A Second Bill Of Rights

In 1944, Franklin D Roosevelt announced a second bill of rights. It basically went nowhere. In 2019, Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced the Green New Deal. It never advanced in the Senate.

I’ve written several reviews of books that have discussed, whether it’s through hugely successive socially conservative campaigns or through corporations overwhelming politics with campaign contributions or the shenanigans of the Senate filibuster, that in many ways our legislative process is broken.

The current state of the Republican party is seemingly content with the situation. Other than tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations and appointing conservative judges, they don’t really seem to have any political beliefs beyond that of grievance. In fact, if you remember, the national Republican party platform in 2020 quite literally said that it is whatever Donald Trump thinks it is. No matter what you think of Donald Trump, even his most passionate defenders would not accuse him of being a political theoretician.

So it’s up to the Democratic party to have the ideas. To their credit, they have scads, everything from infrastructure projects to family leave to police reform. The flaw is that they are trying to solve this via conventional national legislation, which currently is broken, and unless both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema change their minds, it will continue to be broken.

So, what can we do? The bad news is that there is no easy path forward. If we want the country to eventually get out of its rut, we have to have a national movement. The Green New Deal is one path forward, but it’s got so many things that it’s trying to accomplish that it’s easy to knock down as either gross federal overreach or some far off impossible Candy Mountain dream.

Cue Newt Gringrich (I bet you didn’t see that one coming, amirite?). In 1994, he and his fellow Republicans came up with the Contract With America. It was a simple set of laws that he promised to introduce, if he was elected Speaker of the House, on his first day in session. Although they hid legal complexity, the goal of the laws could fit on an index card. They were very understandable. I’m not saying that the Contract was the reason that the Republicans won the House majority for the first time in 40 years, but it didn’t hurt.

Especially with one party bereft of ideas and seemingly ideologically exhausted, now is the chance for the Democrats. However, I’m not proposing some simple legislation. I’m proposing, ala FDR, an entire new set of constitutional amendments.

I know that this is not a small thing. Especially in our broken political system, no meaningful amendment has been passed in fifty years. I think that this would need to be accomplished from the bottom up. The probability of getting 2/3 of both houses of Congress to propose a set of amendments is probably not happening. The alternative of getting 2/3 of the state legislatures to ask Congress call a constitutional convention seems even more daunting.

However, we are at a pivotal moment in our history. After the past 40 years of propaganda of how ineffective government is, how inefficient it is, how private enterprise always has the best answers, the past year of pandemic has shown that the federal government still has a role. If some form of Biden’s America Recovery Plan, America Jobs Plan, and American Family Plan passes and people see the positive role that government can play, then maybe there might an opportunity.

It would take years, probably over a decade. It would take grassroots efforts nationwide. It would take Democrats leaving their comfort zones of the cities to have serious conversations in people wearing MAGA hats.

Who knows? If the Democrats started having committed and focused conversations on real issues, then maybe the Republicans will respond with their own ideas. Crazier things have happened.

So what would a second bill of rights look like? Here’s my attempt. It’s an amalgam of FDR’s amendments, the Green New Deal, and reversing some bad court decisions that have been made over the last couple of decades. Notice that there’s not even ten of them!

Healthcare is available for all. Personal health decisions are personal decisions.

It’s pretty simple. If you get sick, you should be able to get help. It shouldn’t bankrupt you. Obviously, there’s a lot of complexity to this, but we’ve managed to figure out how to do it for people 65 and over, so you’d think that we could figure it out. Virtually every other developed nation has figured it out for all. The second issue is obviously about abortion. Look, I get it, it’s hard. I’m not comfortable with it. In fact, I guarantee you that if I ever get pregnant, that I would carry it to term. Also, I’m a 58 year old man. That’s kind of the point. I (and no one else) have no right to interject myself into a young woman’s decision.

Education is available to all.

I’m not saying that everyone goes to Harvard. It’s just that, especially in the 21st century, that human intellectual capital will be paramount in the race of nations. If the next Bill Gates is living in a trailer in rural Georgia, I want our country to do everything it can to allow them to maximize their opportunity. Again, many other nations have figured out funding higher education. It would seem that we can too.

Housing is available to all.

Having lived in downtown Seattle where homelessness was rampant, I saw first hand how critical this issue is. Living in the richest country in history, having people living in tents and cars because they have no other option is unconscionable.

All adults are entitled to a Universal Basic Income / Negative Income Tax.

Yes, this seems to go against the grain of American values. After all, we’re all just Horatio Algers struggling to life ourselves by our bootstraps, right? If you follow your dream, the money will follow, right?

In fact, it’s a myth and it was a myth when the stories were being written. Right now, there are people working more than full time, multiple jobs, and still have to decide between paying rent, utilities, or medicine. That is not right.

Will there be abusers? Of course there will. In a nation of 330 million people, there are always going to be a few people that will just sit back and get something for nothing. However, they are relatively few in number. The American work ethic is pretty effectively indoctrinated into nearly everyone. Nearly everyone prefers to earn their way. Let’s give them a chance to make a living wage.

Money is not free speech.

This is one of those Supreme Court decisions that makes sense in the abstract but is absolute garbage in execution. I put this case in the same category as Plessy v Ferguson separate but equal decision. By equating money with speech, you are guaranteeing that only the richest people will have the megaphone.

Corporations are not people.

No, they are not.  We should not be giving corporations religious freedom. They should not be able spend unlimited sums of money for their political causes (see above). We need to stop this nonsense.

No voting restrictions and easy availability to vote to all Americans 18 or over.

The eviscerating of the Voting Rights Act is another bad decision by the Roberts court. Again, great in theory, but the fact that as soon as it was implemented Southern states immediately began passing voting restrictions  belies the nature of the argument.

If we want to have a truly participatory democracy (granted that right now, there is one party that decidedly does not want that), then everyone must be able to participate. Just because you’re a prisoner or you’re on parole or you don’t have a driver’s license or you don’t have transportation or you live in a nursing home does not mean that you shouldn’t have a voice in our democracy. I think everyone should vote and I think that it should be as easy and secure as possible.

Abolish the Electoral College.

This one bums me out a little. Yes, it’s archaic. Yes, Mr Constitution, James Madison, was himself adamantly opposed to it. Still, it’s one of those weird little compromises that the founding fathers came to. For a long time, it basically worked. It seemed to be a nice expression of the relationship between state and federal.

However, the Republican party is now gaming the system. At this point in their history, they have no reason to even attempt to gain the support of the plurality of US voters. In fact, since 1992, the Republican party has only won the popular vote once (George W in 2004, although it’s interesting to note that even here that if Kerry had won Ohio, he would have been president while losing the popular vote). I’m not even dissing the Republican party here (at least not much). They are behaving rationally. They have figured out a way to win the Presidency without winning the popular vote.

So we need to change the system. If the Republican party had lost seven of the last eight elections, you can count on the fact that they would have adapted. The Presidency is the only nationally elective office. Therefore, it should be decided by American voters, not by some group of appointed electors.

That’s it! Simple, right? Eight steps to fix a broken system.