A Modest Proposal For a New Constitutional Amendment

The impetus for today's argument comes from my considering the upcoming 114th Congress, and the harm (or if we're lucky, 'good') they might get up to over the next two years.

The problem many politicians have (politicians of all parties) is that they tend to run on one platform, but they get to Washington, D.C. and forget all about the promises they made to get themselves elected.  Nearly as often, they end up going back not only on their campaign promises, but they violate our U.S. Constitution along the way, suffering no consequences except possibly not being re-elected.

Voters have few options when things like this occur, except to vote out the offending official, and hope that their luck is better with the next candidate.

My modest proposal to fix that problem is this:

Any member of the U.S. Congress, or any person serving as President or Vice-President of the United States who either votes for a bill, or signs a bill in to law that violates any portion of the U.S. Constitution shall be removed from office forthwith.

So for instance, when former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) made this statement regarding the passage of Obamacare:

We have to pass the bill so you can find out what is inside of it...

It's probably a good indication that anyone voting for such a bill (and anyone signing it in to law) is going to violate one principle of the U.S. Constitution or another.  When that happens, each and every person who is responsible for said bill's passage should be removed from office.  My proposed amendment would do exactly that.

Now, assuming that my amendment could drum up the necessary support to become law, there would be only two possible outcomes:  Politicians would straighten up and  actually do the jobs that they are Constitutionally required to do.  The alternate is that we would need to come up with a new system for replacing politicians who insist on violating the U.S. Constitution, because the impracticality of holding several national elections a year might grow a bit tiresome.

I don't expect that my proposal will gather much steam on Capitol Hill, but perhaps if it is brought to the people, we can add amendment number 28 to our Constitution before the 115th session of Congress takes a seat.