Ideas for Amendments

Term Limits

#28: Congressional Term Limit. No person may serve more than 12 years in Congress.

#29: Judicial Term Limit. No person may serve more than 12 years on the Supreme Court.

#30: Executive Term Limit. No person may remain within the top 5 positions of authority in any federal agency or department for more than 12 years total.

Fiscal Restraint

#31: Federal budgets must remain below 80% of the combined state budgets from the previous year.

#32: One percent of federal outlay each year shall be diverted toward paying off government debt, until government debt is below 40% of GDP, where it is less likely to crowd out private investments.

#33. Repeal of 16th Amendment/Replace with national sales tax. No income tax shall be collected within the USA. All government revenue shall be collected using one single source: across-the-board (no exceptions) sales tax--as is modeled by the Fair Tax--but with those spending at the poverty level paying "some" tax (e.g., a 5% effective tax rate).

#34: The Employment Act of 1946 shall be considered null and void. Private enterprise is what affords for all economic progress. It is not the responsibility of the federal government to interfere in the economic affairs of the people (e.g., in order to "solve" unemployment). There will no longer be a mandate for the Federal Reserve to artificially manipulate, or to "stimulate," economic activity by influencing interest rates or the money supply. If the Federal Reserve continues to exist, then price stability will be their sole mandate, as it was back in 1913.

Regulatory Restraint

#35: All bills and resolutions must spend a minimum of 30 days on the public record, without further amendment, before final passage by both Houses of Congress.

#36: Federal departments, agencies, and programs shall expire annually, unless reauthorized by a two-thirds majority in both Houses of Congress in stand-alone bills, and by roll-call vote.

#37: Congress' power to regulate Commerce shall be restricted to the interstate trade of goods between states, never to extend to any economic activity which occurs within a state's borders.

#38: The regulatory scope of the administrative bureaucracy shall be reduced dramatically. For each federal regulation added, not less than 10 regulations shall be removed, until the entire Code of Federal Regulations fits within a law book not more than 10,000 pages long, just as it did back in 1950. No country needs over 180,000 pages of job-killing, corruption-spawning government regulations.

Electoral Process

#39: Voters must prove that they are US citizens, such as with photo ID.

#40: Repeal of 17th Amendment. All Senators shall be chosen by their state legislatures.

Content Attribution: Many of these ideas were modified from Mark Levin's 2013 book: "The Liberty Amendments" (Threshold Editions)

Top Image Attribution: Junius Brutus Stearns [Public domain] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Washington_Constitutional_Convention_1787.jpg