If I Were President

         
                     Candidates for the 2016 US presidential elections are often asked what would be the first thing they would do to get America back on the right track, should they be elected to office. I’m not running for president, but like you, I have a few ideas about what it will take to restore America to greatness. So,  what would be the first thing I’d  change if I were elected to the office of the President of the United States?
            The short answer would be implementing term limits for senators. This would require major changes to our founding documents, and the people would have to decide this by referendum. No president could decide something like this on his or her own. It would require the American people to make the change.  In my brave new world, a U.S. Senator would serve a single six-year term. A member of the House of Representatives would also serve one four-year term. Neither of these “public servants” would receive a life-time pension, and they would be expected to return to the workforce to earn a living. Their health care would be tied to what was available to the general public. They would have to participate in Social Security. A president could serve two four-year-terms, but stand for re-election for the second term as they do now.
             Along the same lines, and possibly the biggest change I would seek to make, however, would be that Supreme Court justices would be elected--not appointed--to one five-year term. They would no longer be able to legislate from the bench. They too would return to public life and earn a living like the rest of Americans when they were finished serving.             I love my country, and I believe that most right-thinking Americans do, as well. However, we have been out of control since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was enacted. Our career politicians have become the American aristocracy that our Founding Fathers feared. Believing that they will solve the problems--that they created--is like putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop, or handing the keys to your car to a 10-year-old and expecting to get it back in one piece.
           The level of idiocy in Washington, D.C. is astounding. It is only exceeded by the idiocy of the people who keep re-electing them.
For more on what I’d do to put the country back in the people’s hands, read The Revolutionists, And, in the sequel coming this November, I pose an equally outrageous—yet completely plausible—solution to the illegal immigration problem and the Mexican border crisis in The Reconstructionists.