Why would you merge the Senate and the House, especially in the direction of the House? The Senate, being a statewide race, has a tendency to attract moderates as they need to appeal to a much broader group. The House, being significantly more local, more easily allows extremist views on both sides of the aisle. Expanding the seats and ensuring representatives represent roughly equal number of constituents as each other will itself go a long way.

The term limit of SCOTUS seems low. That almost syncs with a double run of a president allowing some to get potentially multiple appointments while others get none. That leaves the stability of the court left in some part to chance. Expanding the courts and setting the term limit in a way that each president generally gets an appointment per term would help deradicalizing the courts.

There should probably be some incentive to actually encourage domestic job production. In a global economic environment without such incentive there will continue to be job losses and even with UBI an unnecessary burden will increase over the years. That can threaten stability and lead to cutting life saving services. A CCC program can help a lot, but we also need private industry to seek domestic labor more broadly.

Municipalize infrastructure and health production. The government should actually own some factories and produce goods itself rather than the bloated bidding contractor stuff.

Don’t let public employees leave their positions only to be immediately hired back as a contractor at a much higher rate. If you want to work for the public sector, work for the public sector.

Pay public sector workers (including academia) enough to allow people that actually want to pursue those careers to live comfortably and to entice more people to transition into those careers.

Fund education for all for as long as they want it. Educating your populace means you will have a more skilled and more innovative workforce which will lead to better outcomes for everyone.

Significantly reduce copyright protections. They should not let anywhere near a lifetime, and they just serve to hamper derivative innovation.

Not American, but I would add some severe roadblocks to anything that makes basic housing an “investment”.

I’d be okay with keeping the senate. I think the founding fathers had a good idea, Senate was meant to be more “Long term sustainability” while the House was meant to deal with the needs of now.

However, Term Limits. They didn’t see senators sitting on their seats until they were over 90 years old. In their day if you made it to 40 you were apparently doing really well.

Police reform. Abortion protection. Web neutrality. Data privacy. Gender affirmative care protection. Legalized weed. Minimum wages tied to inflation, on top of UBU. If we’re getting crazy.

Income up to $50k untaxed.

I wouldn’t set a hard number value for this. Make it based on how low income is defined, or something dynamic that can change over the years with inflation.

For example, in parts of California you could be making $80k and you would still be considered low income because of how expensive it is just to live there. After paying for housing, there won’t be much left over.

There should be something in there about universal free education

Probably get rid of the supreme Court altogether and have cases that it currently hears be heard by a random selection of federal judges.

Probably also need to get some people smarter and more specialized than me to figure out how to capture the wealth of the wealthy. Like the whole “take out a loan against your assets, use that as money, pay no taxes” thing needs to go.

While we’re having fantasies, can we expand the 14th amendment "no insurrection " bit to be more clear?

And if we’re feeling spiteful, add a “no one who has held office as a member of the Republican party shall be eligible for any role in government, nor any role that engages with the government such as contractor, advisor, lobbyist.” Just gut the whole party.

One more.

Now that corporations aren’t people, only people can own residential land.

Ranked choice (also known as instant runoff or IRV) is barely better than first past the post (which is plurality voting). A better choice is 3-2-1 or STAR voting, both of which outperform IRV by a huge margin. But even if those are too complicated for people, Approval voting is still better than IRV.

https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/

Social democracy leaves power in the hands of the capitalists, they only tolerate reforms like this when capitalism is threatened, and they will (and have) eroded as soon as the threat is gone.

You’re missing some voting reform, but full props for putting voting reform at the top of the list.

Some suggestions:

1. Make voting day a national holiday.
2. Make absentee voting without an excuse a national standard.
3. Enable repeat voting where only your last vote “counts”, allowing absentee voters to change their minds.
4. Ban states from announcing vote totals until all votes are in, preventing people from voting with more knowledge than others.
5. Make allowing people who have served their time in prison to vote a national standard.
6. Overturn the recent SCOTUS ruling about the 14A actually applying to Federal office.

No more first past the post elections and so break the duopoly

You have a point of merging the Senate into the House.

I’m a fan of Australia’s federal voting system. We have a house of Representatives where the country is divided into 151 regions by geography of roughly the same number of people. One in Sydney is a few suburbs, the one in the south of northern Territory is almost the whole territory excluding Darwin.

Then there’s the Senate, where each State gets to elect twelve(six every 3 years[1]) Senators. Territories (Australian Capital Territory & Northern Territory) elect Two Sentors every election.

Everyone in the state gets a say in who represents them as Senators and allows minor parties to get representation as only 16% of the total vote is needed to get a seat. (The Greens typically get 1-2 of seats in each State)

So for areas with geographic issues get to have a say (rural people vote for the National party who represent farmers interest).

And there’s the occasional independent who gets in too and some other minor parties.

The other major difference is we have optional fully preferential voting. You can nominate anyone running in your seat as your first preference on voting day and you give everyone on your ballot a number from 1 to however many. When the Australian Electoral Comission counts the votes if the person you put first is eliminated from the count (they only get 175 votes from the 110,000 who cast a ballot), then your voting slip still counts and your vote transfers to your second choice.

Also we have compulsory* voting here. If you are enrolled, you are required to vote and will get a small fine if you don’t. *You might think all politicians are bastards and cast an unfilled ballot paper into the box, but you have had your ability to have a say. I’ll also note that people may take the time in the polling booth to draw a penis on their slip which isn’t illegal and doesn’t invalidate the vote a long as the intention for who is being voted for is clear. There are also prepoll stations and an option to postal vote exists.

We also have a tradition of voters getting a “Democracy Sausage” after voting. It’s common that voting stations (elections held on Saturdays) are schools and local clubs have barbecues and sell cakes etc as part of fundraising.

In summary, I like out two house system as the Senate allows minor parties to get representation where they wouldn’t otherwise if we just had the House of Representatives. [1] we sometimes have double disillusion elections where the government has the options to call one if they keep passing legislation in the house and the Senate keeps rejecting it and in that case all seats are vacated and the states elect 12 Senators, but it’s not normal.

state rep cap

What you’re looking for is “the congressional apportionment amendment”, and it was passed by congress with the bill of rights, and ratified by many states but every time they almost met the 3/4ths threshold a new state was admitted, and it always remained short. 11 states have ratified it. It had no expiry and as such is still waiting to be ratified by the states. It needs 27 more ratifications to become an amendment to the constitution.

Lots of good stuff here, and I agree with others to keep the senate. Abolish the filibuster!