Some Propositions to Empower Citizens Against the State
Every high school in America shall offer and require four years of Civic Law.
No person may vote without passing the Civic Law curriculum, or accomplishing the same through a GED or following private training. No one may be prohibited from retaking their Civic Law exam as many times as they like, or at any age, although the government need not pay for the provision of repeat training where it can prove to the unanimous satisfaction of a jury that it has previously made reasonable and sufficient efforts towards the education of the person.
The nationally-prescribed Civic Law curriculum must, at a minimum, include a full explanation of each citizen’s rights, the basic structure of the US government, including the personal and organizational liability of the US government for offenses against citizens, and how to determine what the law is with the resources available to members of the public online and reasonably available to every citizen without a computer; and this must be proven every year by statistically sufficient sampling and testing to determine the mean and variance of the national population’s performance that year on the relevant test(s).
Persons born before yyyy shall be deemed for all purposes to have fulfilled the national civics requirement; but are entitled to free education of the same regardless of age if they wish it.
No person may be convicted of any crime that is not recorded in sufficient specificity to give certainty to such person that they would be in violation of such crime, if a reasonable person who has passed the Civic Law curriculum would not have been able to determine to a reasonable certainty that the act for which such person is being prosecuted is against the law, using the training and knowledge learned in their Civic Law curriculum. Such proof may be offered in any form allowed by law by any criminal defendant or civil litigant against the government or any government employee. Without limiting the foregoing, the specificity with which each crime is recorded must be proven every year by statistically sufficient sampling and testing to determine the mean and variance of the national population’s performance that year on the relevant test(s).
No one may be prosecuted or convicted for violating any law or regulation where they can show they had at the time, or can articulate at trial, any reasonable apprehension that they might have been in violation of any other law or regulation by obeying (or making a good-faith effort to obey) the first law or regulation.
No person’s rights shall be abrogated by reason of their having been convicted of any crime, following the completion of their sentence.
The failure of any elected or appointed official, or any member of the civil service, to disclose any misdeeds of any branch or department of government, shall be a felony.
Some Propositions to Promote Transparency
All federal accounts, budgets, and estimates must be prepared and maintained using the same accounting standards and rules applicable to publicly-traded private companies listed on any US exchange.
No part of federal funds or expenditures subject to Congressional control, modification, or elimination, may be isolated or defined as a “trust.”
Elected officials shall be liable for all accounting errors and improprieties to the same extent as any officer of any publicly-traded private company.
Some Propositions to Protect the Integrity of the Judicial System
No one may be convicted of any crime unless all evidence admitted in support of such conviction is made public prior to conviction and is published to the jury prior to conviction.
No one may be convicted of any crime if any part of the proceedings, or any information or material observed or observable to the fact finder, is not public.
No one may be convicted or held in custody by any secret court or tribunal, by any court or tribunal acting in secret, by any court or tribunal whose records are sealed or secret, or by any court or tribunal whose proceedings are closed to the public.
No one may be deprived of their life, liberty, or property by the government, except as part of the lawful range of sentences prescribed by a criminal statute following conviction.
No public defender may be asked to defend more cases than any prosecutor against whom such public defender is representing a client, is prosecuting; and no public defender may be asked to defend more cases than the average number of cases defended by private attorneys. Any conviction or other decision against any client of such a public prosecutor shall be vacated and reversed, and any harm to such person as a result of conviction or other decision compensated to them, in any year with respect to any public defender who is not in compliance with this rule. Any public defender who voluntarily takes on more cases than he or she is allowed under this provision, when other adequate defenders are available, shall be jointly liable with such prosecutors.
Once any criminal defendant is charged, the government has an obligation to spend as much on behalf of each defense as on behalf of each prosecution, and to provide as many resources of every description to the defense, as are available to the prosecution.
No one who has made any plea bargain may testify against another as a component of that bargain.
Plea bargains are subject to the same anti-bribery rules as those applicable to all other witnesses.
A jury and judge must rule on whether the case against the plea-bargain witness would have ended/create precedent, before any testimony obtained as a result of or in connection with any plea bargain may be used against anyone else.
No law may be applied retroactively if the effect is to impose a crime or increase the effect or the risk of a finding of liability or the consequences/sentence of such liability, after the fact.
No plea bargains at all. OR No plea bargain may reduce any sentence by more than 30%.
No one may be convicted of a crime under a law where it is a case of first impression, but instead may only be convicted and sentenced under lesser-included charges that are well-established, although the charges of first impression shall be treated in all other respects as an adjudication on the merits.
No confidential plea bargains shall be allowed in any criminal case, and the evidence and reasoning of the judge in approving each plea bargain, with specific reference to risks, facts, and applicable law and charges in each case as to each charge plead on, must be entered in the record.
A defendant may appeal any sentence resulting from a plea bargain on a basis of actual innocence under the same circumstances allowed post-trial to any other convicted criminal. OR No plea of actual innocence shall be voided by any plea agreement.
No one may be prosecuted or convicted for any conduct in defense of a criminal matter, where the prosecutor would not be similarly liable for the same conduct (g., plea bargains vs witness bribery).
No act may be counted as an element of more than one criminal offense in any one or more criminal charges, indictments, jury instructions, plea bargains, or other judicial processes of any government or governments.
The State, and more broadly even civil society through its prejudices and lack of self-awareness or of respect for the freedom of others, may encroach upon and degenerate liberty in myriad ways against which citizens must always be vigilant. In this regard, any category of force is a tool of oppression and by its nature, inherently susceptible to evil. Probably most or all of these methods have been around in some form throughout human history, but unfortunately technological advances create perils and risks as well as opportunities and benefits in terms of ever-more-sophisticated and effective methods of control, even as they offer us similarly advancing methods of resistance and liberty. It is up to us as citizens to have the wisdom to resist the sophistication of evil and instead empower liberty with technological advances. It is up to us as citizens to out-think and out-smart the slavers, to keep up with their insidious tools of manipulation and oppression. It is up to us as citizens to think for ourselves, feel for ourselves, act for ourselves, live for liberty, live for love, live for the truth. It is up to us to be, and prove ourselves, citizens not subjects.
In particular, with the rapid advance of information technology, there is a challenge to all of us at this time to be alert to and think critically about the ways in which the improving technology of knowledge may be used not only to enhance well-established and long-familiar methods of oppression, and to conceal and obscure them from us. Secrecy may be the most powerful tool of oppression, because it is so hard to resist what one is unaware of, or cannot attribute to a source. Without knowing what a problem is, or its source, we are handicapped, or even paralyzed, in our efforts to resist, fight, learn about, and overcome them.
The citizen’s great disadvantage in this struggle is that the citizen is not focused on trying to control, manipulate, destroy, or oppress others. The citizen researches and conceives for the betterment of the spirit, of the soul, of the world, of humanity, of loved ones, of everything. It is, instead, the slaver or oppressor who obsesses and fantasizes about how to serve their own purposes, whether consciously recognized or not, who spends hours and months and wastes a lifetime and a soul on trying to manipulate and control. Citizens are therefore likely to be incredulous of what is done or intended for technology by the petty and mean, and slow to believe it. We are indeed lucky in the US to have the opportunity to have observed many forms of oppression in their more-virulent forms, at a distance, for much of the past 50 years; and that is an advantage we must seize upon to protect ourselves. The safest course is to resist the creation of centers of power, and it is our right to do so.
Here, as in other areas, everyone should ask themselves:
If you wouldn’t want your neighbor to have such power or knowledge over you by illegally surveilling you, why would it ever be okay to give a gigantic corporation with immense wealth and power, and which could easily be and probably has been, infiltrated by foreign governments to have it?
if actions are so harmful or wicked that we would consider banning private actors from undertaking them, why on Earth would we suffer our government to engage in them?
For consideration, a listing of loose associations of related principles, extreme forms and examples historically, analogies to experiences already known within the US, and brief statements trying to get down on paper sources of concern related to the age of Big Data and channeled electronic communications, and how they may relate to historical experiences:
Pride Changed Angels Into Devils
Intimidation—Knowledge is power and power is intimidating. I am amazed at the willful naïveté, and indeed hubris, in the statement “I have nothing to hide,” or “People who have nothing to hide, have nothing to worry about from surveillance.” I am flat-out stunned when I hear attorneys or law-enforcement officials say something like this. Every citizen (and certainly any self-respecting attorney) should and must be aware, at the core, that there is a problem with the mere fact of the government being capable of listening to or observing privileged communications between a criminal defendant and his or her legal counsel. Surely it doesn’t take great imagination or understanding to recognize the core problem here applies much more broadly—first, perhaps, to people not yet arrested or charged with crimes who are trying to ensure they comply with the law by asking about their current conduct; second, to the activities and communications of attorneys and their agents in representing criminal defendants or indeed citizens concerned they need legal advice on whether something they are doing or did, complies with the law. Only a person with the greatest pride and lack of personal awareness can fail to recognize there is something or someone in their life they care about that could be threatened with the right information—particularly in a society, like ours, with literally thousands of inconsistent, ambiguous, and overlapping criminal and quasi-criminal prohibitions covering nearly every aspect of our lives. The bread and butter of criminal prosecutions are informants whose technical offenses against the law even the police and prosecutors don’t really care about, but knowledge of which can be used to leverage them into providing testimony against others. Private actors without color of government authority can also use information as leverage; historically this is associated with crimes such as blackmail and extortion, particularly by organized criminal organizations such as triads, the mafia, or spy networks to manipulate and control others.
Concealment/Isolation—Denial is a powerful form of avoidance of one’s moral obligations and indeed, righteous indignation as humans with an inherent urge to be citizens. Perhaps the easiest way to corrupt and seduce people with good instincts is to help them pretend there is nothing to object to by keeping the details, or indeed the broad outlines, of government actions invisible. Includes censorship, security clearances, detention facilities, and exile in all their forms; the Nacht-und-Nebel-Erlass secret order (“Night and Fog Decree”) of 7 December 1941; probably concentration camps in all forms and locations, but notably the NKVD special or “silence” camps in occupied Germany (“Schweigelager”); detainment in Guantanamo Bay and US government “black sites.” The Stasi’s very motive in developing Zersetzung and the FBI’s in Cointelpro were to conceal actions by removing them from commonly-recognized statistics like incarcerations for political reasons. More recently, the US government’s fury at Edward Snowden was based on his revelation of what everyone already knew, or should have known, the NSA was already doing; but which to our country’s shame, so many Americans were willing to ignore or overlook before the details were thrust into our faces.
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.
