Dated Concepts

June 23, 2023

Recent events have demonstrated that many of the governmental principles that we take for granted and affect our daily lives are seriously out of date. Here are some things that need to be changed and/or updated.

Lifetime appointments for Supreme Court Justices have outlived their usefulness. They insulate the judges from any real oversight, which is what they were designed to do, but judges are flouting any accountability. Thomas and Alito are just the most recent examples. I suspect that when no term limits were put into the Constitution, no one expected judges to live forever.

The Electoral College is a Rubik’s Cube of unfairness and complexity. States with minimal populations and get to choose Presidents, and, as a result, get to appoint Supreme Court Justices. The January 6th fiasco should be evidence enough that it’s time has come.

The debt limit is a quaint concept that no one understands. Neither party should be able to hold the entire country hostage because of an accounting anomaly. It’s a flawed concept with possibly fatal consequences.

Gerrymandering is done by both sides, but that doesn’t justify the insult it is to the average voter. It isn’t hard to draw fair and reasonable voting maps as the courts have demonstrated.

Nominating conventions may have been fun at one time when men secretly met in closed, smoke-filled rooms to pick a Presidential candidate. Today it is just a lot of funny people in weird outfits doing crazy stuff for the TV cameras while up-and-comers bloviate from the podium.

Are paper ballots really necessary? They do provide an extra layer of protection against people like Donald Trump, but the world has gone digital. I am sure someone could figure out how to run a safe and secure online election.

The President shouldn’t have pardon power. Donald Trump isn’t the only President to have abused it, but he turned it into a running joke. Jeffrey Epstein should have waited for his pardon. It should be done away with before another President does even more harm.

The party in the majority shouldn’t be able to control all of the committees. A slim majority in either the House or the Senate should not translate into total control.