No-brainers
Organizing some old files and I found this from five years ago. So sad that nothing has changed.
- Get rid of the Electoral College;
- End gerry-mandering;
- Restrict presidential pardoning and commutation powers;
- Give full representative rights to the citizens of Washington D.C. and all overseas protectorates and territories;
- Establish term limits for Senators and Representatives;
- Make Election Day either a national holiday or have it on the weekend;
- Shorten and publicly fund the political campaign season; and,
- Establish a truly independent Department of Justice by making the Attorney General an elected office.
These are a handful of no-nonsense, plain and simple, no-brainer, bipartisan changes to the way our government currently works. I can’t exactly say how many there are, since some of these proposed changes might overlap in what they are addressing, or how they would be implemented. Plus, I’m not really trying to count them out in my head as I think of them. Goes to show how obvious these are to me. Clearly, there are incredibly powerful forces that work to prevent these changes from happening (otherwise some of these would have been implemented a long time ago). There are reasonable people who might disagree with some or all of what I’m arguing. But something is different about these proposals: it’s actually incredibly hard for me to understand why a significant majority of the country wouldn’t find these changes to be obvious and perfectly sensible. Call it arrogance on my part, but over the past few years as these resistance to these changes continue to dumbfound me, as they fizzle and fail in the popular discourse, and as I continue to find widespread agreement in conversations with friends, colleagues, and students, covering the entire political spectrum, over just how plain and just these changes really are, I don’t feel overly full of myself. Too many eye rolls and nodding heads when I bring these issues up for me to think that I’m just a spoiled and privileged millennial with a few ideas that he thinks everyone should agree with.