Laws in Chaos: SCOTUS is destroying America

The function of the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is to establish laws. It does so by making decisions that guide all other courts in the country. This is a great power and a great responsibility. The current SCOTUS has not only abused this power, it has acted so irresponsibly that it has confused and contorted existing, established laws. It has created a situation where, in some important areas, no one knows what the laws are any more.

This confusion can be seen in SCOTUS handling of abortion cases. In their recent ruling on whether an abortion clinic can keep protesters from getting too close to patients, SCOTUS pretended that the case was about free speech rather than a woman's right to have an abortion. They struck down a buffer zone of 35 feet in Massachusetts. This 35-foot buffer, ruled SCOTUS, prevented anti-abortion mobs from getting close enough to the prospective patients to "reason" with them.

Anyone who has seen an anti-abortion mob in person or on tv knows that these mobs shout rather than reason and use their bodies to block women from getting into the clinics. Furthermore, the people in these mobs carry large signs that express their opinion very well. The net effect of these mobs is to intimidate defenseless women from exercising the rights that a previous SCOTUS decision had guaranteed to them in 1973. Abortion laws have been blurred so thoroughly that individual states have succeeded in outlawing abortion by passing TRAP (targeted regulations against abortion providers) laws that make it impossible for abortion clinics to remain in business.

The most dubious achievement of SCOTUS has been to overturn one of the most fundamental purposes of the Constitution. It has created an established religion by ruling that a corporation can decide whether its employees can receive insurance benefits that violate the "sincerely held" religious beliefs of the corporation.

Let me explain. The religious beliefs of the owners of Hobby Lobby forbid certain forms of birth control. The owners decided not to pay for insurance policies that provide those types of birth control to thousands of its employees (only the female ones, of course). Hobby Lobby took their case to the supreme court, which agreed with them. But the beliefs of the owners of Hobby Lobby are the beliefs of a few Christian sects. The Supreme Court ruled that the beliefs of these sects take precedence over the beliefs of Hobby Lobby employees (only the women) who will now be forced to pay for birth control out of their own pockets.

Take note: The Supreme Court ruled that certain Christian beliefs must be observed by employees of the Hobby Lobby (only the women), no matter what the personal religious beliefs of those employees may be. If the (female) employees fail to observe these beliefs, they will be punished by having to pay for their own contraceptives. While the Court assures us that this will have no effect on any other medicines or procedures a company decides not to pay, and additionally will have no effect on companies that are not "closely held", the Court track record on such predictions is abysmal.

This is not a "narrow" decision that only affects a few people. In the first place, it affects all women of child-bearing age, a large group. But this decision also opens the floodgates for every employer to make demands on their employees of any kind whatever. When the Supreme Court makes a decision, every court in the country must abide by that decision. When corporations see this decision, they will start looking for ways they can save money by denying benefits to their employees. The corporations will do this because they are not, as SCOTUS would have us believe, persons with sincerely held religious beliefs, but because they are businesses that exist to make a profit any way they can.

Employers know they can place any restrictions on their employees they want. Their employees may sue them in court, but federal cases proceed at a glacial pace. It will be years, or decades, before the Supreme Court gets around to ruling on whether the restrictions on employees are constitutional or not. In the meantime, corporations making such demands will be able to profit from their denial of constitutional rights.

The current Supreme Court seems intent on confusing the people so much that we don't know what is legal and what is not. The Court has decided that controls on election campaign donations are violations of our freedom of speech. Well, not our freedom of speech exactly, but the freedom of speech of corporations and the one percent. Apparently the Court believes that giant corporations and billionaires did not have enough opportunity to express their opinions, while we ordinary folks, the 99 percent, had too much. According to the Court's tortuous reading of the Constitution, the framers intended to give extraordinary rights to corporations (which hardly existed at the time) and political donors (a foreign concept in 1789). The Court declared in a particularly egregious decision that corporations have the same rights to donate money as actual, flesh-and-blood people.

SCOTUS believes that only rich people need their rights to speak freely in elections protected. They believe that only Christians protesting abortion need their rights to speak freely protected. What about the rest of us? This SCOTUS is not concerned about us. Their lack of concern is hardly surprising, since most of them were nominated by Republican presidents with regressive views on sex, voting, and minority rights. Furthermore, while there are 435 Representatives in the House, and 100 Senators in the Senate, there are only nine Supreme Court Justices who have the power to mold American laws in their own, regressive, prejudiced, and outmoded image. Nine people can decide whether African Americans have the right to vote or whether women have the right to choose their own birth control. This situation is the sort of thing that tyrants have always longed for. Caligula, a Roman emperor in the first century CE, once expressed the desire that the Roman Senate should have a single head so that he could cut it off. This is the power that radical Republicans hold today.

SCOTUS has become a body that reflects the obsolete views of a political class that has not been the majority in this country since the defeat of Herbert Hoover by Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Roosevelt himself recognized this glaring inequity by proposing to increase the number of Justice from nine to 15. We can and must do better than that. We must negate the power of SCOTUS by giving more power to the people through the adoption of a national initiative that would enable regressive decisions of the Supreme Court to be overturned by a vote of the people, not in the House of Representatives or the Senate, but in a national election where all the people can vote on important issues and make decisions democratically.

Our Decrepit Constitution: Remedies (Part One)

The National Initiative Amendment (NIA) is the only way to resolve our Constitutions problems in the long run. There are a number of stop-gap measures we can take without amending the constitution, but these would be just as hard to pass as the NIA, so there would be little point in wasting our energy on them. Once we give the power to amend the Constitution back to We the People, there are a number of measures we can take to restore the balance between competing interests.

1. Increase the number of Senators

The Constitution provides for two senators to represent each state. This has led to many problems, chief among them the fact that California, with 35 million residents, has the same number of senators and the same relative power as Delaware, with under a million. This imbalance leads to defeats for issues of interest to large states, such as gun control.

The U.S. Senate was modeled on the House of Lords. Like the Senate, the Lords became a barrier to passing bills for the common good. The House of Commons partially resolved the problem by increasing the number of Lords. We, the People, could resolve the Senate problem by adding another 100 Senators to be elected at large. By definition, these Senators would represent a larger constituency than any of the current Senators. Small states would still have disproportionate representation, but nothing could stop one of the small-state senators from running at large. Such a candidate must appeal to a broader electorate than one running in a small, homogeneous state.

Other, more drastic measures may be taken. The Senate could be abolished altogether, or Senators could retain the ability to block bills (which is their primary function now) but only for three years.

2. Elect the Supreme Court

Life appointment for Supreme Court Justices was intended to free them from political pressures, giving them liberty to vote their conscience. This idea never worked very well, since the Justices are nearly always members of the elite classes. Recently, the idea of apolitical Justices must appear a cruel hoax. Observers can usually predict which justices will join a majority. Presidents appoint younger and younger justices to prevent the opposing party from gaining a majority on the court. Retiring justices choose the terms of like-minded presidents to give up their seats. The Court has actually become a third legislative body, one with even less variety of opinion than the Senate.

We, the People, should make the Court responsible to us by forcing the Justices to run for election every seven years. Renowned jurists who can't get seats on the current, highly politicized court, should be happy to run for such a prestigious post. Presidents could still fill vacancies with the consent of the Senate, but they would be forced to make better choices if they want their appointees to withstand an electoral challenge.

3. Normalize the Laws

Another measure would be to remove the appellate responsibilities from the court, or abolish the federal bench entirely. The Federal Bench exists side-by-side with the state courts, with many of the same responsibilities. All courts should be combined into a single, national system of district courts and appellate bodies. Instead of striking down laws they deem improper, the judges in this system could replace the offending laws with others that have been passed in other states. Many states have similar legal codes already. This blending of federal with state authority would discourage state legislatures from passing frivolous laws that pander to the electorate.

This system would also discourage well-heeled groups like ALEC from changing the laws, state by state, to favor corporations and the wealthy. Judges would be free to ignore changes made by ALEC and other groups in favor of more moderate laws.

Lawyers should be allowed to practice in any state, since the laws would, over time, tend to be similar. State Bar Associations would lose their monopoly control of the legal profession. Legal professionals could practice in any state without fearing law suits from the State Bar. The cost of legal assistance would decrease, enabling ordinary people to better afford lawyers.

4. Abolish the Electoral College

We, the People, should elect presidents by majority vote. If no candidate achieves a majority, we should hold a runoff election. Third parties would be able to participate in elections without fear that their participation would defeat candidates with whom they agree on most issues.

There is currently a National Popular Vote movement (NPV) to sidestep the electoral college by passing laws in each of the states. These laws commit the states to cast their electoral votes for the candidate who wins the majority of all votes cast in all states. NPV flips current presidential campaigning on its head. Candidates would spend most of their time and money in the largest states instead of in the key swing states.They would have to take positions on important issues instead of avoiding them.

NPV avoids the Amendment process but ends up with laws that can be repealed without using the Amendment process. It also fails to institute a runoff system, as described above. It does not encourage third party candidates, since it will rob them of any electoral votes they might have gotten using the current electoral system. This could lead to appeals through the courts, throwing elections into confusion for other reasons, such as when a third-party argues that the anti-electoral college law prevents third parties from getting the votes necessary to appear on ballots. Current election laws are a tangled thicket that may cause unforeseen problems.

The instability of the NPV, which could be undone by the votes of only a few states (assuming it ever passes) will lead to more electoral confusion, not less. The supporters of this plan have a good idea, but the execution would likely be chaotic and reversible within a few years. NPV will go into effect when the states that have adopted it have enough electoral votes.

NPV now has about 50 per cent of the states necessary to put its plan into action. From here on, however, it will run into the same problem of the electoral college, only in reverse. Each state that passes NPV will now be a state that benefits from the current situation.

Another movement, much less realistic, to reform the electoral college would divide the nation into 50 new states with equal populations. The logistics of this proposal make it impossible. State governments are huge, unwieldy bureaucracies that have taken root in one place for up to 200 years. Moving one of these bureaucracies to a new location would create a complex mess and cost a fortune. Moving 50 of them might take another 200 years.

5. Undo the Corporate Strangle Hold on Our Laws

In the late nineteenth century the Supreme Court discovered that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to corporations, though they couldn't figure out how to use it to help African-Americans. In 1890, Congress passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to regulate corporations. The Courts permitted the Sherman Act to be used against Unions, which it declared illegal combinations as defined by the law. In United States v. E. C. Knight Company (1895), the Supreme Court upheld the appeal of the American Sugar Refining Company, which controlled 98 per cent of sugar refining in the U.S., because this control did not constitute a restraint of trade.

During the last years of the twentieth century, Congress responded to public concern about corporate lobbyists influence in politics by passing modest reforms. In Citizens United v. FEC (2004), the Supreme Court reversed much of what reformers had accomplished. In his dissent, Justice Stephens cited earlier Court decisions that recognized that corporate spending on elections should be viewed as a business transaction designed for no other purpose than profit-making. Corporations unfairly influence elections with vast sums of money that few individuals can match. Finally, Stephens pointed out that the mere appearance of impropriety fostered by Corporate campaign contributions would have a chilling affect on voter participation.

Stephens' arguments fell on deaf ears. The Court, as so often before, sided with corporations against the interests of ordinary citizens. One protection for We the People would be to limit the power of the Court by limiting its terms and making it easier to overrule their decisions with a national initiative. Critics of the Citizens United decision have proposed a Constitutional amendment to overturn it. A constitutional amendment would require majority votes of both houses of Congress and passage by three-fourths of the state legislatures. The amount of time, energy, and treasure necessary for the effort is enormous. This massive effort, involving millions of citizens, is required to counter the opinions of five Republican Justices. Nothing about our republic is less democratic than this proposition.

An amendment should be passed outlawing corporate spending in political elections. Laws should be instituted imposing heavy penalties for corporate officers who authorize anonymous spending from the corporate coffers.

Our Decrepit Constitution: The People Hardly Matter

On April 17, the U.S. Senate voted to block any vote on a gun control regulation supported by 90% of the people. The Senate would have passed the bill had a vote been taken, since they had 54 votes to allow debate to continue. Opponents of the bill included lobbyists for gun manufacturers and the radical fringe that opposes any attempt to limit the quantity or quality of armaments that any American can buy.

The Constitution is to blame for this. The Framers planned for the Senate to be the last bastion for minorities against the majority of public opinion. Once again, the Senate has fulfilled its role. The Senate also proved that this country is not democratic, since the vast majority of the people support gun control but can't even get the Congress to vote on a bill that grants their wishes.

Gun control is not the only issue that can't be discussed in the Senate. Global warming, affirmed by over 90% of the world's climate scientists, also fails to get a hearing due to spending by its wealthy opponents. Too many rich people depend on oil for the majority to have their way. Yet global warming threatens to destroy the wealth of the whole world. The slogan of the oil companies seems to be, “I'll Be Gone, You'll Be Gone.” By which they mean to say that when the economy collapses under the weight of natural disasters, they will have made their fortunes and gone away to a haven for the wealthy.

There are only two solutions to this problem. One relies on less democracy, the other on more.

The first option was chosen by the Romans in the First Century A.U.C. The Roman world was racked by revolutions. The ruling class, holders of political power, were unable to stem the violence. But the violence continued until finally a leader, Julius Caesar, emerged who destroyed the power of the elite and declared himself sole ruler of Rome. The people acquiesced to his rule because they were exhausted by warfare and uncertainty. Democracy came to an end and with it the possibility of long-term survival, since an absolute ruler is only concerned about his own power, not the welfare of the people.

There is a possibility that such a person may emerge in the United States. There is nothing in our Constitution to prevent such an action if the situation is desperate enough. In the past, American presidents have increased their power with the consent of the Congress. John Kennedy brought the nation to the brink of nuclear war because he believed missile sites in Cuba threatened the U.S. mainland, but never explained how the Cubans could be a threat when the Russian military possessed missiles that could reach the mainland from Russia. Lyndon Johnson persuaded the Senate that the navy of North Vietnam represented a danger to the United States that justified years of war and thousands of American deaths. Ronald Reagan convinced the Congress that Marines should invade the island of Grenada because a few American medical students might possibly be in danger. George Bush convinced the whole country that Saddam Hussein posed a threat to the U.S. that justified 10 years of war and a trillion dollars of military spending. Americans have a history of letting presidents do anything they want.

There is another way, though, one that results in more democracy, not less. The country could pass the National Initiative Amendment, which would create a way for the majority to exert its will. The initiative process has already been tried in 28 states. Recently California has ended the deadlock in its legislature, very similar to the deadlock in the U.S. Congress, with an initiative.

A national initiative has the advantage over the current Congress that individual Representatives would not need to vote on an issue. They could pass an initiative and let the people decide. If such a process were available today, the gun manufacturers could not spend enough money on propaganda to sway 90 per cent of the electorate to their position. Reasonable gun laws could be passed nationally.

The deaths of thousands of innocent men, women, and children through gun violence is an important stimulus to legislative action. The wealth of our country's wealth and power by global warming is even more critical, since it affects every American, and every person in the world. A national initiative would permit the people to vote on whether to permit oil companies to pollute the world. A national initiative could overrule a Supreme Court stuffed with oil company backers, because the Court cannot rule that an amendment is unconstitutional. The amendment passed by the Constitution would become part of the constitution.

Our Decrepit Constitution: Defanging the Senate

The Framers designed the Senate as a stronghold for prominent men. John Adams wrote that all members of the government should be gentlemen, which he defined as friends and connections of the well-born and educated. In those days, prominent men took pride in their erudition. We know what books Thomas Jefferson had in his library because he donated the entire collection to the Library of Congress after the War of 1812. Jefferson was an American patriot, but no isolationist. His library included an extensive collection of Greek and Latin classics, books in modern European Languages like French and Italian, and a broad selection of subjects from astronomy to poetry. He likely would have laughed at the idea, commonly espoused by today's Supreme Court, that only American laws should be consulted.

Adams himself wrote 10 volumes of scholarly books, primarily on government and law. He was both a scholar and an author, as well as a statesman. He believed in the superiority of the natural aristocracy. Adams believed the aristocracy were the only men who should be allowed to govern the new country. He and other framers believed that democracy was dangerous. He favored not a democracy but a republic which he defined as a government run by representatives of the people, not the people themselves.

The Senate was one of the measures taken by the framers to keep government firmly in the hands of the gentlemen. The framers assumed that fewer members in the Senate would make the positions more highly sought after. Originally, the Senators were to be appointed by state legislatures, rather than elected by the people directly. This method of appointment was thought to add even more assurance that only the best men would be elected to the senate. Senators were to serve for six years. This qualification insulated senators from pressure by the people they were supposed to represent. The framers believed senators should represent the votes of the people, not their opinions.

From the beginning, the Senate was a place where a few men could block progress, the inevitable change brought about by the passage of time. Progress happens primarily because people are changeable. New ideas arise for the popular mind to accept or reject as it sees fit. The framers assured that the public would learn new ideas when they guaranteed freedom of speech and religion. They tried to slow progress by omitting the liberal ideals expounded in the Declaration of Independence from the Constitution. The Constitution did not consider all men equal, at birth or at any other time. It consigns Africans to slavery and the original inhabitants to annihilation by making no reference to the rights of indiginous peoples.

During the first 60 years of its existence, the primary function of the Senate was to prevent any anti-slavery laws from passing. It did this by creating gridlock in the government. Each state had two senators, regardless of its population. The pro-slavery states assured that one slave-holding state would be admitted to the union for each new free state. This tactic meant that the number of pro-slavery senators always matched the number of anti-slavery senators. The admission of California as a free state in 1850 doomed the senate deadlock system and led to the Civil War.

The Senate remained a place where a minority faction could block the will of the majority. The Senate was still the bastion of elitism it had always been. During the twentieth century, the Senate opposed internationalism, preferring a protectionist system that they felt favored the wealthy banking and merchant classes in the U.S. The Senate used its veto power over treaties to wreck the League of Nations. President Wilson intended for the League to prevent major wars by creating a forum where the great powers could talk to each other instead of shooting at each other. Without the cooperation of the U.S., the League failed to prevent the next catastrophic war. The Senate still had more damage to inflict on the world, however, by committing the U.S. to a policy of isolationism. In that isolationism, Nazi Germany arose and grew until it was almost capable of taking over Europe. During the 1950s, the Senate used its filibuster power to block civil rights laws, once again delaying inevitable progress.

After the election of Barack Obama, the Senate used its filibuster power to halt most of the president's fiscal programs. This led to a prolonged recession and suffering for millions of Americans. The Senate, representing the wealthy elite, was not affected by the suffering it inflicted on others. By this time, the U.S. government had delayed facing numerous problems, including drug violence, massive incarceration of its minority populations, two disastrous wars, an enormous and expensive military, the collapse of the middle class, violence in its cities, and a country divided against itself to as great an extent as it had been in the 1850s.

The Framers modeled the Senate after the English House of Lords. The House of Lords performed the same function as the U.S. Senate, that is, rejecting legislation aimed at taxing the wealthy and aiding the poor. The British system was not crippled by a Constitution like ours, however, and in 1911 the Parliament passed a law removing most of the power of the House of Lords to reject or delay laws.

The U.S. Senate was certainly as much a hindrance to progress as the House of Lords. In the 20th century, the Senate kept the executive branch from forming critical alliances, enacting treaties that meant the difference between war and peace, and enacting legislation that provided equal rights to African Americans. In the 21st centure, the Senate became even more obstructive, blocking or delaying numerous judicial nominations and refusing to fund agencies that favored the middle class over Wall Street millionaires and corporate executives.

The addition of another layer of checks allotted to the wealthy class in the form of a powerful Senate is a drag on the government at a critical time in our history. After passage of the National Initiative Amendment, the people should pass initiatives that severely limit the power of the Senate as it is currently defined in the Constitution. The number of Senators should be increased by 100 at-large seats, elected by popular vote nationwide. This will increase the influence of larger states like New York and California, while making each Senator less powerful.

An amendment should pass that limits the ability of the Senate to delay a bill by more than 3 months. If the Senate refuses to accept a treaty negotiated by the executive within 6 months, the treaty will automatically be ratified. These reforms should defang the Senators and turn the Senate into a debating club for the wealthy. Its fangs will be removed.

Our Decrepit Constitution: Fighting the Corporations

Our Decrepit Constitution: Fighting the Corporations

Recent incidents of gun violence are still fresh is the minds of residents of the states of Colorado and Connecticut. Those states have passed strict gun control regulations. Ninety per cent of the population agree that more gun control regulations are necessary, yet the congress is incapable of action. It seems incredible, but it happens because our laws are not democratic.

Senators and Representatives are elected by constituents. Their constituents exercise only indirect influence over their elected representatives. Constituents only vote every 2 years for Congressmen, or 6 years for Senators. The Constitution permits lobbyists to give money to our lawmakers every day. These sums of money are sometimes very large, but politicians need large sums of money to run for office. Just as important, they must avoid ever offending those groups who might give them large sums of money. If politicians offend those groups, their opponents in the next election may receive support from those same groups.

The only politician directly elected by the people (discounting for a moment the anachronous electoral college) is the President. The Constitution surrounds the president with restraints, however. He cannot make laws. He cannot raise taxes. He cannot dissolve Congress and rule by himself, as monarchs used to do. He cannot schedule new elections when Congress refuses to pass his proposals.

All the president can do is talk, and try to persuade the congress to support his proposals. Since political decisions are influenced by money, not ethics, he cannot exercise moral suasion. The presidency, in some respects, is the worst job in the world. Although the president has very little power to influence anything, he is blamed for everything that goes wrong. The president typically begins his term as a popular advocate for change, and ends it as a despised failure. The fault is not his. The fault is inherent in the Constitutional system.

The Framers created a federal system out of necessity. They did not trust a strong government that could become a tyranny, so they created a system that had three checks on the federal government: the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Courts. This system worked so long as there were no entities strong enough to defy the president.

Stronger entities soon emerged. The first was the faction of slave-holding states. These states eventually attacked the United States directly by forming the Confederacy. The Civil War nearly destroyed the Union and made it impossible for successive entities seeking power to use violence to succeed. The costs of civil war were recognized as unsupportable.

Other entities seeking power did evolve. These entities used money to buy influence in the Congress and the Courts. Giant corporations formed whose influence dwarfed the influence of the president. The government struck back, first by passing anti-trust laws to keep the corporations small enough to control.

Progressives at the state level passed laws to control corporate power within their borders. Progressives passed initiative and referendum laws because the only power strong enough to combat the corporations resides in the people themselves. These new laws controlled the corporations to some degree. California was able to control the Southern Pacific Corporation (SP), which had flourished through government subsidies. SP was a local entity that could be controlled through local (state) laws. Other states set up Utility Commissions under various names to control corporations and protect the people from monopolistic utitlity rates.

These efforts proved successful for awhile. Corporations continued to grow larger, however. The common people were severely weakened by the Great Depression, while the corporations and the people who ran them prospered. World War II brought the beginnings of great prosperity to the corporate elite. The Korean War ushered in an era of massive spending on military weapons. The development of atomic weapons caused unprecedented amounts of money to be spent on technology. This level of spending continued until the end of the Cold War, in 1989. Corporations receiving government subsidies for research and contracts for technology could not ship jobs oversease because weapons series were considered too dangerous to trust to foreigners.

This situation changed abruptly with the advent of consumer electronics products like radios, televisions, and audio equipment. These products used the same technological advances that were funded by the U.S. Government for rockets, guidance systems, and the space program. Corporations began saving money by shipping jobs overseas. Silicon chip manufacturing, a thriving business in Silicon Valley in 1969, was moved to Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, and eventually China. Instead of creating employment opportunities in the U.S., corporations fed money into the economies of other countries.

President Reagan led the assault on American unions when he fired striking air traffic control workers. Workers at Atari in San Jose threatened to unionize. In response, the corporate management closed down the San Jose plant and moved their jobs overseas.

Gradually, job opportunities for U.S. workers dwindled. The gap between the common people and the well-off widened. The Supreme Court thwarted attempts to damp the influence of money in electoral politics. The Republicans began suppressing the votes of African-Americans, Latinos, students, and the elderly. Republican governors rolled back hard-won abortion rights.

The U.S. looks more like a third-world country all the time. In those countries, the wealthy few rule the numerous poor. The common people have no chance to redress grievances because they have no power. In other words, there is no democracy.

The U.S. Constitution is badly in need of repair. It needs amendments to establish a right of privacy between a woman and her doctor; to curb the ability of wealthy corporations to buy elections; to prevent politicians from cashing in with legal bribery, otherwise called campaign contributions; to stop publishers from exploiting the work of authors and musicians; to stop corporations from buying up disused patents and using them to blackmail legitimate innovators; to stop gun dealers from supplying criminals with death-dealing weapons; to stop energy companies from destroying the environment.

The list goes on and on. There are far too many potential amendments ever to reach the end, especially when every one of them will be fought with skill backed by money. There is only one solution to this problem. The people must adopt a national initiative which would give them what they never had, a true democracy.

The National Initiative amendment would do just that. All groups advocating a constitutional amendment should join together and support this one. Once this amendment passes, all further amendments will have a much lower bar to pass: They will be passed by a majority of the American people.