What US constitutional amendments would you propose?

[ZOmegaZ]

Say we were holding an Article V convention, to propose Constitutional amendments to the states for ratification. What would you propose?

[Kitsune]

Bring back the Equal Rights Amendment

[Mr Bean]

Say we were holding an Article V convention, to propose Constitutional amendments to the states for ratification. What would you propose?

Automatic constitutional conventions every fifty years with the existing options for calling one with a super majority.

Public financing of campaigns

Distrcting to be done on the Federal level by computer module (Something like the shortest-splitline) and that the model be agreed on and re run every ten years.

[aerius]

Can I just scrap the whole thing and start over from the beginning or declare myself emperor for life?

[Alyeska]

Can I just scrap the whole thing and start over from the beginning or declare myself emperor for life?

No, you may not.

[Terralthra]

I am a big fan of this one.

Section 1. [Artificial Entities Such as Corporations Do Not Have Constitutional Rights]

The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons only.

Artificial entities established by the laws of any State, the United States, or any foreign state shall have no rights under this Constitution and are subject to regulation by the People, through Federal, State, or local law.

The privileges of artificial entities shall be determined by the People, through Federal, State, or local law, and shall not be construed to be inherent or inalienable.

Section 2. [Money is Not Free Speech]

Federal, State, and local government shall regulate, limit, or prohibit contributions and expenditures, including a candidate's own contributions and expenditures, to ensure that all citizens, regardless of their economic status, have access to the political process, and that no person gains, as a result of their money, substantially more access or ability to influence in any way the election of any candidate for public office or any ballot measure.

Federal, State, and local government shall require that any permissible contributions and expenditures be publicly disclosed.

The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.

[Broomstick]

1) Equal Rights Amendment, but including sexual orientation and intersex/transgender people as well.
2) What Terralthra said
3) Modifying the 2nd to include regulation of firearms in a manner to protect the public welfare while also assuring the ability of citizens in good standing to defend themselves by bearing arms.

[Simon_Jester]

The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.

Does that include grassroots organizations?

[ZOmegaZ]

Can I just scrap the whole thing and start over from the beginning or declare myself emperor for life?

You can propose whatever you want. Remember, it still has to be ratified by 3/4 of the states.

[Borgholio]

Requiring 1/3 of the seats in Congress to be reserved for third party candidates. Should cut down on the ability of any one party to get their way through sheer bullying, or the kind of hostage-taking bullshit going on right now.

[Napoleon the Clown]

How the hell would you enforce that?

[aerius]

You can propose whatever you want. Remember, it still has to be ratified by 3/4 of the states.

If that's the case I doubt I can propose anything useful that will actually be ratified. I might be able to get "If you can smoke it, you can grow it" to pass but even that one's likely pushing it.

[The Romulan Republic]

How the hell would you enforce that?

Their is no way to enforce that short of ignoring the outcome of elections when they don't meet the quota.

[AniThyng]

How the hell would you enforce that?

Their is no way to enforce that short of ignoring the outcome of elections when they don't meet the quota.

You'd probably have to change the makeup and nature of the congress to be not district based but incorporate representatives at large and implement proportional voting. Quite a few parliarmentary systems implement this.

[Borgholio]

How the hell would you enforce that?

Do you mean enforce as in actually getting people to go along with it? Or do you mean making it work?

As far as making it work, take the senate, for instance. Right now it's two senators per state. They are always going to be two Dems, two Reps, or one of each. I think there may be two independents mixed in there too.

Say that a state was allowed three senators instead of two, and that third slot was given to whichever political party came in third in total votes. For instance, in CA we have two Democratic senators currently. Under the new system, the third senator would be Gail Lightfoot from the Libertarian party, since she got the most votes of any non Democratic or Republican candidate in the 2013 election in this state. Take this over the entire nation and third parties would have combined control of 1/3 of the Senate, enough to prevent any of the big two parties from simply getting their way all the time.

House of reps would be a bit more complex, but the same idea applies. I don't know if it's practical to add another 1/3 to the size of the House though...

What this does is it ensures that the popular vote is honored...there are no restrictions on the political parties of the first 2/3. The last 1/3 is there to ensure that, A) The minority have a voice and B) To prevent deadlock. I'm sure people could get behind those two ideas.

[bilateralrope]

Requiring 1/3 of the seats in Congress to be reserved for third party candidates. Should cut down on the ability of any one party to get their way through sheer bullying, or the kind of hostage-taking bullshit going on right now.

Why not just switch to some form of proportional representation ?

It's simpler for everyone to understand and it boosts the viability of minor parties while still allowing a majority if that is what the nation votes for.

Plus you don't have to worry about people who say they aren't a member of party x, but then acting exactly like they were.

[TimothyC]

• Repeal of Reynolds v. Sims
• Pseudo-Balanced Budget (no more than 3% of GDP spending over taxes collected, but only after a period of 5 years of a balanced budget, and you can only go over for two years in a row, and it has to even out percentage wise with the years that you don't, and a supermajority is needed to pass a budget with deficit spending)
• 75% passage for all new government departments
• Banning of civil seizure laws.
• Congress may not pass a law that does not apply equally to all
• Repeal Kelo v. New London (Eminent domain may only be used for the purchase of private land for public use, not the purchase by other nongovernmental organizations.)
• Some form of term limits.

[bilateralrope]

Repeal of Reynolds v. Sims

Why ?

[madd0ct0r]

metric reform- all goverment work or submitted to goverment must be in metric, with imperial units optionally included in brackets.

[Grumman]

Change your voting system so you can optionally give second, third, etc choices. If you vote for Anderson, Brewer and Charles in positions 1, 2 and 3, and Anderson is the candidate with the least votes, all his votes get passed to the next candidate down - or thrown out if there is no next candidate on that ballot. This removes the structural bias against third parties and removes the need for party primaries to render their candidate base down to a single loon, without the possibility that Mr. Sports R Gud will get a seat just by having votes percolating down to someone nobody knows about - since you'd just stop numbering before it gets to that point.

[Thanas]

Abolish first past the post and switch to a proportional voting system. This would help with most problems of the US electoral system.

[bilateralrope]

Change your voting system so you can optionally give second, third, etc choices. If you vote for Anderson, Brewer and Charles in positions 1, 2 and 3, and Anderson is the candidate with the least votes, all his votes get passed to the next candidate down - or thrown out if there is no next candidate on that ballot. This removes the structural bias against third parties and removes the need for party primaries to render their candidate base down to a single loon, without the possibility that Mr. Sports R Gud will get a seat just by having votes percolating down to someone nobody knows about - since you'd just stop numbering before it gets to that point.

While that lessens the bias, it doesn't remove it. Consider a party that manages to get support of 10% of the voters, spread evenly across the nation. Since they only have 10% of the vote in each state, they aren't going to get a seat. A transferable vote won't change that.
Plus you still have the problem that if a state heavily favors one party, every vote for another party is a vote that does nothing. Which can't be good for convincing those people that their vote will matter next time round, further cementing the winning parties position.

Lets use MMP as an example proportional system, as that's what I'm familiar with as it's the system used in NZ. The party with 10% of the party vote gets 10% of the seats in parliament.
When one electorate is going to elect an electorate MP you don't like, your party vote still matters. That is the exact situation I'm in. I don't like my electorate MP, but can't see him losing his seat any time soon. But, since my party vote matters, I will vote on that. And, once I'm in the booth, voting for an electorate MP I like is only one extra tick on the ballot.

[Edi]

Abolish first past the post and switch to a proportional voting system. This would help with most problems of the US electoral system.

This. Also add the part from the confederate constitution that says each law must address one issue (can be pretty broad if properly worded), which must be expressed in the title. This prevents adding unrelated amendments, such as abortion restrictions in finance regulation bills and other bullshit that is standard fare in current US politics.

[Terralthra]

Congress may not pass a law that does not apply equally to all.

Is this aimed at affirmative action? Because if it's not, I have no idea to what laws you refer.

Also, Thanas, you don't need to make any changes to the Constitution to implement IRV or some other voting system. Nothing in the Constitution says anything about voting methods.

[Thanas]

I know, but I wanted to have it in an amendment so that it would be pretty hard to get rid of.