Constitutional Solutions to Political Problems

One of the endlessly disappointing things in todays politics is the over reliance on political answers to political problems. Arguably the most underappreciated brilliance of the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution is their drive for constitutional answers to political issues of the day. (Note too, the absence of worrying about societal issues -excluding the sharp divide over slavery of course).

Today the United States is stuck with two parties that continually try to offer political solutions to structural ineffiences of todays various levels of government. I'd like to propose a few contitutional solutions to todays political problems:

1) The Executive branch can only nominate Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of Treasury. The Senate would nominate all other Secretary's and the Attorney General for a term of 10 years requiring 70(75?) votes with no term limit. At any point after four years in office the Attorney General or a Secretary appointed by the Senate can face a vote of no confidence requiring 66 votes. The House of Representatives can submit a request to the Senate by a vote of 300 to ask for a no confidence investigation.

2) No Federal budget can contain non-Federal spending. All money in a Federal budget must be spent on a Federal agency or on Federal services.

3) All budgets not pertaining to State, Defense, and Treasury shall be three year budgets and not contain any earmarks. State Senate's are to be given a 9 month time frame with which to submit spending requests preceeding a 6 month review process before the 3 year budget is submitted to Congress for approval.

Now obviously every department would still be politicized because that is the very nature of every government agency that has ever existed. However these changes would go a long way to lessoning the political back and forth these departments consistently deal with. One could argue that two years is lost with every change of an administration, even when the same party wins.

These changes would also force a more long term strategic aspect upon the departments so that the country doesn't go from a massive push on some short term agenda based objective only to face an attitude of lame duckness from Congress simply because the sitting president may not win re-election; meanwhile the department head has just hit her or his stride after finally figuring out the inner department politics and how the department functions -the various laws and regulations the department operates under.

The reason for Federal budgets to strictly contain Federal level spending is based on the belief that the reason for a federal tax is to fund a national interest, not a local one. City's have their own taxes for local priorities and State's have their own taxes for state level interests. The argument that an earmark helps make sure money goes back to where it is taken from is respected but doesn't follow the logic of having a Federal tax in the first place.

Regarding change number 3 and what determination in the review process should be used is if the spending request is in the national interest. Does it advance national security? Does it address the national dependency on fossil fuel's? Does it help national travel? Does it advance international trade?

One could even make a case that a national level department of education or health and human services or housing and urban development, etc in and of themselves don't even make sense considering their has never been a case of one size fits all in any nation, let alone a nation the size of the U.S. In fact one could also argue that if you shifted that revenue (taxes) to the state and city level you'd see a marked improvement across the entire country as they're far better equiped to know what there local communities need.