The 28th Amendment

I get a lot of useful, funny, not-so-useful, and not-so-funny emails. I also get some things that are, in their own way, profound and deserve attention. One of those I feel deserving of attention recently came across my screen. It proposed a 28th amendment to the United States Constitution. The proposed amendment read as follows:

Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators or Representatives, and Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators or Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States.

In principal, I looked at this and thought “Yup! This needs to be done.” As a practical matter, I thought “I wonder if this will really serve its intended purpose.” I believe it was conceived with regard to the idiotic “Health Care Reform” proposals now floating among the idiots in Washington DC.

Its intention appears to be to get rid of the special health care plan for congress, their ability to vote unconscionable pay raises for themselves, their 100% pay pension for life regardless of time served, and their apparent disregard of tax laws that they ignore or short-circuit, confident that their colleagues will not prosecute – or even investigate – them. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, after all.

I would be interested in the opinions of others on this. Specifically:

-Should the wording be otherwise worded to better eliminate the new class of royalty?

-How do YOU feel about such an effort?

-What are the non-violent alternatives in dealing with an American aristocracy that was never supposed to be able to exist?

Expand the Death Penalty - Part 1: The Premise

It’s not a question of whether the death penalty is going to be expanded. It’s a matter of who is going to expand it. Many of the states here in the U.S. have eliminated or severely limited the application of the death penalty over the years. The reasons given were that it was uncivilized, barbaric, we might convict an innocent person, and it brought “us” down to the level of the criminals. In short, it made us feel good to be merciful. We were stupid. We chose to be stupid because we were afraid of getting our hands dirty and bloody. Guess what. Our hands are dirty and bloody anyway.

Every day we turn on the news (some of us do, anyway) only to hear that yet another released criminal has murdered yet another innocent. Every day we turn on the news to hear that another cowardly, suicidal, terrorist has killed more innocents. We all lament about how awful it is and how something should be done after having, ourselves, been the enablers for these criminals and terrorists.

Every so often, we are faced with the prospect of building new prisons. Everyone (except me, apparently) agrees that we ought to build those prisons, but none of us really wants to pay for them. We do pay for them, but we’re pissed about it. We treat these criminals very well and we’re pissed about that. And by very well, I mean much better than any of them treated their victims, whatever their individual crime was (with very few exceptions).

We, as a society, don’t like the idea of playing God, making decisions of life and death. What we choose to remain ignorant about is that we do it anyway, whether we like it and are aware of it or not. When we choose life for a violent criminal, we are choosing death for that criminal’s next victim. I believe it is time to take our heads out of the sand and take responsibility for the shape of our society.

In case you are wondering, yes, the fact that this is part one does mean that there will be at least a part two. This will deal with terrorism at the appropriate point.