Constitutional Party

Rebuilding a Government of, by, and for the People

PROBLEM: corrupted, partisan politics
SOLUTION: fairer political representation, voting, and campaign finance

PROBLEM: a broken social compact: conflict among classes and groups
SOLUTION: creating profit opportunities in reducing poverty, welfare and crime

PROBLEM: wasteful government spending
SOLUTION: more businesslike government budgeting and accounting

PROBLEM: insufficient demand for domestic labor
SOLUTION: incentivizing private investment in unmet public needs

PROBLEM: costly, fruitless foreign entanglements
SOLUTION: more containment, less nation-building

PROBLEM: obsolete delivery of healthcare, education and law enforcement
SOLUTION: wholesale redesign of operations, markets and associated politics

Platform

Modernize the Constitution and election procedures to repair today's politics more

Remedy distortions in legislative representation and voting procedures, which derive from compromises among slave-owning and rural colonies before the industrial revolution. Create new compromises to address the goal of one person, one vote in a modern, globalized world.
1. Replace the Electoral College with direct election of the President and Vice President;
2. Reform campaign finance, by requiring all spending mentioning a candidate or a position distinctly identified with a candidate to be routed through a Federal Election Commission reporting to the Supreme Court that will account for, and publicly identify the ultimate source of, each sizeable contribution;
3. Lengthen Representatives' terms of service to 6 years to reduce the pressure for continual, corrupting re-election campaigning and fund-raising in the House of Representatives;
4. Require supermajorities for re-election of Representatives (say, 60%) to reduce accretion of corruptible power by long-serving members without imposing fixed term limits,;
5. Eliminate the Senate for a unicameral legislature and distribute its budget to increase the salaries and staffs of the longer-serving Representatives, encouraging professionalism and incorruptibility of legislators while making the legislative process more efficient and establishing one-man, one-vote representation in the legislative branch.
Extend the Bill of Rights to cover gender issues and health and educational opportunities while defining the boundaries between free political expression and corruption of government.
1. Make gender-related discrimination unlawful;
2. Distinguish campaign finance from rights of free speech, and allow its regulation in the public interest;
3. Define the right of each American child to an education of a minimum defined quality;
4. Define the right of each American to health care of a minimum defined quality;
5. Provide for legislation to define nationwide minimums for educational and healthcare quality and to assure the attainment of those minimums where the actions of state and local governments and the free market do not achieve them.
Stimulate election process reform in the states to remedy causes of hyper-partisanship.
1. To counter gerrymandering, specify nationwide standards for bounding election districts for Representatives; require independent judical review and approval of election district specification;
2. To counter hyper-partisan electioneering and disenfranchisement of independents in party primaries while avoiding third-party "spoilers", require adoption of top-5 non-partisan primary elections with ranked-choice voting in general elections for federal and state-wide offices.

To implement: Manage a process of national dialog ending in a Constitutional Convention to effect key federal changes and encourage state-level reforms. close

Make federal budgeting, accounting and investing more businesslike more

Redesign government accounting and budgeting to be more results-oriented:
1. Replace authorization and appropriation budgeting with capital and operating budgets keyed off a Federal Balance Sheet recognizing both intangible values and unpriceable/non-privatizable physical assets;
2. Adopt a version of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, modified in accordance with the framing of the balance sheet, to support auditability and standard means of management accounting and analysis;
3. Eliminate the authorization step in the budgeting process, replacing it with single-step legislative review and approval of capital and operating budgets as proposed by the Executive Branch, without altering the responsibility of the House of Representatives to initiate revenue-related legislation;
Promote fiscal responsibiity by requiring approved projections for the payback of borrowings:
1. Mandate that return-on-investment analyses accompany all items in the capital budget presented by the Executive to the Legislative branch, providing for special ways to value "the public good" (e.g., the avoidance of "shadow costs" from funding the national parks, the judiciary, environmental protection);
2. Build up the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office with added responsibilities for very long-term projections of revenues and subject its projections to reviews by the Board of the Federal Reserve;

To implement: Have the House Ways and Means Committee appoint an independent panel of auditing and accounting professionals to make recommendations that the Committee would turn into legislative proposals for a very deliberate, phased introduction of the changes in procedures. close

Shift a simplified tax code from labor and income toward consumption and wealth more

Shift revenues from income tax to a European-style Value Added Tax to reduce income-fudging tax-avoidance and non-comparability with European pricing:
1. Make the VAT progressive, with higher rates for luxury goods than staples;
2. Compensate for regressivity, with rebates and income supplements for the poor, with costs for tight oversight here replacing more costly revenue enforcement from income-based taxes; design these to cover the regressive effects of the other recommendations below;
Refocus the favorable treatment of capital gains to motivate direct investment producing jobs:
1. Limit favorable treatment of capital gains to entrepreneurial investments in non-tradeable securities, eliminating such treatment for profits from trading in public securities (long and short-term), including "carried interest";
Shift revenues toward user fees and Pigovian taxes (excise taxes/tolls) to improve private investment choices and motivate private investment in public goods and services:
1. Encourage toll/rent infrastructure investments with discounts/rebates for those unfairly charged, as done for highways in Chile, building payback opportunities for competitive private investments;
2. Raise fees on National Parks while expanding discount programs for the aged to include identifiable low-income people;
3. Raise taxes on carbon, non-degradable plastic products, etc., to encourage investments with long-term paybacks to society, phasing them in slowly to spur private tax-avoiding investments that stimulate the economy ahead of the negative tax impacts themselves; provide offsets for those unfairly hurt;
Shrink economy-warping tax spending to strengthen economic growth and market rationalization:
1. Eliminate deductibility of interest to strengthen protections against financial crises;
2. Eliminate the deduction for employer-provided health plans to match other countries' policies and to offset the revenue loss of the recent major cuts in the base corporate tax rate; this must be accompanied by efforts to make healthcare delivery more efficient.
Replace income-related with wealth-related taxes where feasible, to improve fairness and collectibility:
1. Federally tax real estate and tradeable securities at a low rate (e.g., rate on one-year Treasury Bonds) to offset reductions in income tax and focus attention on earnings from labor and from entrepreneurial investments;
2. Reduce trust fund tax avoidance by raising taxes on payouts above those for earned income;
3. Raise estate taxes and reduce gift deductions to encourage spending during lifetimes, allocating those taxes for spending on raising the job- and upward income-mobililty of the poor;
4. Eliminate the step-up of asset basis at death to eliminate capital gains tax avoidance;

To implement:

Have the Congressional Budget Office build a model of the impact of changes in the tax code on a representative collection of taxpayer groupings;
Have a bipartisan Commission on Tax Reform engage in a period of public dialog using the model to assess alternatives;
After sufficient public dialog, have a special subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee work with consultants to design a new, simplified tax code that maximizes incentives for domestic job creation while observing, to the best possible extent, the most widely agreed principles from that dialog;
Implement a minimally disruptive, gradually-phased transition to the new tax structure through legislative action designed by the House Ways and Means Committee. close

Transition healthcare delivery into competitive single payer-providers more

Evolve to a system of "Nationwide Competitive Provider-Sponsored Health Plans" (on the model of Kaiser Permanente, but in the competitive pattern of the telecom industry) to replace public (Medicare/Medicaid) and private (individual, Obamacare- and employer-related) health insurers and too-localized or sub-scale providers.
1. Merge and privatize VA, DoD and other federal healthcare operations currently funded by the government, recasting such funding as a capitation fee on covered users, to model a nationwide integrated healthcare delivery system, opening it to all members of the public paying the established capitation rate;
2. Eliminate state-by-state regulation of healthcare insurance and delivery by providing federal charters to insurers and healthcare delivery systems for nationwide operations based on the VA/DoD model;
3. Encourage mergers of healthcare insurers, drug distributors, pharmacies, and healthcare providers by maintaining reimbursement pressures in current Medicare/Medicaid programs and careful restructuring of anti-trust limitations;
4. Reduce service delivery and competitive problems in remote locations by investing in telemedicine, patient transport networks, and legal frameworks mandating uniform contracts between nationwide providers and local healthcare monopolies;
Expand federally-administered outcome reporting and minimum standards, including protections for pre-existing conditions, non-cancellability, and the like, to put pressure on maintenance of quality:
1. Require standardized, auditable reporting of operations and outcomes to enhance competition and identify substandard performance;
2. Establish an independent healthcare judiciary to hear appeals for denial of service, staffed by experts with documented independence from the healthcare providers;
3. Require "living wills" and other analogs to finance industry regulation to handle issues of financial collapse, "to big to fail," and harmful dominance in the restructured healthcare industry;
Develop "standard protocols" of diagnosis and treatment for defense from malpractice lawsuits, permitting provable adherence to these as a defense, thereby creating and spreading "best practices":
1. Authorize professional and academic associations to publish standard protocols and a public process to endorse their acceptance into use for legal defense;
2. Encourage development a competitive private industry of "healthcare operations auditors," each potentially with its own technology for tracking and proving adherence to standards.

To implement: Start with the merger of Federal healthcare delivery systems and a contemporaneous communications program familiarizing the public with the cost-effectiveness of successful integrated healthcare delivery organizations. Ttask the Department of Health and Human Services with the job of designing a program for the transition of non-government healthcare-related firms that would include an auctioning of licenses to operate national healthcare programs under government review. Pre-announce that auction with sufficient time for current participants in healthcare delivery to merge or organize consortia to bid for those licenses. Include medical assistant training and employment in the expanded Americorps program for universal national service. close

Modernize public schooling with a focus on early childhood more

Build public pressure for more attention to education through presidential messaging and programs effective at state and local levels:
1. Facilitate court challenges to teaching that denies professionally-accepted scientific or historical truth by creating as a cause for action denial of adherence to the modernized Bill of Rights' definition of educational opportunity;
2. Facilitate court challenges to substandard or unequal opportunities for education by creating as a cause for action denial of adherence to the modernized Bill of Rights' definition of educational opportunity;
3. Provide matching grants for selected local expenditures on education, such as modernization or replacement of obsolete buildings, facilities, and technical infrastructure; early-childhood daycare/education facilities, and the like;
4. Fund the Department of Education to document educational opportunity and quality by district throughout the country, with public promotion of the results for use in grant determinations and court actions;
5. Give and promote one major presidential address per year devoted to education;
Aggressively fund and oversee a major expansion of early childhood education combined with daycare to give children at risk from dysfunctional homes time and opportunity away from them for healthy development, to give parents more opportunity to hold down jobs, and to give society a major equalizer of opportunity and incomes.
1. Provide pre-school vouchers for all parents of limited means;
2. Encourage recipients of Social Security to derive income as teaching assistants in public and charter schools without any tax impact; this will encourage resourcing of schools with minimal impact on government revenues.
Spur cost-effective innovation in educational technology and operations to replace outdated, Prussian-style classroom-teacher instructional modalities.
1. Use military training and the DoD school system as a test-bed and proof-of-concept demonstration for technical and operational innovations;
2. Create very high-production-quality, interactive and social media for the military/DoD schools to demonstrate its cost-effectiveness over lower-production-quality, teacher lesson-planned instruction, spurring such investments by educational publishers;
3. Fund DoD and local school experimentation with more individualized modes of instruction than possible in the classroom-teacher model, e.g., as proposed at www.LearningAdvancement.com;
4. Expand funding for school infrastructure modernization, to include digital media and redesigned schoolbuildings;
5. Encourage certification programs with internships to supplement traditional higher-education degrees, to reduce financial hurdles to post-secondary education among the poor -- subsidizing internships for certification enrollees in identified "labor shortage" job categories, roughly on the model of the German apprenticeship programs;

To implement: Direct the Justice Department to prosecute cases of denial of rights to educational opportunity, with penalties to be legislated. Fund the Education Department to expand pre-school programs and sponsor prize money for the publication of high-quality, interactive educational materials and to subsidize the private or local investment needed for initial adoption of those materials and the infrastructure required. Ditto for software to manage "flipped classrooms" supporting more individualized instruction. Include teaching assistant training and employment in the program for expanded Americorps service, including that related to pre-school programs. close

Redesign incarceration to lower costs and lower recidivism more

Shorten periods of detention by converting term-based to juried release, to incentivize effective rehabilitation and discourage anti-social behavior:
1. Convert early-release/parole hearings into juried determinations by panels of current and retired corrections officers and others without direct knowledge of the candidates in each case, paid for out of officers' duty time or by ultimately self-liquidating additions to corrections budgets; if a prisoner (of any type) can persuade such a jury that he will be no danger to the community, can obtain self-supporting employment, and/or has fully repaid those harmed by him for the physical or financial damage caused, then that prisoner can earn his release; (document)
2. Develop standards and procedures for juried release to codify those suggested above, while developing a culture of positive, rewarded self-improvement among prisoners and minimizing costly abuse by unready prisoners;
3. Make online and other self-improvement and skills development training and education attractively available to prisoners, and support use of these facilities with "teaching assistants" and "personal coaches," encouraging potential employers to provide these as recruitment prospectors;
4. Use Scandinavian models to design these programs and project budget impacts.
Improve post-release support to minimize recidivism:
1. Manage the program of expanded Americorps service to provide one form of tightly supervised after-release employment where appropriate to help prisoners satisfy codified release requirements;
2. Build a jobs bank and cultivate other willing employers for released prisoners;
3. Provide job-finding and relocation assistance to those released, to avoid geography-related limitations on employment opportunity.

To implement: Set up and shake down demonstration sites in better-managed prisons before spreading successful programs to other, and higher-security locations. This is a very long-term program that could take a decade to implement nationwide. close

Expand AmeriCorps into national service for unemployed youth more

Mandate a one+one optional year of national service for defined unemployed persons, to attack poverty and crime and to compensate for family upbringing dysfunction (supplementing early childhood programs addressing that same objective):
1. Identify candidates by legislated criteria, such as unemployed high-school dropouts over age 16, unemployed high-school graduates over age 20, those released from prison or addiction or psychological treatment centers, military service veterans with PTSD and the like;
2. Allow voluntary participation by the older unemployed and unemployed veterans leaving military service;
3. Provide heavy supervision, training, and psycho/social support to achieve the goals of reducing poverty and crime;
4. Provide military-equivalent compensation and subsistence allowances to contain budget impacts.
Design work programs to support other initatives:
1. Provide training and relatively low-cost entry-level workers for teaching and medical assistance, child- and elderly-care, construction, infrastructure retrofitting, software and educational media development, etc.
2. Support Americorps itself by training and retaining its own skills trainers, supervisors, and managers.
Exploit the resources of the military:
1. Use Americorps to take over closed military bases and schools to overcome base-closing resistance while reducing DoD waste and minimizing budget impacts;
2. Use military dischargees as cadre for growing the Americorps staff while reducing veterans' unemployment.

To implement: After a national address directed at the legitimate concerns of the Trump voters, propose for congressional action a "War on Unemployment" modeled after Lyndon Johnson's failed "War on Poverty," but designed to focus on high school dropouts or those otherwise failing to show employability. Military training resources would be expanded to support an enlarged AmeriCorps program, and public-private partnerships would be encouraged to supply apprenticeship and related training, supervision and initial employment. close

Use public/private partnerships for domestic job creation more

Use "tax-increase avoidance" to spur new private investment:
1. Promote legislated future graduated tax increases on carbon to prompt near-term job-creating investments in renewable energy, a smarter electrical grid, conversion to electric private and public transportation, building HVAC, and the like;
2. Use legislated tax increases on trading-based capital gains to shift investible funds into innovative start-ups with relatively higher potential for job creation;
Allow or demand federal participation in venture-type investing for high-multiple capital gains:
1. More aggressively price and license government R&D products by allowing for government-owned patents and their auction-priced licensing, on the model of spectrum sales for communications;
2. Allow government funds to be used in parallel with private venture capital for entrepreneurial investments, with a minor or passive role in management and restrictions on how ownership interests are to be held and disposed of (e.g., as deadlined warrants that must be sold before maturity, to avoid creeping socialistic ownerships by the government);
Leverage federal expenditures with private money:
1. Legislate legal templates for public-private partnerships to build, repair or replace infrastructure that can generate user fees for long-term payback, e.g., roads, hyperloop and other public transporation, urban renewal, schools, etc.;
2. Replace federal spending with interest-rate subsidies on private borrowing to spread out federal expenditures and lower the cost of capital for private investors in strategic or infrastructure investments;
3. Condition tax reduction for repatriated foreign earnings on domestic job creation by deducting dividend increases and other distributions to shareholders from the tax-reducing treatment.

To implement: Combine this program with the plan for universal national service in the promotion of the "War on Unemployment." Enabling legislation, where needed, may entail a large number of congressional actions, to be coordinated by a White House program director. close

Lubricate labor mobility more

Expand on current programs for unemployment, to facilitate geographic relocation and employment-targeted skills development:
1. Subsidize employer expenses for selected new hire relocation, certain new-residence costs, and training.
2. Subsidize community college and other residential educational and training programs for professions and trades in short supply nationwide
3. Develop and promote effective online self-improvement and skills development training and education for professions and trades in short supply nationwide.
Reconfigure regulation of trade unions to incent them to help members change employers and industries:
1. Encourage cross-industry consolidation of currently single trade-defined union organizations;
2. Subsidize union efforts to find new jobs for members in different employers, industries or geographies;
3. Enable progressive union dues to motivate unions to help members find higher-paying jobs.

To implement: Task the Labor Department to design and seek legislative and budget action to support this program. close

10.

Rationalize and simplify federal regulation more

Discipline financial activities with deterrence replacing micro-regulation, to unlock creativity and aid competition:
1. Require fiduciary responsibiility for all financial advisors in place of regulating fees and allowable actions;
2. Graduate capital requirement ratios for lending or trading businesses based on size, to discourage industry concentration, encourage entrepreneurial competition, and reduce moral hazard risk, while reducing prescriptive regulations;
3. Tighten bailout policy for financial institutions to require that certain pending executive compensation be voided and shareholders be reduced to nominal interests while bailout funds take majority equity in a fashion requiring deadlined resale.
Speed the process of environmental impact assessments to accelerate adaptation to climate change:
1. Prepare standard, acceptable means of evaluating environmental costs and risks in the form of assessment templates, standard costs and formulas, and acceptable methodologies;
2. Create a "swat team" within the Environmental Protection Agency to assist local officials in cases of national importance;
3. Enable progressive union dues to motivate unions to help members find higher-paying jobs.
Make corporate tax rates proportional to size or market share to encourage competition, while reducing prescriptive regulations.

To implement: task the responsible agencies of the federal government, including the Office of the Controller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve, with developing legistlation to address the objectives above.close

11.

Do a reset/restart on immigration management more

Strenghten border controls and procedures, to win public support and control unwanted immigration:
1. Expand border-monitoring technology using drones and tracking devices, supplemented by rapid response forces, to identify unauthorized incursions into American territory and change legal provisions to permit expelling such people even after they have successfully penetrated our borders;
2. Forbid entry by unaccompanied minors, excepting those on valid student visas;
3. Provide holding areas for asylum seekers, who would need to provide, or use a limited amount of federal resource to validate, claims of need for asylum; return them to their entry points after a fixed period if such claims could not be validated; this would set a very high standard for acceptable demands for asylum and discourage those with more dubious claims;
4. Require an enforceable oath or commitment by immigrants to take no action in violation of local law or in opposing the text and spirit of the US Constitution, and provide a required, brief training;
Perform a one-time culling of illegals, to address public concerns and validate the worthiness of those permitted to seek residency and citizenship:
1. Establish employer and renter reporting requirements, along with self-identification responsibilities, for all currently illegal aliens -- within the context of identifying those for whom a positive change of status will be permitted -- and strengthen enforcement of these requirements by adding staff and budget where needed;
2. Create a temporary staff and project withing the Department of Homeland Security to perform a two-year census of illegal aliens;
3. Deport all unidentified illegals after the two-year period when found;
Establish a path toward citizenship for all identified, law-abiding, employed illegals and their children, including independent persons arriving as minors ("dreamers"), depending on their length of time in-country, age, and other considerations; extend this privilege to other identified, law-abiding illegals whose employment status is excusable for stated reasons (e.g., age, health, temporary conditions);
Expand or drop limits on H1B visas for professionals and other critical workers, and those in employment categories with a period of identified labor shortages (skilled or not), who can prove employment upon entry or graduation;
Subsidize the teaching of English and local programs to integrate new arrivals into American culture in locations and at times where warranted.

To implement: Task the Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies with planning and implementing programs to support these objectives and secure the congressional enabling legislation and funding required. close

12.

Criminalize harm-causing disinformation and hate speech more

Create a legal definition for harm-causing speech, expanding on the concept of "crying 'fire' in a crowded theater":
1. Include misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech in this definition, including impacts on public health (e.g., opposition to mask wearing) and on bias crime (e.g., encouragement of, or prominent acceptance of, bigoted organizations or public communications);
2. Apply the principles of libel and slander law to define burdens of proof for claims of speech-caused harm;
3. Include the propagation of, as well as the origin of, harm-causing speech as harm-causing speech, whether by personal action or algorithmic automation;
Employ post facto liability instead of prior restraint as means for deterring or preventing harm-causing speech:
1. Prior restraint requires censorship, which is in opposition to understood rights to free speech, whether exercised by government or a privately-owned public platform or medium of communication (e.g., Facebook);
2. Apply the principles of libel and slander law used with print publications to the algorithmic distribution of content via software-based media; this will serve to limit algorithmic distribution of any content that is not clearly traceable or from known responsible sources.

To implement: Legislation should be drafted and passed making the protections for social media in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 conditional on their best efforts to enable the full traceability of legally-adjudicated instances of harm-causing speech back from the point of its role in motivating harm through steps in its propagation and to its original posting by an identifiable individual. Such tracing is feasible for the software-driven operaetions of Facebook, Google, et al; the cost and burden of identifying originators of harm-causing speech who may seek to post anonymously can reasonably be placed on the media platforms on at least a "best-efforts" basis as quid pro quo for the Section 230 protection. (document)

This legislative effort should be kicked off by a presidential address to the nation using recent examples of the death and injuries caused by people acting on motivations drawn from misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech. The address should emphasize the distinction between protecting and avoiding censorship of speech and the assertion of court- and jury-found liability for harm caused.

Test cases need to be prosecuted in courts of law to formalize standards for establishing the liability of originators and propagators of harm-causing speech. Where victims or their reprsentatives can identify a person causing harm and that person admits a motivation based on a specific communication he received, it should be possible to identify and assert liability via tracing. Prosecutors of the Justice Department should be asked to seek out precedent-setting cases of this type. close