Political Discussion and Commentary

A constitution should have an expiry date, when redraft, amendment or ratification of articles should occur with a mandatory new congress.

Senators should not exist. Or should be two senators per state and a Congress proportional to population distribution

Parliamentary instead of a presidential federal union.

All congressional decisions should operate on the basis of consensus minus one instead of first past the post. Or at least 2/3rds minimum rule. Force the suckers to actually deliberate.

A shutdown congress is a dissolved congress, go back to voting if a functioning government can't be made.

1. The Senate is antidemocratic
2. The electoral college is antidemocratic
3. Slavery is wrong, stop that shit right now. Yes Jefferson, I'm looking at you, in the future we all know what you did, err, are doing.
4. There will be over 300 million people in this country and their collective will is largely ignored by our "elected" representatives because gerrymandering has become a science. You don't know what that is? Fine, just write down that elected representatives can't draw their own districts. Seriously, that's what they're doing.
5. Money is not speech, write that down. Doesn't matter where. Yes really.
6. Did I mention how undemocratic everything has become?
7. Private health insurance is illegal. It doesn't matter if you don't know what that is, write it down.
8. Look at this gun. Anyone can purchase this. ANYONE-bang-CAN-bang-BUY-bang-THIS... bang.
9. You know what? Here's what we're going to do. I tell you what to write and you do it, if not, I'll shoot more than your ceiling. There's 30 rounds in this thing and it takes me two seconds to reload. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs..."

Imagine the worst thing that could happen and explicitly make it clear they’re illegal. Checks and balances won’t be enough someday, you can’t depend on people enforcing them.

Holding up a fat blunt to Franklin: Hey, bro, wanna get high?

Later, when we're both toasted: Dude, what do you think about this shit? shows him his picture on the $100 bill

I'm a simple man, I would just go out drinking with Ben Franklin all night

To answer myself, I think likely one of the first things I'd mention is corporate personhood. I have a feeling the Founding Fathers never considered that that could possibly ever be a thing and that's probably a big part of why they wouldn't have included something specifically about it in the constitution. But just something like "the Bill of Rights only applies to 'natural persons'" would have been great.

“Okay, this one is a freebie, since you’re going to figure it out relatively quickly, but making the runner up to the Presidency is just dumb. Having your political rival as the next in line is just… c’mon, you can do better than that.

Next, I know some of you are concerned about factions. It’s human nature to band together so you can’t really stop this, sorry. That said, this first-past-the-post system is awful and will result in a duopoly and a race to the bottom. If you just adopt ranked choice voting to start with, these factions won’t be neutralized but at least you can ensure more diverse political factions and limit their power to dominate other factions.

Now then, the second amendment. I know it seems straightforward to you, but eventually this language will be too vague. Additionally, those muskets are eventually going to evolve into easily concealable firearms that can fire a dozen or more deadly accurate shots and be reloaded in under a second. Ironically, they’ll still be wildly outclassed by what a tyrant can field against patriots exercising their rights. I’m not going to tell you what you should do, but at the very least you should clarify what a “well regulated militia” means. Yeah, I know the Constitution can be amended so that it can evolve around those firearms, but it remember my previous point? That duopoly will ensure that nothing is done about this and people will argue past each other.

What’s next? Oh yeah… you know that clever set of checks & balances y’all designed? Sure it makes sense that each branch would jealously guard their political power, but those factions are going to prefer to centralize all their power behind a single executive. I know you all who supported the Articles of Confederation are horrified about that idea, but eventually things will evolve back to an elected monarchy, and once they consolidate enough power that elected part will probably disappear too. So uh, might want to strengthen those checks & balances. Good luck on that one.

Finally, I know y’all can’t envision a world without slavery. I get that the southern states are dependent on it and therefore abolishing it overnight seems impossible, but kicking the can down the road (do you guys know that idiom?) is just going to make the problem worse. It will literally divide the country in two and will have major ramifications many centuries later. If you can’t abolish it now, at least put a framework in place to transition away. Maybe in a way that respects those wonderful values you profess in the Declaration of Independence that only apply to a handful of landowning men for now.”

The problem is that they might not be too upset about how things have gone. Aside from blacks having the vote. And women. And non-landowners.

The "founding fathers" have been deified by Americans, just like the document they wrote. They were the oligarchs of their era, they just wanted to tax America without giving a cut to England and they came up with some pleasing words to convince everyone else to go along with it.

No one is going to use the 2nd amendment.

Codify your rules in solid, non negotiable terms. Anything up to interpretation will be used to cheat.

A strong executive is a terrible terrible idea. The single worst export the United States will ever have is the presidential democracy. It fails everywhere and it will fail here multiple times.

I don't think there's anything terribly useful that could be said. There were already factions fighting over more central power or a loose confederation. Multiple attempts to get things going failed in various ways before finally something was agreed upon. You can look at the bill of rights and what that was a response to.

Some rando in weird clothes showing up claiming to have advice for them is probably not going to go well to begin with. The most rational response would be to get that nutjob out or in prison.

Hand them a history book of the last two centuries of democracies. Give them some more and modern examples of what makes democracies succeed and fail.

• Force people to vote.
• Outlaw PACs.
• House of reps needs to deal with states that have huge populations.
• how do you deal with a government ruled by nut jobs?

"Look, I know this is going to SOUND crazy, but hear me out on this... You need to make it so convicted felons are ineligible for office. Just trust me on this."

Followed by:

"Hey Ben, you need to see this thing called 'YouTube'."