The Tenth Amendment Party, Part 1

In line with the wise dictum that it is better to light candles than to curse the darkness, I propose (modestly enough) a complete and total transformation of the American government.

I hold these truths to be self evident, that we have devolved into a nation dominated by Big Money, with a bought-and-paid-for, bankrupt government, and an imperialist, warmongering foreign policy which serves only the interests of the Military-Industrial Complex, precisely as foretold by Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address; that the nation is dedicated and consecrated to the mindless and profligate waste of energy, that it is environmentally obtuse; that it has subjugated the legitimate needs of its populace for good jobs and decent educations to the demands of Big Business, the Empire, and the banking cartel; in short, that we have become a degenerate and profoundly undemocratic nation.

In other words, things need to change. Strangely enough, the means of change are plainly and obviously at hand: adherence to the Constitution of the United States of America, as brought up to date to reflect the quantitative and qualitative changes in the body politic since the adoption of the Constitution in 1789.

To bring the Constitution up to date, we need to do the following:

1. Change the provisions relating to the Executive Branch (Article 2) to eliminate the (indirect) election of the President through the college of electors. Instead of a President elected on a nationwide basis, we will switch to a leadership system modeled on parliamentary systems; to wit, the President will be elected by the single (unicameral) House members from among their own number (primus inter pares, as in Great Britain). The Senate will be abolished; its existing members can be transferred directly to an assisted living facility in Virginia, where the senile among them (most of them at this point), can be installed in a mock-up of the Capitol building where they can gas on till their final days, complimenting each other and passing "laws" designed to destroy the civil rights of the American commoners. They will never notice the difference.

This change in election method will preserve the great legacy of President Barack Obama. He will forever be remembered in American history as the chief executive who finally broke the back of the electoral system. Americans simply gave up after Obama; he was "the End of the Hope for Change" (h/t: Barley). A man engendering such profound, inimitable, life-altering disappointment in his former supporters that they became ready for something that would really work, instead of an electoral system based completely on Madison Avenue techniques. It is no small thing, Mr. Obama, to be the historical figure who prepared the American people for a return to a Constitutional form of government. Your caving in, your sell-outs, your abandonment of principles, your 180 degree reversals on virtually everything - none of this needs to be in vain. Thank you, Mr. President.

2. The new House of Representatives will consist of about 1,000 delegates, elected from districts among the states on a "one person, one vote" basis, to the extent this can be devised. The powers of the House (or Parliament) will be strictly limited to those enumerated in Article One of the Constitution. This is an extensive list, but the abuses of general language (particularly the Commerce Clause) will be rolled back by legislation in the form of a Constitutional Amendment so that power is reallocated to the states and local government wherever possible to diminish the encroachment of the central state on local sovereignty. This will probably be the main work of the new Constitutional Convention.

3. The 16th Amendment (passed in 1913) will be rescinded, eliminating the national income tax. Instead, the new central government, with its vastly curtailed functions, will be financed as it was during the first 124 years of the Republic, mainly through tariffs on imports and excise taxes. If it is considered necessary to supplement the income of the federal government in order to maintain a decent defense, a value added tax (which does not interfere with the right of states to levy sales taxes, a main source of revenue at the local level) should be added.

In my next manifesto, I will go through the Article One powers of the House and demonstrate (a) how easy the changes actually are (and how wise the Founding Fathers were) and (b) how far over the line the central government has gone with its ceaseless expansion and endless meddling into local governance.