Amendments should be “unnasty, unbrutish, and short.”
That's the most common demand for constitutional amendments, but we're in a ‘war of attrition’ against scorched-earth enemies of freedom. Right now I don't see any handy ‘brevity’ weapons laying around, so let's build some verbal freedom-tanks, liberty-battleships, constituional-air-craft-carriers, and most importantly, verbal smart-bombs to avoid collateral damage.
We need to construct constitutional weapons with tough armor, with speed, with range, and with superior firepower because these domestic enemies mean to roll their tanks right over us, chop us up, and feed off our entrails while laughing about it. These are godless heartless bastards and we need to wake up to the kind of enemy we face.
When the war’s over, we can beat our constitutional swords to plowshares with a new convention. But that's decades down the road.
I assure everyone that pro-freedom reforms will never come anywhere close to the IRS tax code.
Today's political leaders take pride in exploiting every loophole they can find — it's a ‘high-five’ moment. Every omnibus bill EVERY YEAR is ‘brutish and anything-but-short’, sometimes even nasty, and always wasteful.
At the very least, give the states a tool to freeze and hack away at wasteful federal spending. But let's not forget the ‘power’ side too.
The EPA alone enjoys more power than the English dynasty had for several centuries. It can seize any amount of land imaginable — without new legislation — due to the ‘sacred rights’ of a sucker fish, a fly, or a rat. If it feels ‘nasty’, the EPA can destroy the cattle industry [without legislation] and most any industry. It can even regulate cow farts and the air we exhale as ‘pollution’ [CO2].
The IRS — brutish, anything-but-short’, and when I say ‘nasty’, I mean it.
So we need a plan that does not scare people on tight fixed incomes, that empowers states, that solves the border crisis immediately, that is structured with checks-and-balances, that cuts waste, that ends a presidential monopoly of judicial nominees and other key nominations, that puts higher learning in perspective, that counters judicial tyranny, that perpetually combats centralized power, and that busts open the sunshine of national deliberation and debate.
What other plan crosses that political minefield with fewer words than the one proposed here?
Sure, it can be revised. But to utterly discount it? I don't think that's a reasonable notion. I wish we could set the clock back to originalism. Then we could warn people of future dangers like biblical prophets.
But this is the world we live in. For all our ugly problems, I think we can save this battered hulk of a ship and make her trim and glorious once again — greater than ever. And believe it or not, this plan makes it easy.
Criticisms are easy, but solutions are a wonder of the world. Some people get them in a flash, but ideas that seem simple now took thousands of years for someone to discover.
The Constitution ‘as is’? A sinking ship. Original intent? That was chucked overboard a long, long time ago. Our ship needs her holes plugged up, and emergency repairs never look as good as a new vessel on her maiden voyage.
After a counterrevolutionary election we now must appeal to McConnell and Bonehead?
!!!!!!! .... I ...... REFUSE .... !!!!!!!
Not angry at anyone on this thread, not yet anyway. I expected exactly the kind of criticism that was posted here. Been spoiling to counter it, and wrote rebuttals in advance, but spontaneous thoughts keep coming.
[more coming up]
“IMHO it is fundamental to the legitimacy of the Constitution that it be, to parody Hobbes, “unnasty, unbrutish, and short. It has to be a compact statement of enduring principle and due process. And I just don’t see adding neither-fish-nor-fowl officers to the Constitution, if that’s what you’re doing.”
How about a single ‘anti-power’ representative of the states? It might be a new idea, but it's not really that complex. ‘Anti-power’ — brutish? Not as violent as the Second Amendment which is also the principle of ‘anti-power’.
So please clarify. What is nasty? What is brutish? And where are fewer words that achieve the same important goals?