Here’s my proposal; don’t vote for anyone with a law degree.
Mind you, it’s valuable to have a lawyer’s advice when writing laws. But they should be used as consultants. When lawyers are legislators, we confuse the issue of how a law is crafted to achieve an end with determining what the end should be in the first place. Lawyers have special expertise that’s valuable for the former. They have no special expertise in the latter and numerous conflicts of interest.
I was thinking about keeping lawyers out of government and a good discouragement might be a law (or even Constitutional Amendment) prohibiting anyone who has been a legislator from arguing or judging a case in court for 5 (or maybe even 10) years or anyone who has argued a case in court in the past 5 (or even 10) years from becoming a legislator. The purpose would be as clear as the purpose of prohibiting legislators from giving themselves a raise that takes effect before the next election.
I would tweak that to not voting for actual past- or presently-practicing lawyers - Republican OR Democrat.
Having such a glut of lawyers crafting the law in Congress has resulted in warehouses full of self-serving, indecipherable junk that passes for law in this county. It's a scandal, and I think intentional, that laws are written in legalese that the regular folks who are subject to them cannot understand.
This country could use a big housecleaning.
Mind you, it’s valuable to have a lawyer’s advice when writing laws. —————————— I’m not so sure about that. Our government is full of lawyers, government PR firms and influence peddlers are full of lawyers, much of the staff of congress and senate are lawyers, lobbyists are mostly lawyers and look at the mess our country is in and the litigious society we live in. Most of the laws written by lawyers are understandable, all have loop holes in them, most are ambiguous and open for almost any interpretation one wishes.