amendment: National right to life, banning abortion except when the mother's life is in danger, the death penalty, and euthanasia.
32nd Amendment: Ban eminent domain.
33rd Amendment: Ban secession, and treat any attempts to secede by any state or Washington, D.C. as treason.


Probably some more somewhere...

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

3.) Abolish the Senate as it is.  Replace with a chamber with proportional representation.

The Constitution actually makes this the one thing you can't amend.

Not quite. Changing the Senate itself to proportional representation is so difficult as to effectively be impossible, but adding a third proportional chamber and then neutering the Senate to make it irrelevant is theoretically possible, tho still unlikely. We'd need far fewer sparsely populated states to make it likely.

[MyRescueKittehRocks]

Personhood Admendement, Concealed Carry Admendment and Legal Tender Admendment.

That's a Christian Libertarian dream slate.

All the amendments proposed within The Liberty Amendments by Mark Levin.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

Life at Conception Amendment

[Free Bird]

Balanced Budget Amendment
Citizens Equality Act Amendment
FairTax Amendment
Eminent Domain Consent Amendment
Presidential Popular Vote Amendment
Supreme Court Amendment. 15 year term, expand the bench to 13

[SteveRogers]

Citizens Equality Act Amendment

What's that?

Eminent Domain Consent Amendment

That sounds like an oxymoron

[Attorney General, LGC Speaker, and Former PPT Dwarven Dragon]

1. Balanced Budget Amendment




2. Overturn Roe vs. Wade
3. Institute term limits for congress - 2 terms for the senate, 6 for the house
4. Abolish electoral college and institute NPV w/ IRV

5. Require that presidential GE debates include every candidate who is on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win and is legally qualified for the office - abolish the polling requirement (i.e. give third parties a voice) (Even under the loosest possible defintion of "on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win the election", such debates would have only included six candidates in 2012, so it's not as if this is infeasible or anything)

6. Overturn Obergefell vs. Hodges and FORBID any division of the federal government or state/federal court system from legislating or judging any marriage-related issue.  Only state legislatures and referendums would have any jursidiction here. Under the amendment, federal marriage benefits would remain but would only be available to man/woman couples. States could individually choose to recongize other unions but these would only have state-level benefits and other states would be under no obligation to recognize them.

7. Expand the size of the house. Probably to 600 members or so.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Wouldn't the thing about debates theoretically run afoul of the rights of the Commission on Presidential Debates?

Also, a Balanced Budget Amendment is a terrible idea, and repealing Obergefell is just naked bigotry.

[SteveRogers]

Wouldn't the thing about debates theoretically run afoul of the rights of the Commission on Presidential Debates?

Also, a Balanced Budget Amendment is a terrible idea, and repealing Obergefell is just naked bigotry.

He doesn't much care for democracy, you see. He literally wants a theocratic dictatorship

[Swedish Rainbow Capitalist Cheese]

This thread is filled with so much stupid proposals it hurts my brain. Thank God non of you guys were founding fathers.

My amendment would probably be for Atlas members not being allowed to propose constitutional amendments. 

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Careful now, l they'll pass an amendment banning smug Europeans

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Campaign finance laws, limiting Pac contributions should be the next one
Another will be direct elections of Prez