The two key constitutional changes I would make to the American Presidency both deal with the way a president is elected rather than with his powers once he gets into office. (Probably because that's the only part I feel qualified to opine on, honestly. But still.) The first and most obvious is the abolition of the electoral college. Maybe it made sense in a time when the population was poorly educated, news could take weeks to travel, and vote-counting was all done by hand, but now its a totally anachronistic system that should have gone out the window when we started popularly electing Senators. Of all the countries that have used our Constitution as a model for their own, none has chosen to emulate the ridiculously oblique, convoluted method we use to divine our next President. Would the average American even be able to explain how the electoral college works? Probably not. Should they have to? No, because it's stupid!
Why, you ask? Oh, my readers, the problems surrounding the mess that is the electoral college are vast and multifaceted. Here are just a few of them:
1.Having a system where someone could gain the popular vote and still lose the election just seems so inherently anti-American. No matter what their political affiliation, the idea of a President that wasn't popularly elected is just utterly at odds with the collective notion of what's right. Shouldn't an incoming President have the support of the majority of the nation? Or else who in the world is he representing?
2.The electoral college gives unfair weight to smaller states. Under this system, not all votes are created equal. Yes, the number of electoral votes states receive are divided sorta kinda on population numbers, but look at this comparison*:
Wyoming: population- 544,270 electoral votes- 3
California: population- 36,961,664 electoral votes- 55
One Wyoming vote: 5.512 e^-6 One California vote: 1.488 e^-6
This means the vote of someone in Wyoming counts over three times as much as the vote of someone in California. wtf electoral college? What kind of game are you playing? Are the states as entities electing a president then? Why does that make the people of Wyoming as an entity over three times as important as the people of California?? So many questions, so little logic!
3. Then to make things even more frustrating, since the vast majority of states have a winner-take-all system for distributing electoral college votes, many people's votes end up not counting for anything at all. And in states that reliably swing one way or another, it can be a major depressant to voter turnout. Why bother, if you know which way your state is going to go anyway? Switching to a direct election could have nothing but a positive effect on voter turnout levels.
4. In modern-day practice in most states, electors are (according to convention) all supposed to vote the way a majority of the people in their state vote, right? So at some level we already accept the notion of a popular vote. There's really no point in keeping all these unnecessary, cumbersome steps in between.
Sadly, since you need 3/4ths of states to ratify an amendment for it to pass in real life, and small states benefit from this so disproportionately, I don't see the electoral college going away any time soon.
Hmm. I have no idea how long these journals are supposed to be, but I have the feeling that this one is definitely crossing the line into WAY too annoyingly long, so I'll try and make the second point more brief: Campaigns have become prohibitively dependent on a never-ending, ever-increasig quest for funds.
It puts the emphasis of an election in entirely the wrong place. Rather than being focused on the relative merits, platforms, and visions of the candidates, it becomes a question of cold hard cash and who has more of it. According to Politico, the 2008 presidential elections alone cost over a BILLION dollars.** Cause, you know, it's not like there's anything more useful we could have done with that kind of money... (ooh, hey. What if all the money candidates raised above a certain amount had to go to something useful? Like paying down the national debt, or funding poor schools, or investing in clean technology R&D? Completely unworkable, but whatev.)
Anyway. The hunt for campaign contributions has an unhealthy and corrosive effect on American politics, especially in light of the recent Citizens United ruling. I want a candidate to win because they're legitimately the best choice, not because they made the most promises to big businesses or hosted the most $3,000 a plate dinners. That's why I'm in favor of publicly financed elections. I mean, I know we already have a weak, optional version of publicly financed elections, but I want something much stricter. Something that puts caps on the total amount that candidates can spend, and that companies / unions / non-profits can spend on their behalf. Something that demolishes the unsound notion that equates "money" with "speech". I'm not going to try and write the exact language for it, but our Constitution could definitely do with some strict limits on campaign spending.
To close, a couple things worth pondering more:
- The line-item veto, and whether we're more helped or harmed by granting the president that kind of broad additional authority.
- The enactment of some sort of presidential "Question Time," the way the British Parliament does it. I'm way jealous that British people get to have Question Time and we don't. It's so much cooler than the State of the Union.
- The concept of executive privilege makes me really squeamy, but I don't know how I would go about changing it. I know there are somethings that need to be kept secret, but it's just so easily abused. This one's not explicitly in the constitution, but if I'm remembering right it falls under a whole 'separation of powers' deal.
*numbers all according to US Census Bureau, 2009.
**http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15283.html
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