12 Uncommon Suggestions for Amending the Constitution

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/04/12-uncommon-suggestions-for-amending-the-constitution/275363/




Last week, I solicited suggestions for Constitutional amendments. Many of the responses were familiar: There are ongoing debates about the extent to which corporations should be treated as people, for example, and both sides in the abortion debate were keen on permanently codifying their preferences. I appreciate all the email, but below I've decided to focus on the suggestions that I've never seen widely discussed or debated, the better to provoke civic thought. Except where otherwise indicated, I express no opinion about whether these are good or bad ideas.

Keep Your Laws Off Their Bodies

Terry Rolon writes:

Legal jargon aside, an adult person should be sovereign over their own bodies and free to do anything they wish to it without limit. They ought to be able to ingest anything, even if it kills them. They ought to be able end their life at any time for any reason. The decision to do so ought to be outside the reach of government.
Says Sarath Krishnaswamy:

Congress shall pass no law regarding actions between or among consenting adults on private property, where the effects of such actions are reasonably wholly contained to the sphere of said adults, said express consent, and said property.
This would seem to make possible a legal market for kidneys.

[GreenStormCloud]

1. I have to strongly disagree with one suggestion.

One writer wants all information declassified after 20 years. That is a very bad idea. That would mean that active spies in hostile governments would be automatically exposed. It would mean that the technical details on how to build nuclear weapons would be declassified.

Sorry, but some stuff needs to stay classified for a looooong time.

[Pelican]

2. Forget 20 years...

I ran into a fella who thinks that there shouldn't be classification period.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2767068

[zipplewrath]

3. Spies yes

The technology behind nuclear weapons was fairly well known among the experts within 20 years of their origination. Production details are covered by various forms of "proprietary rights" or "trade secrets", and that is often where the difficulty lies anyway.

[GreenStormCloud]

4. The principles of nukes are well known.

But the composition of the high explosive sphere, the number of detonators, the shape of the blocks, the type of explosive(s), the exact shape of the plutonium, etc. are government secrets that need to stay secret.

[zipplewrath]

5. Sorta

As can be seen by the number of countries that have "figured out " these secrets, it isn't all that secret. Each country/producer has a slightly different recipe, but the fundamentals don't change much. It has as much to do with ones ability to accurately and reliably manufacture these details, as it is the details themselves.