Unity08. A people's movement to take our country back.

You are right. Unity08 deserves its own constitutional amendment as part of its political platform.

Very well. I amend my motion to adopt as a Constitutional Amendment: Congress shall make no social laws for itself excluding the public at large from participating.

ex animo
davidfarrar

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The Constitution is amendable, and was always meant to be. We elect Representatives to make statutory laws, but Constitutional law requires broader participation, albeit usually just state legislatures in addition to Congress. However, there is nothing to prevent us from amending the Constitution to make our nation more democratic. The role of the people does not necessarily have to end at voting, and if we achieved such democracy, it would not be anarchy, except in the most idealistic definition, that of having no rulers above us, but instead to be self-governing. That is the goal of both democracy and anarchism in their most ideal forms, but I get the impression you were not using it that way. Please forgive me if I am wrong about that.

Just because empire is an ugly word doesn't mean you don't live in one.

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It isn't very well thought out. But it is a powerful issue. And as Bill73 rightly pointed it, it probably should be in the form of a constitutional amendment, which is even better.

I don't think it's right for Congress to vote itself a raise without public authorization. In this same amendment we could also forbid Congress from raising its own salaries. The issue could be placed before the People at the ballot box at a general election.

ex animo
davidfarrar
In addition, as I pointed out in my motion, I am open to friendly amendments.

ex animo
davidfarrar

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I don't think he was trying to suggest that the people should vote on such issues, but rather that people, that is all Americans, should benefit equally from the health care and retirement plans that Congress grants itself.

Just because empire is an ugly word doesn't mean you don't live in one.

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My only concern is how you want to go about getting it adopted by Unity08. As long as you place whatever your plan is before the delegate-membership of Unity08 for their support or rejection, I'm okay with it. It's just that simple.

Now, as to my motion: I am not quite sure I understand your amendment. Would you, or anyone, word it in a more concise manner so we can perhaps incorporate it into the motion?

ex animo

davidfarrar

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I make a motion to adopt as a plank in Unity08's political platform that...
All legislation pertaining to wage, health care, and retirement benefit packages for federal elected officials must be approved by two-thirds of the state legislatures before it become law. If not approved within a two year period, the current wage, health care, retirement package remains in force.

Can I get a second?

Or if you have an additional friendly amendment, please publish it here for discussion and possible adoption into the main motion.

If you support this motion, as amended, please mark the five stars to register your support for this motion.

ex animo
davidfarrar

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Previously, I briefly reviewed your website. I must say that I did not study the various proposals and ideas in detail. What I did find and understand you to mean makes us of similar minds. For instance, there is a thread in this forum that asks people for their top three issues to which I merely named one: Transparency in Government. Now, if I understand you correctly, we are not far apart in our thoughts about how to rein in government and make it accountable to the people. I believe the number one issue that goes further than any other proposal to resolve any issue with government legislation is the people's ability to make government behavior transparent and, thus, accountable. I would say that, with transparency, your proposal for the application of effective and recognized management practices to legislation; Unity08 could be the vehicle to take us through all the cobwebs.

That being said, maybe I can get you to expound a little on the vehicle you are proposing by addressing some thoughts I have about specifics. There are a number of practical, Constitutional, and time frame issues that can not be inferred without a delineation of what the pillars of your proposal's structure would look like in real life.

For the sake of discussion, lets assume we are talking about, say, the implementation of a "Peoples' Oversight Committee". (Feel free to change this model.) I am not sure how the committee would be constituted and am hoping you can expound more. One thing we know is that it would have access to the building blocks of proposed legislation through the Freedom of Information Act. The trick would be to couple this transparency with a required legislative review process that enhances the people's ability to proactively push for compliance within the parameters of the Constitution and The Bill of Rights. Its objective would be to make legislation reflective of what the people want --- not entities like corporations, special interest groups, or foreign governments.

Now, what is not clear to me is the mechanism that would permit the committee to effectively enforce government compliance. For instance, how would the committee get government to start using a method of prioritizing legislation to address the people's concerns? The dangers I see for the institution of a People's Oversight Committee are Constitutional in nature. Certain powers and authority are expressly given to the President and to Congress which mere oversight can not alter. While transparency may enable the committee to enlist the power of the people, time frames for action put the committee at a disadvantage. How is it possible to force the implementation of widely recognized and accepted management practices when it takes so much of our collective voice to get representatives to hear us? While we may be able to speak loudly enough to stop earmarks and reduce the influence of special interest groups, if caught in time; how is it possible to override or influence the constitutional perogatives of officials?

As I am not familiar with Dick Morris' book nor the specifics of your proposal, I have more questions than I have solid input. Maybe you are just saying that this should be the focus of Unity08, I am not sure.

I appreciate you saying that you would like to hear my feedback. However, I'm afraid I probably have more questions than solid input. I think that is so because ideas always become a little hazy as they go from theory to fact. I look forward to reading your response.

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Okay, in an effort to understand your proposal, let me try this again. When you say we need a "Governing Body that has all the skills and experience it takes to Effectively Manage The World's Largest Corporation ..." I take it you mean senior government appointees. The reason I say appointees is because the president and congress are both elected and their qualifications are already scrutinized at the ballot box by the voters. I don't believe you are talking about career civil servants either because these people already have to meet established requirements for their positions. That only leaves appointees. So, you want the practice of making appointments based on politics to cease. Instead, your proposal is that only skilled, experienced, knowledgeable, and proven managers be appointed to head the major government departments.

Here is some supporting documentation for your proposal # 1:

The Brookings Institution, in its Presidential Appointee Initiative states that,
• The secret to regaining the public's trust may be both obvious and politically unassailable: presidents should make clear that qualifications always are more important than political connections in the choice of nominees.

I can agree with you that we ought to present this question to any prospective Unity08 candidate to learn whether they will implement an appointment approach that places a premium on the need to appoint people to senior level positions based on their skills and experience instead of politics.

The second part of your proposal says, The Management Disciplines in place and functional to Eliminate Mistakes By Accident or Design ... This builds upon part one. I think the words you are using make it appear that you are mistakenly putting the cart before the horse. While it seems to be a sound notion and a good question to ask if a candidate has a management plan for governing, to expect to have these management disciplines already functioning in the government is outside of the control of someone that is running for the position now. (I am not trying to be picky about semantics, I just want to understand and be accurate. A lot of miscommunication happens when we write online and cannot interact as we would in a verbal conversation.)

I would like to take your second thought one step further and ask the candidate how they would seek reform for a corrupt system so that we never again have political appointees in place of knowledgeable, skilled, and competent managers. It would be good to ask how a candidate intends to insure more permanent reform through tools like Executive Order, proposed legislation to Congress, or would he/she take a more in-depth approach with a study and recommendations?

I do agree with the concept that Appointees are not there in a political capacity to use their office to further their political agenda. They are there to effectively manage the resources of a department so as to efficiently carry out the laws of the land. To do that, I agree that we need proven managers that are skilled and experienced in that particular area. And there also needs to be proven management disciplines applied to the enormous task of running the government in the most efficient way possible. Only then can we tell if the legislation that is enacted is really working as intended.

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Popo, thanks for your response. I think I have a better idea of what you are saying now. I feel much more comfortable having a discussion about the merits of your thought. Two heads, or many heads, are always better than one when it comes to brainstorming about ideas.

I don't think America is simply a large corporation that has to be managed more effectively. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights make up the living and breathing ideals for operating within a framework that we call our government. While those ideals are not the same thing "as" our government, it would be a mistake to think that government's purpose is to simply "manage" those ideals.

Ideals embodied in the Constitution and The Bills of Rights, attributed to our Founding Fathers like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, are based on earlier ideals espoused by the Philosopher John Locke. Even the elegant Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson owes its core principles to the earlier and elegant Philosophy of John Locke.

John Locke's ideals from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

• "Much of Locke's work is characterized by opposition to authoritarianism. This opposition is both on the level of the individual person and on the level of institutions such as government and church. For the individual, Locke wants each of us to use reason to search after truth (my emphasis) rather than simply accept the opinion of authorities or be subject to superstition. He wants us to proportion assent to propositions to the evidence for them. On the level of institutions it becomes important to distinguish the legitimate from the illegitimate functions of institutions and to make the corresponding distinction for the uses of force by these institutions."

This tells me that ideals (embodied in the Constitution and the Bills of Rights) are subject to interpretation based on our reason and in proportion to which we determine that government can engage in its various activities. That is also why we can expect to have a population with a spectrum of differing belief systems - everyone has a different truth as individuals and how they view the role of government, based on their individual reason.

This is the foundation for us to elect representatives that believe as we do in our Democracy. There is no basis for me to believe that we have to manage ever changing truths with government managers. While a qualified manager approach may yield better efficiency for implementing static policies, I believe a managerial qualification requirement for our candidates would detract from changes that human reason undergoes. There is also a school of thought that thinks the term "Legislator" means that representatives should be lawyers because they understand the law better than you or I. I don't have to say why that is such a scary thought.

I don't know where ideas come from so I can't say that someone without any specific skill or experience will not come up with an idea that hits home with my reason. I also can not say that someone emminently skilled, experienced, and is a qualified manager is not suited to be my representative either. An analogy could be drawn with how medical school candidates are selected. I can't give you specific figures but, I do know that medical doctors are not merely selected from the ranks of Biology majors in colleges. Imagine that, we have medical doctors whose undergraduate studies were in English Literature. I don't think it would be good to establish specific managerial qualifications for our elected representatives.

I believe there is good reason why our Forefathers left specific qualifications other than age, citizenship, and residency out of the Constitution. I do think we need to scrutinize candidates better so we can determine they are principled and of high character.

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popo, that is sooo true! On Sunday, August 12th, I am sorta lazing before the TV screen, thinking about a project of mine, and then thought of getting a weather report, it was early so I flicked around for a local station, stopped on ABC, it had the ABC national news , meaning that the local news would be next. While I waited, ABC broadcast a segment on the tradegy of the 3 murdered college kids, and the one wounded college kid. Then to my somewhat should be jaded, amazement,the ABC newscasters went into a segue-topic-offshoot, don't know what, about how bad the people are in that area of the city, the crime rate being so high, the crime being inner-city, the crime is from poor and ... the crime is getting better... NOT ONCE NOT ONE TIME - did ABC mention or speak of the 26 year old ringleader, the illegal immigrant with the rap sheet that includes the rape of a five year old girl. Not one iota of a breath of a word.

I sat there in shock and am still in kind of a .. well I'd heard about the MSM (mainstream media) but that really ...really. You know what I mean.

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Rather than placing stricter limitations on who can serve in an elected office, which would in effect just make our government less democratic, let's get at the heart of what you are really saying.

It seems to me that your issue is with the nature of our election system, and how the issues have been replaced with hype. That is something on which I think most of us would agree. So, let's move toward changing the rules of the election process rather than limiting who can run. I personally would like to believe that the people are entirely capable of deciding between candidates IF they have access to the candidates' actual positions on the various issues with which they are concerned. The problem is that the entire political process has been removed from our lives, except the partisan aspect and the horse race. What we must do is to re-insert the actual politics, the issues, and to give the people ready access to these. Some of that is already occurring through the internet. Some candidates are creating websites that cover their positions on the issues they believe are important. However, there are still several problems with this:

1) Not everybody has internet access. This is also an issue with Unity that will surely need to be addressed, but as internet access becomes more widespread, it will become less of an issue.

1.a) Perhaps, the Unity presidential platform could include an initiative that would create a federal broadband ISP for low income households, and a computer recycling/redistribution program that would allow lower-income families to receive computers that are being discarded by others, but which are still functional and/or reparable.

1.b) At least until every American has internet access, we should try to remedy the problem in another way. I suggest a law that requires that the candidates for any federal (or state?) office must hold an open debate in every precinct of the jurisdiction for which they are running. OK, maybe that's unrealistic. Senatorial candidates would be spending all their time trying to cover every precinct in their state, and would get tired of having the same argument that many times. So, let's modify that. Candidates for any federal office must participate in at least three debates against all other legally registered candidates for that office, and that these debates must be televised throughout the jurisdiction for which the candidates are seeking office, and that open admission viewing areas must be made available to those without televisions in every precinct of that jurisdiction

I know that there are some flaws with that idea, but now it's out there, and you can suggest revisions, amendments, or entirely different ideas that might accomplish the purpose better.

2) We might also want to suggest a law that requires that all candidates for elected office must post a website with a page containing their positions on the issues that are most pertinent to the office they seek. Such a law might be going overboard. We might do better just telling people not to vote for anyone who doesn't post their positions on their website. Or maybe there is a middle ground of some sort. Perhaps there should be a governmental agency whose job is to create an unbiased website that lists every candidate for every office and their positions, and that this office should also be tasked with posting the same information in all newspapers relevant to any given race, and acquiring air time on appropriate radio and TV stations to make this information public knowledge.

I'm just working off the top of my head here, so none of these ideas are very well developed, but I think these would be better steps than trying to limit who can run for office. I would like to live in a democracy, with self-government by the people, and obviously, if most people are declared unfit for most offices before election processes even begin, we are moving far away from democracy.

Just because empire is an ugly word doesn't mean you don't live in one.

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Your plan is irrelevant. It has no legal standing, nor enforcement mechanism. Phil as much as said so in his last posting:Popo, thanks for your.

Be that as it may, go ahead and make your motion to adopt Peter's Plan and I will be glad to second it, if nothing else, so you won't suck the life out of anybody else's political plank discussions in the future.

But who am I kidding? You aren't going to make a motion to adopt your own plan, are you, Peter?

ex animo
davidfarrar

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