Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure
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1. Strike pardon power;
2. First sentence of Article II changed to: “The President shall execute the laws of the United States of America”;
3. Abolish the electoral college;
4. Congress may regulate money in politics; and
5. Congress may create independent agencies with charters of up to 25 years. (President still names and Senate still confirms appointments. But they can be insulated from “the executive Power.”)
Everything else, including judicial reform, expanding the House and implementing a wealth tax (1% over $100mm, 2% over $1bn, 3% over $10bn, 4% over $100bn and 5% over $1tn), can be done through statute.
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).
This already happens, though. Candidates largely ignore entire states they know they can't win, as well as ones they think they will win.
(Ask Hillary if she regrets not campaigning more in Wisconsin, for example.)
Then by contrast the senate: each state gets 12 senators regardless of population.
Each eligible voter should get one vote of equal weight to all others. The EC breaks that.
If anything, we probably need to better subdivide states, and in several cases, at this point large metros (e.g. LA or NYC) should probably become city-states with direct representation in Congress but a loss of governing power and senatorial representation from the rest of their (present) state. e.g. there's basically no reason for voters in LA to have any influence over the governance of Redding.
Electeds. Where they campaign signifies who they think they have to convince and compromise with to earn their seat.
It’s honestly the hardest one on there.
> a wealth tax would require an amendment
Genuine question, why?
> It would also be a bad idea to abolish the EC because then candidates would only ever campaign in cities
This doesn’t mathematically work. Most Americans live in suburbia. (We define “urban” very, very broadly for statistical purposes.)
And this effect is more than compensated for by the existence of the Senate and even House.
> it would complicate the recount process
No messier than now. And you’d only be delayed in close elections, in which case carefully recounting everywhere is fine.
A wealth tax would clearly be a ‘direct tax’, which must be apportioned among the states according to the constitution.
Article I establishes's Congress's fairly broad taxing powers.
> The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/sales_tax
> The federal government has not enacted a national sales tax, although it has the constitutional authority to do so under Article I, Section 8.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
Of course, the SC could easily declare it unconstitutional....interpret any amendments as they see fit anyway. The decision on the 14th very nearly went the other way.
Really? How do you know?
No chance any ever passes. Amendment’s are difficult to pass by design.
The equal rights amendment which virtually nobody actually really opposes in theory in 2026 has been bantered around for 103 years as a concept and 54 years after congress approved it and sent it for ratification. Its close, but still no cigar. This is an amendment that is hardly controversial bit still cannot manage to be passed due to procedural issues and set deadlines being missed.
Now consider just how much effort and how long a controversial amendment would take…
As opposed to campaigning exclusively in the half-dozen swing states that matter?
While I'm sympathetic to the notion rural areas should not go unrepresented, I find an electoral system where you only have to secure electoral votes for states representing ~25% of the population to win, only a handful of which you need to campaign at all due to the winner-take-all nature of virtually every state's electors to be strictly and starkly inferior to one in which a candidate needs to campaign for no less than 40-45% to secure a plurality.
> 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.
The benefit of Congress is slowing and deliberating over knee-jerk decisions.
Having the President initiate and Congress approve plays to the strengths of both offices.
Which wastes everyone’s time. If a case merits pardon, amend the law that convicted them in the first place.
Congress can do it any time. The fact that it will probably result in a statute change, too, versus a one-off benefit, is a feature of that process.
I debated this for a while, myself. Kept creating carve-outs. But at the end of the day, pardons are a shitty and ineffective check on either the judiciary or criminal statute, and they have been known to be a potential source of corruption since at least the Roman Republic, which denied this power even to their dictators.
> we should also create room for Congress to create rule-making agencies that exist within the Congressional branch
Eh, I prefer independent agencies. If the Congress wants a law it can pass it.
Longer than a generation if you include the Congressional stage of the process as part of the attempt - the last time Congress sent an amendment to the states was in 1978.
Yes, an amendment was ratified as recently as 1992, but that amendment was approved by Congress all the way back in 1789 (!) along with ten other amendments which we now know as the Bill of Rights and one additional amendment that has still never been (and probably won't ever be) ratified. The story of why that ended up getting ratified in 1992 is quite interesting, but it has nothing to do with how to get new amendments through Congress these days.
The removal of Humphrey’s executor was a goal of Project 2025, they are elated at this ruling.
> One example includes potentially seeking the overruling of Humphrey's Exec- utor v. United States. 62 This case approved so-called independent agencies whose directors are not removable by the President at will. The Supreme Court has chipped away at Humphrey's Executor in cases like Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 63 but the precedent remains. The next conservative Adminis- tration should formally take the position that Humphrey's Executor violates the Constitution's separation of powers.[1]
[1] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042/project-2025...
If only the problem was that they don't have balls. Everything they've done, and not done, is intentional. Hence why most of them see the DSA as a bigger threat than the Reps, and the former is what's awakening some of them rather than 8 years of MAGA.
I have caused some flame wars and/or been removed from dem leaning groups by asking if a candidate or the person speaking would be willing to use 100% of the power lent to them by my vote to enact their policy goals. I didn’t even expect it to be inflammatory, but apparently being frank about power being power is inappropriate.
This probably branded you as an extremist. Those aren’t usually useful to a non-extremist political movement. If you made it clear you were open to compromise and weren’t looking to burn the system down to make a point, you might gain better reception.
The only people I see advocating for doing anything are unfortunately extremists or insane currently, but people want some action and I think the Democrats inability to articulate what they would do and own it publicly is part of why they are so unpopular even amongst their own base.
And I literally mean the advertising and owning of actions, Biden did a fuck ton(wanted him to do more, him and Obama both failed with their Attorney General picks imo), but when it came to speaking in public the Dems were always demure.
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.
Can be done through statute. And, I’d argue, is better done there. Independent redistributing commissions? Proportional representation? Expanding the House? Combination thereof? I don’t know if we know the answer; hard coding a solution ex ante seems unnecessarily risky.
And undone through statute, or SCOTUS intervention.
This is generally hard. And should be possible for something as intricate as election mechanics.
> or SCOTUS intervention
Oh, I have lots of ideas for Court reform. Worst case, add justices. (Or, my favorite, every Supreme Court case gets a random slate of appellate judges.)
Any one judge per district. Our House was supposed to scale with the population. IT only makes sense that the courts should too. There should be more than 9 given how large the population is.
- term limits for congress
- voter day national holiday
- if budget isn't balanced all members of congress become ineligible for election
- repeal citizens united (maybe covered by op)
- and change all fines/tickets to paid in human hours of community service rather than money
Ask Colorado how TABOR[0] is going. The answer is a 1.5 BILLION[1] deficit because TABOR restricts how money is collected and spent by the state.
A balanced budget isn't actually all it is cracked up to be. The deficit spending at the federal level we have now is bonkers, but a balanced budget every year is just unrealistic. Learn from Colorado and do not put yourself into an unrealistic corner. A budget will grow and shrink with the economy -- a balanced budget over X years seems much more realistic. It would mean we could have never, at a federal level, done the kind of spending necessary to cope with COVID, for example.
What I'd like to see is Congress be entirely unable to draw a paycheck while the government is shutdown. Shutdowns are a last resort, but are now so common we have normalized them. This is immensely unfair to federal workers and everything downstream that depends on a functioning government, like SNAP benefits. If the government shuts down over budget issues, make the people who made that decision pay HEAVILY for the action.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxpayer_Bill_of_Rights [1] https://coloradosun.com/2026/03/19/colorado-budget-shortfall...
Rich congresspeople already don't need their paycheck. I want more people in congress who need their paycheck, not more who don't.
I’d strongly argue against the community-service bit, however. That’s just job loss for those who earn income from labor and an inconvenience for those who earn it from capital.
If you have capital rather than income then this is still better for you.
e.g. a retiree has capital but not income and for someone like Musk will have plenty of capital but proportionally much ledd income as that will be the best way to avoid tax.
Then the most knowledgeable and experienced people in the room are lobbyists. And at its root, lobbying is just "asking congress for things".
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.
Should there be limits on spending on messaging opposing a certain candidate? Or supporting / opposing a specific policy? It's going to be pretty tough to draw a line there that doesn't sound a lot like solidifying and entrenching the powers that already exist. And it usually includes an ugly way of determining what speech is "political" and what is not.
The SC decided today that political parties can spend as much money as they want in coordination with candidates.
One, they have. Repeatedly.
Two, the reasons historically varied, but it tended to range from it being good for them when winning elections to most electeds being okay fundraisers and not wanting to compete with the great fundraisers.
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?
The entire EU Commission (executive branch) is also not proportionally elected.
Nor is the European Parliament (legislative branch) proportionally elected.
Nothing about the EU is proportionally representative, but it's understood that it's a union of member states, not a union of people.
The United States was created similarly.
You can argue whether that's good or bad, but the dissonance between the US's original purpose -- an American Union -- and its current reality is the source of the wtfs.
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.
Same thing that happens most of the time now. They serve their sentence unjustly. If it’s a serious issue, the Congress can act.
> You need something else
You don’t. Most societies don’t. Pardon power is an anachronism nobody would argue for if it weren’t already here.
> sounds like the abolition of prosecutorial discretion sounds like the abolition of prosecutorial discretion
What? No. This is a unitary-executive thing. Prosecutorial discretion is unrelated.
> second is that you're passing the political speech version of the interstate commerce clause
Lots of thought has gone into this. One can write it competently. At the very least, the First Amendment would still stand.
> executive is currently the only elected official with authority over executive agencies. Suppose the head of one of these independent agencies goes rogue
They’re not! SCOTUS just confirmed this for the Fed. We have a mishmash of authorities, with the Congress clearly wanting some agencies to retain some independence. Most statute creating independent agencies contemplates how members may be fired. If the Congress wants to create a judicial-type independent agency, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be able to properly—the executive already magics these up with administrative courts.
Shouldn't we be making problems better instead of worse?
> If it’s a serious issue, the Congress can act.
Does Congress have the authority to pardon someone?
Also, do you really expect that to happen even if they could? Congress can't agree on anything by design.
> This is a unitary-executive thing. Prosecutorial discretion is unrelated.
They're pretty related. Prosecutorial discretion is Congress passing a law and the executive deciding not to enforce it. How different is it to Congress passing a law and the executive deciding not to implement it?
It's the check provided by the other elected branch. The ability to say no.
> Lots of thought has gone into this. One can write it competently. At the very least, the First Amendment would still stand.
It's not a drafting issue. If someone can buy a TV network or a website with a lot of readers and then use it to say what they want, money buys speech. If someone with access to an audience can't say what they want, you don't have a First Amendment anymore, because having an audience is a prerequisite to exercising speech which is imposed by reality rather than the law, and there is no way to get one without spending money or money-equivalents like labor/time. The concepts are directly in opposition. The government can't simultaneously regulate speech and not at the same time.
> They’re not! SCOTUS just confirmed this for the Fed.
And that decision was a little nuts. So if the public wants the Fed chair out, there is no practical democratic process that can do it?
> We have a mishmash of authorities, with the Congress clearly wanting some agencies to retain some independence.
Which is a violation of checks and balances. It's Congress setting something up and trying to tell the other branches they can't stop it. That shouldn't happen, and the existing instances of it happening are also bad.
There are times when you want Congress to act as a check on the President, but there are also times when you want the President to act as a check on Congress.
Using the same process to stop something that has already been set in motion is getting the equation backwards. When there is a steamroller on its way to flatten an elementary school full of children you want the emergency stop button to be accessible rather than bureaucratic.
Luckily Trump is only a “may” for being more egregious.
The supreme court is one vote away from not upholding the constitution.
Slavery was almost brought back?
Or are you referring to the birthright citizenship case, which involves an ancillary aspect of the 14th amendment?
But for your benefit: https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-14/
> which involves an ancillary aspect of the 14th amendment?
SECTION 1:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Its 25% of the entire amendment. Its not ancillary. The point of it was to allow the emancipated slaves to actually have citizenship. Otherwise not only would they have not been able to vote in the states that they were born in, neither would their kids, as their children would not have been US citizens.
We have two corrupt justices. Until a President has the balls to enforce the law, this won’t be a problem solved by changing text on paper.
If you try to make the Constitution unamendable, you guarantee that the Republic that is founded on the Constitution will eventually fail.
I can't think of a worse idea for the long-term health of the Republic.
Do you want to be in a US without the Fourteenth Amendment?
Actually it strictly immutable without any of the Amendments, no 1st, 2nd etc.
That it's been done numerous times in the past suggests it is quite far from immutable.
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.
Voter fraud has been prosecuted, measured, and accounted for across the US. It basically never has any sort of impact on any election. There are 10s of instances of it each year. Far too few to swing any election.
That said, I'd be willing to accept voter ID with a few caveats
1. A national ID has to be provided to all voters. Charging people to vote shouldn't happen.
2. We need reform to polling location laws, it should be a violation of the law if it takes more than 10 minutes to get to a polling location in a district.
3. We need reform to location capacity, more than a 10 minute wait to vote should be against the law.
I'm fine if we want to require in person voting or whatever. I'm fine with paper ballots counted by machines. That said, there should be accommodations made for the old or disabled.
You could even make the problem of fraud moot if you have mandatory voting (or opting out of voting) so that every person is accounted for regardless. It'd make it much harder for anyone to "cheat" as there'd be pretty obvious statistical anomalies.
Some laws, in particular signature matching, should be eliminated. With so little hand writing, I'd be shocked if almost anyone has consistent signatures now-a-days. Since there's such variability it makes it a lot easier to discard votes due more to prejudice and less due to an actual problem with someone's signature.
Nonissue.
Once you see it as a throughline of your conversations with people who have been steeped in the American culture for so long, it is hard to unsee.
Sure we can. We can even do it right here. I'd never let someone tell me what I can and cannot talk about.
The executive branch, as the one tasked with "faithful execution of the laws", is really the only branch that actually does anything substantial. I mean, yes the Congress passes laws and the SC interprets them, but the only branch that can actually carry out those laws is the executive branch. These rulings by the SC basically say that the President can do whatever he wants because (a) he can't be prosecuted for any official actions, and (b) all regulatory decisions are now solely within his control.
Starting with Citizens United, this crop of SC justices will go down in infamy as some of the worst since Dred Scott. Let's hope we don't need another actual civil war to rectify their buffoonery.
Precedent and reason is no longer a metric for the conservative justices. Only the party's wishes. Which means they are a political body now.
> If Thomas had chartered the plane and the 162-foot yacht himself, the total cost of the trip could have exceeded $500,000
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...
This is like saying Pete Rose was innocent because he never threw any game he gambled on, or Trump can take gifts from Qatar because they never influenced him in any way.
I genuinely think this argument is made with dishonest motives. Truly astounding if it is not.
If there is any evidence of the latter, perhaps you could point it out? AFAIK, none of the generosity ever received by Thomas came from a friend with business before the court. Furthermore, Thomas is perhaps the most easily predicted justice, since he sticks to his ideological guns, which are quite well-known. Attempting to bribe him would be a fool's errand, and by all appearances it has not happened, at least not successfully.
You're free to point to evidence to the contrary, if you're aware of it.
1: https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/court-allows-trump-to-fir...
EDIT: adding that it's sad that people downvote an alternate source that is from an expert outlet. I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim SCOTUSblog is biased, and NPR has surely been credibly accused.
But I don't have a very clear picture about what actually happened.
How could one possibly build their own opinion one way or another from this piece?
Having read coverage of it previously, just seeing the headline told me it was not likely to be a balanced/informative article.
I've used the mental model of math and theorems to reason about it. In this model, all laws have to be consistent with base axioms from the constitution (and common law maybe?)
I have come to realize that it is not a great analogy. The model breaks down when you realize that the law is not about "truth" (objectively true statements), but about "goodness" - what is right or wrong. That's the subjective component. Reading opinions help guide through the logic and what is thought of as good. Dissents are useful to glee into different perspectives. Some dissents are high tower rants though. Learn to discern the two.
Take a look at Marbury v. Madison[0] for the background on how SCOTUS gained the power of judicial review, i.e. power to strike down laws as unconstitutional. Judicial review is not granted in the constitution.
Pretty fascinating. I didn't know this.
References to "domicile" come from common law (in Trump v Barb).
I may be mistaken.
Good on the reporters that cover the opinions and post updates. Without much editorialization I may add.
As an aside, I find it very exciting that audio of oral arguments are broadcast and opinions are read without cameras in the room It's a retro feeling.
The linked article calls them conservatives, which seems like something they'd like to call themselves as well.