More propositions to expand the individual liberties enumerated in the Bill of Rights
- Citizens have the right to bear, maintain, and use arms for self-defense—in their homes, on their private property other than at times when the public is invited onto such property, in transit to and from purchase or sale, in transit to and from practice and every lawful use, and in every other time, location, and circumstance where they have a reasonable apprehension of harm or impairment.
- Any government or government official who impairs or prevents the ability of a person to defend their life, liberty, or property is strictly liable for the protection thereof under all circumstances, at all times, and in all places where such impairment or prevention applies.
- To the extent an individual right or principle of individual right can be enshrined and protected by the law, it must be.
Some Propositions Regarding Checks and Balances
Part of the genius of the US Constitution was the system of checks and balances which handicapped and restrained each branch of government, and which cumulatively, acted like a heavy weight of inertia to make expansion of the state slow and difficult. But after 242 years, even the slow accretion of power has passed the tipping point and now the very inertia that once protected the citizens, traps and oppresses them with an unresponsive government that serves to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few. The federal system also offers opportunities for the multiple governments operating within a given jurisdiction to check and counterbalance one another; although as historically structured it has always been subject to abuse, and the primary effect of the federal system today often seems to be subjecting citizens to additional levels of bureaucracy, multiplying the inconsistency of regulations already present within each government, and exponentially increasing the number of criminal charges to which any given act may be subjected. In the same vein, even within a single government, the number of agencies with regulatory and enforcement power has exploded to the point where citizens may be subjected to multiplicative, unreasonably burdensome, and often flatly inconsistent regulations and laws.
Some ideas for addressing these problems and getting the system to work better:
- State Constitution protections of citizens trump Federal regulations within that State, and the protections of the Constitutions of each State implicated by any interstate activity trump Federal regulations and the regulations of any other State with respect to any such activity.
- Mandamus shall be available as of right to every criminal defendant with respect to every right asserted by such defendant under any applicable state or federal constitution, both to the court having appellate jurisdiction over the case where the defendant is charged, and to the appellate court that would have had jurisdiction over the matter if the defendant were charged by the government whose constitutional right is asserted.
- No government agent or agency shall have simultaneous authority to stop, detain, arrest, hold, indict, prosecute, or adjudicate criminal and civil matters concurrently.
- No agency having any regulatory authority may enforce any criminal law, and no criminal penalties may be imposed on anyone for violating any agency-promulgated regulation.
- No regulation promulgated by any part of the executive branch shall have any force or effect whatsoever.
- No regulation promulgated by the President or the President’s office or any military or civilian agency of the executive branch shall have any force or effect whatsoever except with respect to the premises owned by the Federal government and administered by such agency, and employees or agents of such agency.
- Every legal and regulatory violation must be prosecuted and tried in the first instance by an Article III Court. Nothing less than an Article III Court affords minimum due process to any citizen.
- The power of each branch of government (and each level of government) is to be exercised broadly insofar as such power acts to protect the citizen or constrain the authority of any other branch or government; and narrowly insofar as such power would have the effect of complementing, supplementing, or confirming, the authority of any other branch.
- No public or continuing injunction may be exercised by any Court over any government employee or agent, or other governmental body, or on behalf of any class that is incapable of certification by a plaintiff class as a class action. Nothing in the foregoing sentence shall limit the ability of any Court to prohibit or constrain illegal or unconstitutional conduct of any governmental employee, agent, or body.
- Neither Congress nor the President may limit the jurisdiction of the US Supreme Court, or of any US Appellate Court within its area of subject matter jurisdiction; nor may Congress nor the President limit the subject matter jurisdiction of any District Court in such a way as to actually or effectively eliminate or constrain access to original courts having subject matter jurisdiction Constitutionally allowed to the courts.
- Private bills and private executive actions, except Presidential pardons, shall be abolished, unenforceable, and unconstitutional. The Courts have sole jurisdiction over private and specific matters and actions pertaining to US citizens and [legal?] residents within the United States.
Some Propositions to Improve Accountability of Public Officials
- No vote of Congress nor veto of the President nor judicial decision may be taken off the record. Every Congressional and Presidential vote or abstention and judicial opinion and abstension shall be recorded and stored electronically with the text of every bill or decision or opinion or other document voted upon or opined on or abstained from, in a searchable database accessible from the world wide web. The Library of Congress shall maintain one version of the database, Each Presidential Library another for the relevant President’s term, and the Supreme Court a third, in block-chain fashion, to prevent corruption of the databases. Copies of any or all of these databases may be downloaded for free (or at actual cost proven by the relevant database holder of making such copy or providing such download) by anyone wishing to combine such data with analytical tools or other data.
- No criminal statute shall be sustainable or enforceable without a separate legislative history explaining the intentions of each logically distinct provision of the statute, being enacted separately. Such statements of intent may be authored unanimously, individually, or by any majority or minority of officials voting for such measure (and similarly, officials voting against such measure shall be
- Elected officials and judges are personally liable for all harms caused to any person within the US, and to any US citizen, whether intended or not, where such official or judge cannot prove they read and had a fair understanding of every word of such statute at the time they voted for it. A reasonable, contemporaneous (at the time of the vote) statement written and signed or recorded and verified by such official using their own words actually written by them or demonstrably (by contemporaneous redline and similarly written and signed, or recorded and verified, prior instructions to such aides or clerks as may assist them in drafting) (i) stating all bases necessary for their decision, (ii) with reference to the specific language of any bill or law, and the national situation and need (for elected officials) or the specific facts of each case (for judges), (iii) and with reference to those portions of the bill or law the specific facts apply to, and (iv) comprehensible reasoning connecting their decision on the vote or opinion, to the matters identified and referenced above, and (v) an opinion explaining the basis or lack thereof for Congress’s Constitutional authority for passing such a bill, in a manner that a rational person can follow, once shown to be in conformance with all of the preceding clauses, shall be an absolute defense against any liability under this provision. Such writings and records shall be conveyed to the same three agencies responsible for maintaining statements of intent and judicial opinions, but shall *not* be publicly accessible, although they *shall* be available to any litigant who may sue such official or judge under protective order; and they shall become available to the public and be added to the public database 25 years after the term of office of such official or judge ends.
- No statement of Congressional intent authored or signed by any official, may be used to question or impeach their private explanation for their vote; however, any private explanation, once brought to life, that the judge in the case agrees with any party in the case is in conflict with a statement of intent signed by such official, shall be made public and must be considered by the courts in weighing the credibility of any statement of Congressional intent.
- Elimination of sovereign immunity except with respect to actions legally undertaken by the military in times of war.
- Elimination of sovereign immunity for all governments and government actors (at least in all spheres where government is acting as private actor or private actors can function, and at least to extent implicates civil liberties) for harms to US citizens within the US, or where reciprocated by other nations in an enforceable manner, as to their citizens within the US and US citizens within their countries.
- The government’s rights to pursue civil remedies against citizens shall be limited to the same scope as citizens’ civil rights against the government and one another, and in no event shall any government or government actor that itself enjoys sovereign immunity with respect to the same field ever be allowed to pursue a civil remedy against any private person.
- No one may hold any federal office or be appointed any federal judge without putting all their money into a blind trust.
- No one may use any money contributed to any campaign for office or any organization advocating politically, for personal use at any time after their election.
- No one may work for or be compensated by or have any investment (other than a de minimis investment purchased at arms’ length in a public company) in any federal contractor or anyone who is or was an officer of any federal contractor at any time, after holding federal office.
- No one may hold any federal office after working for any federal contractor.
- Corruption shall be considered treason.
- Any agency with the ability to participate in any civil asset forfeiture, or any criminal asset forfeiture not immediately and fully paid to the individuals harmed by such criminal for such crime, shall be open to similar civil restoration of any assets lost or adversely affected by the actions of such agency, directed towards, in part or in whole, such person.
- Civil asset forfeitures, if allowed at all, shall be used exclusively for compensation of persons harmed by the government. OR No civil forfeitures shall be allowed in connection with, or as a result of, any criminal prosecution. [OR: they go to the public defender defending such case? Or the public defender/criminal shall have a lien against the government for all such amounts]
- No one shall be convicted of any crime which contains as an element (i) the government employment, rank, or position of the victim; (ii) failing to cooperate with (as opposed to actively interfering with) law enforcement in the enforcement or investigation of a possible crime; (iii) failing to obey any order or command directed at an individual or identifiable group of persons or organization or entity other than a judicial injunction duly entered in accordance with law; or (iv) cooperation or participation after the fact as an element of any conspiracy.
- There shall be no official immunity for arresting, detaining, stopping, or otherwise interfering with the lawful conduct of citizens.
- Members of Congress, the President, their spouses, and any trusts over which any such person has signatory authority shall be personally, jointly, and severally liable for any amount of government deficit spending other than as a result of or in relation to defense of the nation in time of war; and such liability shall carry forward for a period of not less than fifteen years after their last public service.
