Wednesday, June 11, 2003

You divide, I'll choose. Once of the problems with our current legislative system is that we have folks like Roy Blunt inserting last minute stuff into things like Homeland security, where those insertions have nothing to do with what the bill purports to be about. Presidents have been arguing for a line-item veto for a long time. I was under the impression that the President following Clinton would have such a veto. Does Bush have a line-item veto? Has he ever used it? I was thinking about a more general mechanism -- the problem is that legislation wanted by a large majority of people gets hung up on "stealth" stuff inserted into the bill. What if every member of congress or senator had the ability to trigger a vote of "bill splitting"? The idea here is that a single congressman or senator could, at suitable points, propose that any legislation be divided into two or more parts. Each part would then be subject to the normal process. As an assemblyman you''d have to get at least a certain percentage of the chamber, say 20%, to agree, before the split would take place. What this would ensure is that objectionable items could easily be separated out of bills, early in the process. Each part of a bill would have to be able to live or die on its own merits. You would need to have some order in the process, to prevent legislation from being hacked to death, into atoms, but the general idea seems pretty cool. Opinions? 11:08:47 PM    comment []

What kind of country do we want? We can argue about the wording of the constitution until we're blue in the face.  At what point do we have the courage to ask ourselves if we can do better?  There are a series of constitutional documents that have been created over the past 50 years or so.  Are any of them better than the good ole US of A constitution? Keep in mind that the "official" constitution has been amended quite a few times.  It's evolved, and for good reasons. If we could make constitutional changes now, what changes would we make?  Starting with flag burning is probably not going to be my first choice. 12:16:33 AM    comment []