The presidential campaign is in full swing. Promises intended to attract votes are being made by the candidates of both parties—promises that, though superficially attractive, are often vague, ill-conceived, counterproductive, or fraudulent. Politicians do what they believe they must do to get elected. Many promises require not only the election of a particular presidential candidate but also a willing Congress to keep them. This makes keeping so many promises unlikely.

Many of the changes America most needs are difficult to achieve, and, if they are achieved, they will not be realized soon. I had planned to list and justify such essential changes, but I quickly concluded that I was not planning an essay but a book. Instead, I offer a list with minimal discussion. I may deal with some issues on my list in detail later. By no means will I even mention every important issue facing the country. The issues I do mention are important for our nation to thrive as a democratic republic, however. Items not on my list seem of lesser importance or may simply have been overlooked by me. Feedback is welcome.

In reviewing my list, I discovered that so many needed reforms involve reversing damage done by a radical, right-wing Supreme Court. This is where I begin my list.

Originalism. Right-wing legal theorists dreamed up the concept of originalism as a mechanism to avoid having the law respond to modern-day sentiment and needs. The theory demands that the Constitution  must be read not in a contemporary context but in the context in which it was written. This is a very subjective criterion and one being applied by the court with a strong does of hypocrisy. If the court really believed in originalism, the Second Amendment would apply only to 18th-century muskets, not to assault rifles. Congress should outlaw originalism, though that might be tricky.

Textualism. Textualism is the other legal theory designed to keep the 21st-century at bay. Textualism ignores original intent and context, on one hand, and interprets the words of the Constitution as literally and as mindlessly as possible. Admittedly, Supreme Court Justices have a difficult job to do. I am reminded of my high school English teacher. If you followed her directions literally, you weren’t using your common sense. If you took directions too loosely, you weren’t following directions. The conservative Justices are loath to be caught using their common sense.

Presidential Immunity. Donald Trump argued in court that, as president, he was immune from prosecution for virtually any misdeeds. This cockamamie idea was, everyone thought, adequately dispatched at the appellate level. But, when Trump appealed to the Supreme Court, not only did the court agree to take the case, but the conservative justices apparently bought the notion that a president could have a citizen assassinated and go scot-free. I always thought that the Justice Department’s policy that it could not indict a sitting president was not only counterproductive but unsupported by the Constitution. But the high court has gone further and has made the president just short of being a king. It fashioned this new protocol out of whole cloth.

Medical Freedom. This is perhaps an odd label. I believe that the details of your medical care should be a matter between you and your doctor, free of governmental meddling. Despite what Kamala Harris and other politicians say about returning to “Roe v. Wade,” I think this is the wrong goal. The government should have nothing to say at all about abortions. It is impossible to cover adequately all conceivable situations in law, and we should trust the good judgment of women and physicians, who are sworn to ethical standards. There should be an exceedingly high bar for the government to clear to outlaw or prohibit any medical procedure, particularly ones widely accepted by the medical community. Abortion agreed upon by patient and physician should be everywhere legal. In many places and too many circumstances, there is a presumption that abortion involves misconduct. Although congressional action could deem abortion generally licit, a constitutional amendment may be necessary. It could guarantee a right to medical care. I do not think the ERA (see below) would be completely effective.

Religious Freedom. Americans should be justly proud of the First Amendment, particularly its guarantees of freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, and of the right to petition the government. The Supreme Court, however, has screwed up the religious freedom thing. The Founders had seen the negative effects of religious conflict and the toxic consequences of established religion. They sought to put an end to religious discord with these words: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof … .” The “free exercise” of religion meant that Americans could worship in whatever manner they saw fit. It did not mean that you can harm me and claim that your religion (or God) made you do it. Free exercise of religion should be like free exercise of speech; you cannot yell “fire” falsely in a theater, and you cannot destroy another’s reputation with knowingly false assertions. In other words, you cannot use religion as an excuse to harm others or to undermine legitimate societal norms. But the Supreme Court has allowed merchants to discriminate on the basis of religiously held beliefs about homosexuality and has allowed a secular company to avoid providing medical benefits that Congress has said are mandatory. Maybe Congress can fix this; perhaps not.

Second Amendment. Not only has the Supreme Court ignored that the amendment did not anticipate the advent of modern firearms, but it also ignored some of the most important words of the Second Amendment text: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State … . Of course, the militias of 1791 do not exist today. At any rate, Congress can regulate arms. Machine guns have long been banned, and no one believes that civilians have a right to keep nuclear weapons. Assault weapons should be banned (as they once were) and existing weapons should be confiscated, probably in a buy-back program. (No politician I know of has advocated such a rational policy.) It isn’t clear whether Congress can keep firearms off the streets, but it should try. An amendment to the Second Amendment may be needed. Gun cases are another major area in which Supreme Court Justices have simply made up law out of whole cloth. We need to put an end to that.

Chevron Deference. Capitalism has been enormously successful at creating wealth and, to a degree, spreading that wealth around. Because humans can be rapacious, ignorant, or morally insensitive, it is necessary for the government to regulate certain activities for the benefit of the populace generally. Congress has wisely delegated much of this regulation to executive branch departments run by subject-matter experts whose competence necessarily outweighs that of members of Congress. The Supreme Court used to assume the competence and good-faith regulation by government agencies. The court has thrown that assumption out the window and made it much easier for industry to challenge regulations. The court’s predilection for textualism has also led conservative justices to view the remit of agencies as narrowly as possible. This is something else Congress needs to fix.

Campaign Financing. The way we finance political campaigns is a mess. It has been converted into a national disaster by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. That decision has allowed virtually unlimited expenditures by corporations in favor of a candidate as long as the effort is not made in consultation with that candidate’s campaign committee. That is a theoretical and an unenforceable restriction. I would argue that, if corporations are people, they should have the same restrictions on contributions to a candidate as do you or I, that is, thousands of dollars, not tens of millions of dollars. Many would like to see public financing of campaigns. There is something to be said for this idea, but I am not convinced it is workable. It is generally believed that a constitutional amendment is needed to undo the effects of Citizens United. Additionally, the Federal Election Commission itself needs reform. Its composition of three Democrats and three Republicans have made the body incapable of agreeing on just about anything.

Supreme Court. Every federal judge, but not Supreme Court justices, is subject to a mandatory ethics code. But Supreme Court Justices have refused to apply such a code to themselves. Meanwhile, justices accept lavish gifts that, if they do not buy particular outcomes, certainly buy influence. It is time to put a stop to this. Moreover, the current court is increasingly out of step with the country, and our touted system of checks and balances has little effect on the court. Justices can be impeached but, in fact, never are. Both the president and Congress have checks on their behavior; Supreme Court justices essentially have none. There is no easy fix, but a larger court or a court with term limits would deter a runaway ideological court. Adding more justices would not only make the court less likely to be captured by a radical faction, but it would also allow the court to take more cases and probably adjudicate them better.

ERA. The Equal Rights Amendment was first proposed by women’s advocates in 1923. It asserted that:

Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

The amendment has taken a troubled road to adoption. The requisite number of states have voted in favor of it, though some have attempted to rescind their adoption. There is also a question of time limits for adoption imposed by Congress. It appears that the National Archives and Records Administration has the power to declare the amendment an accepted amendment to the Constitution. That this would be controversial may not be the greatest difficulty. The word “sex” is rather more expansive today than it was in 1923. Would the Supreme Court conclude that the amendment protects biological women but not intersex or transgender women? In most circumstances, all people should enjoy the same rights. (Being in prison will certainly limit some rights, of course.) It is asserted that having the ERA in the Constitution would guarantee the right to an abortion. I am skeptical of this assertion.

Voting Rights. The beneficial effects of the 1965 Voting Rights Act have been greatly diminished by Supreme Court decisions. Republicans have taken advantage of those decisions to make it harder to vote and easier to remove people from the voting rolls or intimidate them into not voting. The Voting Rights Act should be amended to require pre-clearance of voting-related changes throughout the country, not just in a few states. Being a citizen of 18 years or more should automatically make you a voter. That right should not be able to be taken away from a citizen even if that person is incarcerated. (This is probably not a popular viewpoint.)  Exceptions should probably be made for the mentally incompetent, but the bar for removing voting rights should be very high. I would like to see more uniform voting rules throughout the country, but the Constitution largely leaves details to the states.

House Reform. The membership of the House of Representatives has been capped at 435 since 1929. Not only have we added states to the Union since them, but also the population has greatly expanded.  The more the population grows, the less effective is the individual’s representation in the House, that is, the less democratic the House becomes. The size of the House should be allowed to expand. Additional, the District of Columbia should be added as the 51st state. Its population is, after all, substantially larger than that of the smallest state, Wyoming. The House is also less representative because state legislatures engage in gerrymandering. This is hard to fix at a national level. Allowing apportionment to be determined by nonpartisan committees rather than by state legislatures would help.

Senate Reform. The Senate should eliminate the filibuster. It is undemocratic, as it allows a minority to control what the Senate can accomplish. Further, there should be a time limit for the Senate to hold hearings on presidential appointments. If the Senate does not hold an up-or-down vote in a specified period of time, the appointment should be automatically approved. Reforming Senate rules, which the body can do itself, is a small part of what makes the Senate undemocratic. The allocation of two senators to every state means that, in the Senate, small population states wield much more influence than is justified. The two senators from Wyoming represent far fewer souls than those of California or New York. Moreover, the small-population states tend to be more rural and more reactionary than the population of the nation as a whole. The Founders did not contemplate the kind of population disparity among the states that we have now. An anti-democratic Senate is hard to fix. Small states would surely oppose an amendment reducing their power, and that power even extends to an outsized influence on amendment ratification. I would advocate giving each state one senator and giving the larger states two or three senators, depending upon population.

Electoral College. No civilized country other than the United States elects its chief executive via an arcane system such as our Electoral College. It was adopted as a compromise by the Founders. Its major features are that (1) it gives undue influence to small, rural states, (2) it allows election by minority vote, and (3) as we discovered in 2020, the system has too many points at which malign actors can manipulate the system to their benefit. A constitutional amendment to elect the president and vice president by a majority vote of the citizens would be quite straightforward. However, implementing my suggestions for the Senate and House would, as a byproduct, make the Electoral College more democratic. Short of that, states are free to allot electoral votes other than in a winner-take-all fashion. Some states already do this. One helpful change would allot 2 votes to the candidate receiving the most votes in the state and 1 vote to the winner in each congressional district.

Immigration. No one believes our immigration system is rational or effective. And yet, (1) we need immigration to provide labor in our rapidly aging labor market, and (2) we have both a moral and legal obligation to provide asylum for persecuted arrivals from elsewhere. As long as Democrats want to fix the system and Republicans want to keep the system broken to use it as a campaign issue, nothing useful will get done. To improve the system, Congress needs to appropriate money, money for more agents at the border, and money for more judges who can adjudicate cases quickly, rather than in 10 years or so. In general, we need to create an effective way for people to apply to come to the U.S. and a determination to remove anyone who fails to use the system or cannot qualify. Kamala Harris has suggested putting immigration centers in countries from which there is a heavy immigration demand. This makes sense, but any real solution is more complex than I can suggest here.

Minimum Wage. The federal minimum wage can be a powerful tool to lift workers out of poverty. Unfortunately, it has not nearly kept pace with inflation. Had it done so, the present minimum wage would be around $20/hour. Not only should Congress raise the minimum wage, it should also index it for inflation.  (All government benefit programs should be indexed for inflation.) Will this increase prices? Probably, but we can afford it. Inadequate personal income has both direct and indirect costs that can be minimized by the change. Also, the special minimum wage for tip workers should be eliminated. (Not taxing tips is a demented idea, even if Kamala Harris and Donald Trump both advocate it.) The U.S. tipping system is unfair and manipulative and should be done away with. It has also gotten out of hand—tip jars are appearing everywhere these days. People should be expected to perform their jobs without additional subsidies from customers.

Middle East. The U.S. has long been willing to support Israel with all the economic and military support it claims to need, irrespective of its internal or external actions. When Israel does something outrageous, allowing illegal expanded West Bank Israeli settlements, for example, the U.S. denounces the action but does nothing of substance. We never cut off funds; we never cut off arms. Netanyahu has been gleefully bombing Gaza back into the Stone Age and now seems to be doing the same to Lebanon. The U.S. should condemn the Israeli actions and cut off all aid until a ceasefire is in place. We say we want a two-state solution to the Middle East problem but do nothing to make it happen. Netanyahu wants to avoid such an outcome at all costs. I have no idea how to bring about a desirable outcome. Both Democrats and Republicans have strongly supported Israel for fear of losing Jewish votes. Well, not all American Jews support this craven policy. We should do the right thing, even if it loses some votes. No one will propose that during a presidential election campaign.

Ukraine. We have applied two principles to the Russia/Ukraine war:  (1) We support nations in their resistance to foreign aggression and oppose territorial gains by force. (2) Russian military capabilities scare us to death. These policies have led us to support Ukraine against the Russian invasion. We appear to favor Ukraine’s not losing the war, whatever that means, but have failed to provide the wherewithal for a Ukrainian victory. Kamala Harris has recently suggested that she does favor a Ukraine victory. Donald Trump has consistently ducked the question of his preference in the war. It is widely believed that he would favor an immediate Ukraine surrender to Russia. I believe that Ukraine should be able to attack Russian assets in Russia. Russia, after all, is getting substantial help from North Korea, Iran, and, perhaps China. Ukraine cannot win by engaging only in defense. It would likely be foolhardy to attack the Kremlin, but military assets within Russia should be fair game.

Taxation. The federal government is not spending too much; it is taxing too little. Given that we are in the middle of a presidential election, the two major candidates show no reluctance to propose new programs or tax cuts, but they studiously avoid telling us how they plan to pay for them. Democrats gleefully devise new programs without an associated revenue source. Republicans just as gleefully cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy, justified by the provably false theory that benefits will trickle down to everyone else. This cannot go on forever. We must either tweak the system to generate more government income, or radically change the system. Tweaks would include increasing the capital gains rate, as Kamala Harris has advocated, for example. She has suggested a modest increase, but the capital gains rate should be eliminated completely. Why should someone who earns money from the stock market be taxed at a lower rate than someone earning money through physical labor? Other useful changes are possible. The government’s having extracted insufficient revenue from the wealthy has led to a nation in which the gap between the wealthy and everyone else has grown larger and larger. A more radical revision of the tax code might be an implementation of what I have called an “expenditure tax,” a scheme closely related to a value-added tax. Such a tax would have caused Elon Musk to be highly taxed on his $44 billion purchase of Twitter. See the blog post linked above for details.

Housing. It is widely believed that there is a housing crisis in this country. Housing is expensive and often unavailable. The COVID pandemic exacerbated the housing shortage, as fewer units were being built. In any case, few affordable units were being built. Kamala Harris’s plan to subsidize new home buyers will only worsen the problem by increasing demand. We need more supply. The federal government can do only so much. Local zoning laws that demand single-family dwellings are a big part of the problem. Rich consortia’s buying up houses and converting them to rental properties is not helping matters. We may have to rethink what cities and, particularly, suburbs, should look like.

Childcare. Capitalism has failed to create a workable market for childcare. The service is expensive and often unavailable at any price. The quality of the service provided is uneven, partly because qualified people can usually make more money in a different occupation. Yet daycare is important. It is needed to allow middle-class women to work to support their families. It is needed for less skilled women to allow them to work and improve their skills to move into the former group. When a market is broken and has no chance of becoming viable, the government must step in. The federal government should probably subsidize daycare. Perhaps the public school model should be applied to public daycare.

Healthcare. American healthcare is a mess. It is slightly less of a mess because of Obamacare, but that change was more about providing health insurance rather than health care. I believe that healthcare should be a right and should be available free of charge, within reason. (Some treatments, particularly new and experimental ones, are outrageously expensive. We are fond of saying how much we value human life, but can cannot logically place an infinite value on it.) The Declaration of Independence spoke of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Life requires healthcare. A Medicare-for-all system would be an improvement, though it still involves private insurance. For a variety of reasons, we probably should not nationalize the entire health system.

Trade. Our trade policy is not substantially broken, but it is on its way. A President Trump will surely break it. Free trade, as economics predicts, increases wealth for all parties. We have recently learned some important lessons that complicate the trade calculation. First, transportation disruptions have widespread deleterious effects. Second, relying on unfriendly nations for resources needed for our national defense is risky. We have been moving to ameliorate the critical resources problem. The transportation risk is more troublesome and is largely the responsibility of the private sector. Donald Trump, as a cornerstone of his proposed economic program, would place tariffs on nearly all imports. Not only would this increase the cost of living for all Americans, but it would also likely set off a global trade war that would make the whole world poorer.

I'm not sanguine about any of the problems described above. Should Donald Trump be elected in November, the prospect for a felicitous American future will largely disappear.

A friend chided me for saying nothing about climate or environment, as we surely need a livable world in which to thrive.

I agree, of course, that we should protect the environment, including all living things within it. I also agree that we must do all we can to diminish climate change and mitigate its effects. We are working on these tasks, albeit desultorily. Circumstances will eventually increase the perceived need to act with greater urgency. The immediate need on this front is to assure that Donald Trump does not again become president, as his concern for these matters is imperceptible.

Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan, in a New York Times essay, “The Supreme Court Has Grown Too Powerful. Congress Must Intervene.,” suggest that Congress can save us from an out-of-control Supreme Court. Salvation, however, requires that the House, Senate, and president agree on a plan of action. How likely is that?

— LED, 9/29/2024, rev. 10/12/2024

 
Send mail to Lionel Deimel with questions or comments about Lionel Deimel’s Farrago.
Copyright © 2000-2026 by Lionel Deimel. All rights reserved.