Skip to main content

Curtailing the power of the State, one Constitutional Amendment at a time

1. No presidential executive order or signing statement attached to enacted legislation shall contravene or usurp the legislative powers of Congress.

2. All executive orders and signing statements, with the exception enumerated in Section 4 of this amendment, shall be communicated to Congress and published immediately.

3. Upon petition of twenty-five Senators or one hundred Representatives to challenge the constitutionality of an executive order or signing statement, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court shall choose by lot three Associate Justices to review the issue and rule within thirty days. This three-Justice panel may either uphold or strike down the executive order or signing statement. The appeal of this decision shall be heard by the Supreme Court, which may not refuse to hear the case. While the case is under appeal, the implementation of the executive order or signing statement shall be stayed.

4. If an executive order or signing statement shall be deemed by the President to compromise national security if published, the content of that executive order or signing statement shall be communicated to the chair and ranking member of the committees of the House and Senate which have authority over intelligence issues. A petition from any one of these individuals shall substitute for the petition described in Section 2 of this amendment.

5. Violation of this amendment shall be constitute an impeachable offense.

Comments

Jim Fryar said…
This one is a beauty, lets get it done.
tom said…
This is not only too verbose, it's totally unnecessary. Signing statements have no validity or force of law, they are merely comments. It's been a well settled point of law since Marbury v Madison, if not before, that if the executive branch is ignoring a law passed by Congress or some other duty, the proper route is to appeal to the courts for a Writ of Mandamus.

And there are essentially two types of executive orders: the valid ones where the President directs his officers and/or employees to do something that is within the power & jurisdiction of the executive branch; and the totally bogus, unconstitutional ones where the President pretends to make law, as if he were a king issuing a proclamation. The 1st type are not a problem, the 2nd type is already prohibited by the Constitution, in a place that's really hard to miss - "Article I, Section 1. All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives."

Difficult as it may be to believe, the President is not really the problem, Congress is. Legislative authority is vested in them: the may not delegate it by allowing unelected bureaucrats to legislate for them in the form of regulations, and they certainly cannot be allowed to abdicate it completely by regularly & routinely allowing the President to usurp their authority.

They need to start writing clear & detailed laws that leave little or no room for interpretation or regulation, and when the President encroaches on their rightful territory, they need to smack him down hard. For minor encroachments, they can pass a resolution stating that he does not have the authority to do X, or pass a law by veto-proof 2/3rds majority explicitly revoking his authority and repealing any contrary provision of law. For major usurpations, there is always the option of impeachment. Violating the Constitution that you swore an Oath to preserve, protect and defend is clearly an impeachable offense.

A much better amendment would be a "one subject at a time" rule for bills, like the ones in almost every state constitution. This would end the practice of passing unpopular bills by attaching them to "must-pass" legislation, and would go a long way toward reducing pork.
tom said…
You're a few months late w/ this comment, but if you want to discuss unconstitutional stuff done by the "right-wing conspiracy" you may as well start in June of '98 with the Alien and Sedition Acts.

And btw, there were more than a few Democratic Administrations & Democrat dominated Congresses promoting the various War on [Foo] campaigns. Of course, like you said they're part of the right-wing conspiracy too. But then I guess Libertarians must be pretty right wing to you as well.

Popular posts from this blog

A Libertarian Martin Luther King Jr. Day post

In which we travel into interesting waters . . . (for a fairly long trip, so be prepared) Dr. King's 1968 book, Where do we go from here:  chaos or community? , is profound in that it criticizes anti-poverty programs for their piecemeal approach, as John Schlosberg of the Center for a Stateless Society  [C4SS] observes: King noted that the antipoverty programs of the time “proceeded from a premise that poverty is a consequence of multiple evils,” with separate programs each dedicated to individual issues such as education and housing. Though in his view “none of these remedies in itself is unsound,” they “all have a fatal disadvantage” of being “piecemeal,” with their implementation having “fluctuated at the whims of legislative bodies” or been “entangled in bureaucratic stalling.”   The result is that “fragmentary and spasmodic reforms have failed to reach down to the profoundest needs of the poor.” Such single-issue approaches also have “another common failing — ...

Libertarian National Committee Deathwatch Part 1

As the LNC continues to lurch towards collapse, with the latest news of mass layoffs at HQ, I've decided to begin tracking those things leading the national party to irrelevance, even as state and local parties gain power. As news, rumors and rhetoric break out, I shall chronicle them in this ongoing series at Delaware Libertarian. Organizations approaching failure have a number of characteristics. One of the most striking is renunciation of their purpose and effort to reinvent themselves as a "me-too" provider of services in the marketplace. In this, the LNC has been on a collision course with destiny for a while now. Recently, for example, it hired Republican Party web site developer TerraEclipse to redesign the LNC web site . Terra created a web site very similar to those of the clients it brags most about -- far-right Republican conservatives like Tom McClintock and BJ Lawson. A quick look at the web site they built for the LNC is instructive. The tagline on the ...

The disturbing decline of the Delaware blogosphere: a very unfortunate Around the Horn (even if it's not Friday)

I've noticed a change in my own blog-checking habits over the past several weeks, and I don't know if it's just me or the reality of the last month of a divisive political campaign. I automatically used to check out Delawareliberal first and several times a day, because it was where I could find edgy, thought-provoking, and (dare I say it) funny banter going on. These days visit several other spots first, and my visits to DL are both shorter and less engaged. Why? Because the combination of invading neo-con commenters with the stridency of some of the major contributors has led to such pleasant exchanges as a post dedicated to labeling another blogger racist by donviti, whose own sense of provocative humor is generally so far out there that he makes John Belushi doing Samurai bartender on the SNL look positively pro-Asian. Or I can find Delawaredem and jason periodically spewing the idea that anybody who is not a liberal or progressive Democrat is somehow a non-American,...