No chance 3 ever passes, and a wealth tax would require an amendment unless it is "apportioned among the states" or some such thing (and it can't be because wealthy people are concentrated in a handful of states).

Editing to add: It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities. They would completely ignore rural areas, which are financially and culturally different. This would not end well.

Separately, it would also mean we wouldn't know who the president is until all states are done counting, and it would complicate the recount process. Both are simpler under the EC, assuming the slow states are not close calls or big enough to swing the EC count (which they usually are not).

I agree with everything, other than the two caveats below:

> Strike pardon power;

I'd go slightly narrower. I think pardons and clemency are a good thing to have in the system. I think we can put reasonable guardrails around it

- Require pardons to be published to a public register to be effective - Allow a 2/3 vote of both chambers of congress to veto a pardon within 90 days - Disallow pardons in the final year of the term - Explicitly affirm that Congress can make bribery and other forms of direct/indirect quid-pro-quos for a pardon illegal

> Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years.

I think we should also create room for Congress to create rule-making agencies that exist within the Congressional branch.

Your president is already hard at work “executing the laws of the United States of America”. They're taking them behind the shed one at a time.

Constitutional amendments that can actually be passed:

Throw something in there about gerrymandering. Maybe even ranked choice voting?

Why don't we just eat the entire elephant and abolish the Presidency?

> Five Constitutional amendments we need

Let's consider these then.

> Strike pardon power

What are you going to replace it with? What happens to someone who is convicted in a case where the law is both clear and clearly wrong? The courts can't help them when they actually did it but there are scores of laws that "innocent people" violate without knowing it on a regular basis. You need something else to address that if you're going to take away the thing that was intended to.

> First sentence of Article II changed to: “The President shall execute the laws of the United States of America”;

That sure sounds like the abolition of prosecutorial discretion, which is the same problem but worse. You would have to repeal the majority of existing regulations to keep the general population from overwhelming the prisons because existing laws are drafted to be overly broad to prevent "bad people" from getting away and then rely on prosecutorial discretion to prevent prosecutions when that's unreasonable.

The existing system sucks, but are people prepared for something that works very differently than that? Actual rule of law isn't flexible. People go to jail for breaking the law even when they're sympathetic and get off on technicalities even when they're unsympathetic.

> Abolish the electoral college

The electoral college is old and kind of silly and structurally very similar to the process for amending the constitution, thereby ensuring that the people who would have to do it continuously have the incentive not to.

That's why politicians complain about it -- they love to complain about things that are almost impossible to change because then people vote for them wanting it to change even though they can't actually change it, allowing them to run on it again next time having accomplished nothing.

> Congress may regulate money in politics

There are two ways you could try to do this.

The first is that they could only regulate money, but not in-kind contributions like a media outlet providing favorable coverage or a company sending employees to volunteer for a campaign. This would be completely pointless because they would obviously just use in-kind contributions instead and nothing would change.

The second is that you're passing the political speech version of the interstate commerce clause, because 100% of speech requires you to consume resources in order to do it. People talking about politics on the internet are contributing computer time, internet bandwidth and labor hours and their views favor one candidate over another. You would essentially be granting Congress the power to regulate political speech, which seems Very Bad.

> Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years.

This is like the pardon thing again. The executive is currently the only elected official with authority over executive agencies. Suppose the head of one of these independent agencies goes rogue. Who is supposed to rein them in? Creating something which is immune from public accountability seems bad.

Other than 4 I disagree whole heartedly. The worst part of the Fed government might be the Federal Reserve (abolish the fed), which would be like your 5. Electoral college is an important step to relegating the power of the masses. Pardon should be clarified in scope but not removed, Bidens indefinite pardons for any possible crimes was absurd.

SCOTUS is the fly in the ointment with Constitutional Amendments.

The Bill of Rights were intended to restrict government action. When there were exceptions, the wording of the Bill of Rights made them clear. The Bill of Rights were intended to be absolute things the government never could do.

That is not how they work today. SCOTUS has changed the Bill of Rights to require citizens to affirmatively assert them and has ruled that citizens can consent to permit the government to engage in activities the Bill of Rights made clear were prohibited.

As a result, our lives are very different than what was originally intended. Today when the police pull you over for a traffic stop, the police engage in conversations they learn in police training - conversations that are explicitly intended to lead to the driver waiving his constitution rights - rights that were intended to be absolute unaidable automatic restrictions upon government conduct.

SCOTUS will always be the fly in the ointment.

I think the ship has sailed on #4. It's simply too easy to do it overseas now.

I mean yes, but the bigger issue is that the 14th amendment only survived by one fucking vote.

The supreme court is one vote away from not upholding the constitution.

> 3. Abolish the electoral college;

Many people think the EC is somehow a distinctly idiosyncrasy of the United States, but the Presidential election of the European Union is similar.

The difference is that somewhere along the way, the member states of the USA lost most of their power. That hasn't yet happened to the members states of the EU. But perhaps it will?

> 4. Congress may regulate money in politics;

This one is completely useless. Congress may regulate, but why would they? They directly benefit from more money in politics.

If anything this should be more direct, and read: "Political donations may only come from individual US citizens, and cannot exceed the amount of monthly minimum wage per person, per year".

Or maybe just add a field in the tax return form where anyone can name a party to receive some fixed amount donation, subtracted from person's taxes.

It would be better to make the Constitution unamendable than to let people like you get their hands on it. People are just not smart enough to foresee the consequences of their choices, so it's better to stick with choices that at least worked once.

You can’t abolish the electoral college without standardized voting across all states. A single state or even county allowing frivolous or unverified voting can swing the entire election.

The EC provides a failsafe by capping the max impact of a single state in the event of an anomaly.

In other words, you can’t talk about abolishing the EC without a national voter ID law.