Proposed Constitutional Amendments

Most laws are passed in response to particular situations. Root cause analysis exposes the underlying dynamics that lead to particular situations. Based on these underlying dynamics, we can design fixes that prevent particular situations from arising. The Constitution of the United States is based in large part on British parliamentarian and historian Edward Gibbon’s root cause analysis of, as he entitled it, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It is in this spirit of finding and fixing root causes that the following draft proposals are presented for new or revised Constitutional Amendments.

• Sanity in Public Administration, AKA the Zookeeper Amendment: Screen and bar social predators from any and all positions of resonsibility over human beings, regardless of citizenship or residency status.
  • This Amendment sets a statutory threshold on a standardized psychopathy spectrum beyond which applicants for candidacy, or for appointment or employment to positions granting them any responsibility or authority over others, beyond which they are ineligible for said candidacy, appointment or employment to the subject office, post or position.
  • The tests used to decide such eligibility shall be standardized in accordance with the specifications to be set forth in this Amendment, shall be administered ONLY by federally authorized examiners and executives directly employed by, and reporting directly to, the federal agency established for this purpose, and shall include psychiatric, neuroanatomical and neurodynamical diagnostics that collectively resolve to a single numerical score.
  • Future adjustments to the requirements and specifications of these tests can make them more restrictive but shall never make them less restrictive.
  • Those who fail these tests shall thereby be automatically registered as psychopaths. Prospective applicants who don’t want to risk discovery as such should not run for public or private office or apply to positions of responsibility or authority over others. Private preliminary tests can serve them as predictors of their score on the standardized test, thus providing them with the opportunity to avoid detection and automatic registration as psychopaths.
  • This amendment shall apply retroactively to all existing office holders. Those who choose to opt out of the specified testing, or who opt in but fail the test, must quit and vacate their posts without delay, specifically without more than eight hours to complete the transition, during which their activites shall be actively monitored by armed and specially-trained federal police officers, and shall be restricted to relinquishing institutional equipment and conveying any passwords and access procedures needed by their successor.
  • The effects of this Amendment are expected to militate over time with a proscription against dictatorial business structures, which are exploitable by psychopaths, by denying psychopaths access to governmental power and authority, thus diminishing in turn the severity and incidence over time of psychopathy spectrum disorders in the gene pool.

• Goldwater Overrule, AKA the Zoo Patron Amendment: Overrule the Goldwater Rule, a principle in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) ethical code that prohibits psychiatrists from offering professional opinions on the mental state of public figures unless they have personally examined them.
  • The Goldwater Rule silences psychiatry professionals at moments when society most needs them, and at moments when their education and training stands to confer the maxiumum benefit on society.
  • This Amendment allows psychiatry professionals complete freedom in alerting the public to the presence of social predators in their midst, especially public figures seeking or assuming public office.
  • By way of analogy, a zookeeper with a degree in zoology who notices a leopard on the loose within the zoo grounds should not be prohibited from calling it a leopard in alerting the zoo patrons of its presence among them without having formally examined the animal.
  • In both cases, the alert is of immediate concern to public safety and the predator is unlikely to consent to such an examination, neither at the time of such an incident nor at any time in the future.
  • By the same token, a psychiatrist should not be limited in classifying specific people, regardless of their position or current activities, as to their propensity to align with social predators. It is recognized that each of us falls into one of three categories in this respect, and that stating an opinion as to which category a person occupies can only be construed as a public service to people who may not see this, or who may disagree with such assessment.

• Early Education in Psychopathy: Incorporate psychopathy awareness and practical detection and diagnostic methods into mandatory early secondary education.
  • The life of a psychopath is measured in victims. They are never without one for more than two weeks. By the time someone is accosted by a psychopath and becomes their new victim, permanent harm has already been inflicted and worsens over time.
  • This Amendment brings psychopathy awareness to bear in time for it to confer a benefit to the general public.
  • This Amendment equips young students with the awareness, understanding and skills they need to protect themselves from the social predators in their midst, in time for these assets to prevent confusion, cognitive dissonance and permanent harm. By the time they receive this education, many young students will already be subject to bullying methods characteristic of budding psychopaths. They must understand what is being done to them before they begin to internalize these attacks and attribute them to their own shortcomings.

• Democracy in Public Administration: Outlaw or impose prohibitive taxes on businesses with dictatorial organization.
  • The proximal goal of this Amendment is to migrate businesses from dictatorial (corporate) to democratic (cooperative) structures.
  • The ultimate goal of this Amendment is to deny to psychopaths an exploitable social structure.
  • This Amendment is expected to militate over time with a statutory threshold on the psychopathy spectrum for access to governmental power and authority, to remove from the social environment the selective advantages of psychopathic behavioral syndromes, thus diminishing the severity and incidence over time of psychopathy spectrum disorders in the gene pool.

• Immunity in Public Office: No public office shall confer immunity of any kind from due application and prosecution of established law, nor shall it act to defer any said application or prosecution.
  • This Amendment ensures that no one is above the law, more specifically that no public officer, employee, contractor or appointee associated with public office of any kind shall be immune from full and immediate application and prosecution of established law, whether or not the basis for said application or prosecution falls under the official charter or official duties of said office, position, contract or appointment.

• Enforcement by US Marshals: US Marshals are exempted from obstruction by the Secret Service.
  • The US Marshals are responsible for the arrest of government officials who act in violation of Constitutional law.
  • The Secret Service are responsible for the physical protection of government officials.
  • Government officials may, upon occasion, violate Constitutional Law.
  • Therefore when the duty of US Marshals to arrest those who violate Constitutional law comes into conflict with the duty of the Secret Service to protect government officials, the duty of US Marshals shall prevail.

• Presidential Self Pardon: Without suggesting that the Founders of this Republic committed any error or omission of reason while framing this Constitution, those subject to the Presidential Power of Pardon shall not extend to the present nor to any former holder of the Office of the President, nor shall it extend to anyone whose pardon under said Power would present the fact or appearance of a conflict of interest.
  • The necessity of this Amendment should stand as a lasting testament to the pathological opportunism of psychopathy spectrum disorders, and to the importance of maintaining the Office of the President as a legitimate office of government, as fully separate and distinct from a psychiatric ward.

• Only Voters can Finance Elections: Overturn the Citizens United decision by resolving that:
  • Money is not speech;
  • Business and government entities are not people;
  • Businesses, institutions and any other substitutes for individuals cannot make political contributions of any kind. This includes Federal, State and Local elections as well as the internal electoral processes of business entities, all of which shall be democratically organized and duly secured against infestation by psychopaths.
  • Those who wish to contribute personally held wealth or assets to political causes must first pass the Constitutionally standardized psychopathy spectrum tests set forth in other Amendments as a condition of said contributions.

• Mother’s Choice: Codify the Roe v. Wade decision in a Constitutional amendment.

• Clarify the 2nd Amendment as permitting the establishment and organization of well regulated militias and not individual gun ownership.
  • This will not necessarily limit well regulated militias to State Guard units but it will set standards according to which qualifying militias are permitted to keep armories and control the use and storage of armaments and munitions. Other uses of armaments and munitions shall be similarly restricted to hunting and sporting clubs, which shall be similarly required to meet satutory standards of armaments and munitions regulation, deployment, storage and safekeeping. No individual use or possession of armaments as defined in the 2nd Amendment thus clarified shall be permitted, on the theory that only well regulated militias are inherently capable of fulfilling the intended purposes of the 2nd Amenent, and that individual gun owners as such are capable of firearms training, firearms experimentation, sport shooting and criminal activites to the exclusion of all else.
  • Said militias found liable, in whole or in part, through failure to meet the regulatory standards set forth in their articles of organization and procedural mandates, for individual firearms offenses exceeding a statutory threshold, shall be subject to permanent dissolution. Actions taken under the Constitutional authority, command and control of said militias shall not be subject to the liabilities prescribed under the proscription against individual gun ownership, as such restrictions would be fundamentally at odds with the charter and intended purpose of said militias. Put more simply, Why run a militia that can’t shoot?
  • Prohibit the Federal or National expropriation of State Guard military units. Rename National Guard to State Guard in aid of this prohibition. State Guard units answer to the State Governor and to no one else. This amendment is intented to restore and further clarify the original purpose and intent of well regulated state Militias under the 2nd Amenement as originally ratified.

• Incentivization Reform: Prohibit the operation of any post, agency, business entity or institution whenever and wherever such operation is subject to one or more conflicts of interest. This will do away with the honor system as it is applied to conditions under which office holders are expected to recuse themselves. The conditions of recusal shall be unambigously defined, and when said conditions resolve to indicate recusal, through either a motivational or incentive analysis, by the appearance alone of impropriety or by both, said recusal shall be mandatory and immediate. Failures to self-recuse under this Amendment shall be punishable in proportion to the damage and potential damage inflicted by said failures up to the date and time of actual recusal. No such failures to recuse shall be held attributable under the law to other than the officeholder whose actions, omissions and duty to recuse are subject to this Amendment.

• Responsibility to Act or Resist: Any Member of Congress who fails to fulfill their Oath of Office, either to act when said oath demands action or to resist when said oath demands resistance, shall be deemed irrevocably complicit in the violation(s) demanding said action or resistance.

• Environmentally-Conscious Information Transfer: Prohibit the use of other than electronic, optoelectronic or similar lightlike transmission technology for the conveyance of information for any purpose or in any context, even such information as might accompany the conveyance of physical goods, except in the form of product labels permanently affixed to said products for the purpose of branding or of instructing their use or of providing internet addresses at which such instructions may be found, or on protective packaging of said products for the express purpose of directing their delivery or return.
  • No government or business entity shall use, nor require to be used, nor permit to be used, transportation services of any kind in the conveyance of information, nor in support of such conveyance in any capacity or for any purpose, nor the use, consumption or expenditure of such natural resources as fuel or rubber that are or have been used in the transportation industry for the conveyance of organisms or physical objects.
  • No government or business entity shall condition the provision of goods, services or employment on the use of transportation services of any kind on the part of customers or applicants in their written application for goods, services or employment of any kind.

• Planetary Defense: The military forces of the United States shall acquire within 5 years from the enactment of this Amendment, and in perpetuity maintain and improve, a comprehensive and massively redundant planetary defense capability enabling the timely, effective and reliable deflection of Earth-crossing threat objects of every kind, prioritizing at first the known threat objects and adding thereafter the most likely among unpredictable threat objects, and shall maintain in perpetuity a state of readiness to activate the ideal chain of redundant defense sequences against any such threat.

• Deluge Readiness: As a backup to planetary defense, disaster management programs addressing cosmogenic deluges shall focus on the readiness of specialized shipbuilding industries to construct wooden arks for general use on short notice. Even in the modern age, wooden arks seem the ideal refuge for the simple purposes of human survival of these events. It is very likely, based on a correlation of the climatological record with regional flood myths from antiquity, in which the specifications for such arks varied as one might expect, that this will not be the first time that humans have developed this capability at scale. The experience of the Older and Younger Dryas deluges circa 12,900 to 9,400 years BCE, grouped in sequence and separated from one another by just a few thousand years, seems to have left in its wake a human society well prepared to react in a timely manner to the Burckle deluge circa 2,900 BCE.

• Electronic Security: Electronic infrastructure improvements shall be planned, developed, improved and maintained in perpetuity against disruptive cosmogenic plasma streams of every kind, prioritizing known threats including catastrophic solar flares, and expanding in due course to more distant threat sources such as explosive stellar transition events in the galactic environment. Said improvements shall be focused initially on the robustness to such events of power generation, power and electronic transmission and computing technology, expanding in due course to the mitigation of, and compensation for, breakdowns in the Earth’s natural solar and cosmic radiation shielding that may be brought about, whether directly or indirectly, by the action of such events.

• Native American Lands: Return ownership of all Native American lands originally granted to indigenous peoples to the Native American tribes to which they were originally granted.

• Department of the Interior: Place an all-encompassing League of Indigenous North American Peoples in charge of the Interior Department. To avert inter-tribal animosity, stipulate only that governance of this Department is to rotate through a randomized sequence of tribes, similar to NATO rules, in which each tribe receives the governance, once and only once, each time through one complete such rotation. After the first rull rotation, the sequence is again randomized for the second rotation, and so forth in perpetuity.
  • This Amendment inverts the prior arrangement in which the Native American tribes fell within the Department of the Interior, placing them instead in collective charge of the Department of the Interior as a League of Indigenous North American Peoples created for, and commensurate with, said reorganization.
  • This Amendment is intended to mitigate the conflicts of interest inherint in the prior arrangement.
  • This Amendment returns the management of lands in North America to their original caratakers, bringing to bear their twenty to forty thousand years of applicable cultural experience.

• Mineral Rights: Relinquish all mineral rights on Native American lands to the League of Indigenous North American Peoples created for, and commensurate with, the reorganization of the Interior Department under said League.
  • This Amendment is intended to serve the purposes of the Interior Department reorganization under the League of Indigenous North American Peoples created for, and commensurate with, said reorganization.

• Hire them or House them: Require all municipalities to house and feed anyone for whom they cannot find or create employment within thirty days of the need arising.
  • This Amendment is intended to eliminate homelessness by shifting the burden of its eradication onto every community in the nation.
  • Those to whom employment is offered but refuse to accept it must be committed to a mental health institution of the sort that were common before the release of the Jack Nicholson movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest but in which the corrupting influences that movie exposes are intelligently and effectively disincentivized.
  • By statutory design, the pathway to discharge leads to employment.

One could respond to the first of these proposed amendments by pointing out that it is unfair to psychopaths but then we’d have to talk about whether cages and zoo enclosures are unfair to predatory cats, which no one questions. Unlike with most animal predators, we need not worry about hurting the feelings of psychopaths because psychopaths have no feelings to hurt. Unlike domesticated animal predators who assimilate as family members, psychopaths are cold-blooded, self-serving social predators for the sake of sport and self-promotion. They destroy innocent lives and bring down civilizations as a matter of deviant instinct and need to be contained. There are people in our midst who know how to handle them. We call them…

Kevin James: Exemplary Role Model for How to Handle Predators