12 Uncommon Suggestions for Amending the Constitution

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Last week, I solicited suggestions for Constitutional amendments. Many of the responses were familiar: There are ongoing debates about the extent to which corporations should be treated as people, for example, and both sides in the abortion debate were keen on permanently codifying their preferences. I appreciate all the email, but below I've decided to focus on the suggestions that I've never seen widely discussed or debated, the better to provoke civic thought. Except where otherwise indicated, I express no opinion about whether these are good or bad ideas.

Keep Your Laws Off Their Bodies

Terry Rolon writes:

Legal jargon aside, an adult person should be sovereign over their own bodies and free to do anything they wish to it without limit. They ought to be able to ingest anything, even if it kills them. They ought to be able end their life at any time for any reason. The decision to do so ought to be outside the reach of government.

Says Sarath Krishnaswamy:

Congress shall pass no law regarding actions between or among consenting adults on private property, where the effects of such actions are reasonably wholly contained to the sphere of said adults, said express consent, and said property.

This would seem to make possible a legal market for kidneys.

How About a Parliament?

Several readers suggested changing America's legislative branch to a European-style body that gives proportional representation to lots of competing political parties. What I'd never seen or thought of before is the suggestion of leaving Congress in place as it is, but adding a parliamentary body.

A tricameral legislature! A reader writes:

I'd like to add a third legislative body: a parliament. All new parties allowed. The parliament would appoint the vice president, who would act in tandem with the president, something like Cheney.

The parliament would be able to override both the Senate and the House if either splits on a bill. That is, if a bill passes the House, but not the Senate, the Parliament can pass the law which is sent to the President for signing (or veto). If the bill passes the Senate but not the House, the same. The Parliament would also be able to introduce legislation, which, at its discretion, can be sent to either the House or the Senate...

This would be more palatable to me if the Parliament could override the House but not the Senate.

Better Safeguarding the Constitution

Peter Jewett writes:

Citizens shall have standing to challenge the constitutionality of any federal law, executive order, or regulation. We wouldn't have to sit around and wait for elusive perfect plaintiffs (who have been harmed individually, who know they've been harmed, and can prove they've been particularly harmed) to settle whether an issue (Obamacare, drone strikes, warrantless wiretaps, federal funding of religion, etc.) are constitutional. Taxpayer standing would settle the issue almost immediately. It would lead to more litigation, but Congress could authorize a particular process for expediting the issue through a particular court or panel, to the Supreme Court.

Transparency

A reader writes:

The public shall have the right to access all classified information after a period of 20 years.

Says another:

The power to classify information shall henceforth be vested in the judiciary with oversight by the Senate, which cannot classify material, but can make public anything wrongly classified.

Bill Cornett writes:

Any citizen has the absolute and complete right to record the words and actions of any government official acting in an overt manner with any member of the public. This right will also extend to the words and actions of anyone working on the behalf of any government agency or quasi-government entity of any type. No notice need be given. It shall be prohibited for anyone subject to recording under this amendment to force a citizen to abrogate this right as a requirement for interaction or proper action on the part of the entity from which they derive their authority.

The New Nullification

A reader writes:

A Federal law or regulation shall be repealed when articles of repeal are ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several states.

Says another:

States laws may grant more freedom than Federal laws, but never less. In the event the two laws conflict, the law granting greater personal freedom shall prevail.

Radical Criminal-Justice Reform

A reader suggests:

All nonviolent crimes shall be punished by means other than incarceration.

Says another:

Each year every member of Congress shall spend at least one consecutive day and night in a regular cell inside a randomly selected federal prison that is located inside his or her state.

Says a third:

All prisons shall be outfitted with streaming video cameras that any citizen can access over the Internet, the better to protect prisoners against abuse.

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/9wFIJNj16UI/story01.htm

State Spending on Preschool Hits 10-Year Low

Jason Reed/Reuters

Even as President Obama launches a massive push to expand preschool opportunities for young children, early childhood education advocates are expressing dismay over a new report that access and funding have hit 10-year lows.

The president's plan would expand opportunities for families that don't have the means to pay for private preschool programs but also earn too much to qualify for existing state programs aimed at children in poverty. Advocates contend that early education is an essential component to leve! ling the playing field for at-risk children, and to the nation's long-term economic well-being.

Here are a few of the sure-to-be-sound-bite statistics in the State of Preschool 2012 Yearbook, compiled by the National Institute for Early Education Research, which went so far as to call it a "state of emergency":

• Among the 40 states that offer pre-K programs, funding dropped by more than $548 million -- the largest one-year decline in a decade.
• Only 15 states and the District of Columbia provide enough funding for programs to meet all 10 of the institute's quality benchmarks.
• For the first ! time since the yearbook began in 2002, preschool enrollment na! tionally didn't increase enough to keep pace with population growth, a result of states not having enough seats to meet the need.

W. Steven Barnett, director of the institute, said in a call with reporters that the discouraging data reflects a decade-long slide when it comes to the nation's investment in its youngest learners. States' contributions -- supplemented by federal dollars and additional local sources -- totaled $5.1 billion over 39 states and the District of Columbia. Ten states provided no funding for early learning.

Barnett said it's important to note that the steep drop in state spending on early childhood education programs was exacerbated by the fact that at least $127 million in federal stimulus dollars that had been used in the prior year were no longer there. But the recession is not to blame, Barnett said, pointing out that funding has been on a ste! ady downward slide for a decade.

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Will Obama's Plans for Early Education Go Up In Smoke?

White House Shares Details of Early Learning Plans

State of the Union: President's Push for More Early Learn! ing

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Equally troubling to NIEER is that s! tudents are losing out on multiple fronts -- capacity has been cut in many states to save money, and the kids who do get a spot are often in more crowded classrooms with fewer resources. There is also less monitoring of individual programs through accountability measures such as site visits.

As the Los Angeles Times reported in February, the president's preschool plan is structured with Republicans in mind, particularly those who question the efficacy and management of the federal Head Start program. Rather than a wholesale expansion of Head Start, the new federal initiative would give states matching funds for preschool while allowing them to retain control over how programs were structured, provided certain "high quality" standards were met.

The president's plan would rely on a sharp hike in the federal cigarette tax, and that proposal is expected to meet stiff resistance by tobacco industry lobbyists. I asked Barnett where he would like to see states focus their efforts - albeit on a smaller budget -- if the new tax revenue doesn't come through. The first thing would be to "bring back the state capacity to monitor and support programs in continuous improvement," Barnett said, a necessary step to ensuring high-quality opportunities.

"States need to right the balance in terms of the trade-offs they make between enrollment and providing enough money to really make the preschool experience meaningful," Barnett said.

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This post also appears at The Educated Reporter, an Atlantic partner site.

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/wlUN7vlRuu4/story01.htm

The Glamorous Life of a Journalist, Cont.

LAX, 830 am, locating the only working electric socket along this corridor, knowing that the six-hour (United) flight coming up has no power ports or connectability. Reviewing final-final changes on an article that will "ship" while I am en route.

I tell myself that this hunched-gnome posture is because I am sitting on the floor. In any case, return to "normal" online presence impends. (Full "glamorous life" archives here.)

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/lh1rVVKnTM8/story01.htm

Money Buys Happiness and You Can Never Have Too Much, New Research Says

Reuters

Americans have a peculiar conviction that the one thing money can't give us is satisfaction. You can't buy happiness, we've all been told. "Mo Money Mo Problems", Biggie concurred. And while we can all agree that desperate poverty is hideous, there is a broadly held view that after a certain level of income (around $75,000, say), more money doesn't buy more well-being.

But it's just not so. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers! have been arguing for years that, yes, richer families tend to be happier, and no, there is not an automatic cut-off point. In other words: Mo money, fewer problems.

Their elegant and straightforward new paper can be nicely summed up in the two graphs below. The first graph looks at income groups within countries. In all nations surveyed, richer households reported more life satisfaction. (Statistical note: This graph is logarithmic. That means doubling your income from $1,000 to $2,000 raises satisfaction by the same amount as doubling your income from $10,000 to $20,000. You can imagine why this might make a good theoretical case for income redistribution.)

The next graph compares different countries, rather than different households within countries. Here, each circle represents a nation, with the richest ones clustered on the right. If extra income didn't matter for well-being, you'd expect the line to flatten. Instead, it steepens. More money doesn't just mean happier families. It means happier countries.

But Biggie was onto something. Even though the United States seems to score the highest in life satisfaction in the first graph, other studies have suggested an overall flat-lining of happiness here. Economist Daniel Kahneman found that people earning above $75,000 "do not appear to enjoy either more positive affect nor less negative affect than those earning just below that," Stevenson and Wolfers report. In a past paper, the duo found that, although the U.S economy had doubled in size since the early 1970s, overall well-being has declined.

Stevenson and Wolfers' two-part explanation could be summed up as, well, mo money, mo problems. Those problems would be social turmoil (such as the rise of single-parent househol! ds) and income inequality, which they suggested could act as a tax on s! elf-reported satisfaction, counteracting the effects of rising total income.

That's not a reason to stop reaching for policies that grow the pie. But it might be a reason to consider better policies to divide it so that more reaches the poorest families.

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/52oYgP21TyA/story01.htm

When He Talks Abortion President Obama Pretends to Be a Libertarian

Reuters

Addressing Planned Parenthood last week, President Obama made what must be one of the least self-aware statements of his tenure. "Forty years after the Supreme Court affirmed a woman's constitutional right to privacy, including the right to choose, we shouldn't have to remind people that when it comes to a woman's health, no politician should get to decide what's best for you," he said. "No insurer should get to decide what kind of care that you get. The only person who should get to make decisions about your health is you."

It's no secret that Obama supports a woman's right to choose,! in consultation with her doctor, whether getting an abortion is appropriate. Contrary to his rhetoric, however, Obama doesn't believe that American women should alone be empowered to decide what's best for their health as a general matter. However emphatically he proclaims the opposite, Obama verily believes that politicians like him ought to interfere in myriad decisions about personal medical care. It is illegitimate for him to invoke the language of liberty to score points on this set of issues.

If "the only person who should get to make decisions about your health is you," why has Obamacare mandated that all Americans buy health insurance, whether they want it or not? Why isn't he championing the right of people to decide, with their doctors, to take medical marijuana? Why does he favor laws that prohibit kidney donors from being compensated for their organ? Why does he favor FDA rules that prevent sick people who want to try new drugs from doing so u! ntil the drugs have gone through a lengthy approval process? I! f "no insurer should get to decide what kind of care that you get," why does he favor a federal panel that would evaluate treatments covered by Medicare and stop reimbursing doctors for the ones deemed ineffective or less effective than alternatives, regardless of what a patient and her doctor wanted?

The issue isn't whether Obama's actual positions are prudent or imprudent. It's just highly misleading for him to invoke liberty as if it's his guiding principle. He shouldn't be allowed to obscure the fact that he favors limiting the ability of Americans to make all sorts of decisions about their own health. If he were being honest, he'd say, "It just isn't prudent to have a healthcare system or a broader public policy norm whereby individuals are the only ones empowered to make decisions about their health. Other stakeholders, including politicians, bureaucrats, insurance companies and the American Medical Association must to have a role." That statement would pr! obably be very unpopular with Americans. But it accurately captures the approach to health care policy that Obama has taken as president. Like many pro-choice Americans, he employs rhetoric when talking about abortion that makes it sound as if he is far more libertarian than is justified by his other positions. Americans shouldn't be fooled.

URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheAtlantic/~3/A8fsacjSkPY/story01.htm!