How I entertain myself on dull evenings:  I remake government.  Oh, not in the "first, we surround Congress with troops; then, we break into the White House, overpower the Secret Service, and take the President hostage" way of which action movies are so very fond.  No, my thoughts run more to amending the Constitution and making government better.  At least, as I concieve "better government" to be.

To that end, recently I dusted off my notes on new amendments -- six of them, to be exact -- and hereby display them to you, my loyal readers, as the partly baked ideas they are.

28th Amendment:  This one provides for the direct election of the President and Vice-President.  No more of this Electoral College bullshit where states with large populations (and therefore more electoral votes) are wined and dined to a fare-thee-well while the rest of the states get leftovers.  High time for the candidates, and the political parties, to have to figure out how to appeal to the majority of people who are likely to come out and vote on Election Day instead of the 537 people who vote on a day in mid-December.

The first thing this does is repeal the last amendment about voting for the President and VP (that's the 12th Amendment, if you care to look it up).  And while the new 28th Amendment retains a lot of the language from the 12th, there are certain major differences.

For example, electors are not tied to representation in the House and Senate.  A state can appoint as many electors as it wants.  But, the sole duty of the electors is to verify the vote counts for the Prez and the Veep from their state and pass them along, in writing, to the Senate President.  And it's the people with the majority of the popular votes cast who win, not the people with the majority of the electoral votes.

And the process of what to do when nobody has a majority of the votes cast stays the same.

Isn't it time we elected our Chief Executive and his number two person directly?  Yeah, I think so too.

29th Amendment:  This one eliminates four existing amendments and puts them all (plus a little bit more) in one handy spot.

The amendments that go away are the 15th, 19th, 26th, and 24th.  For those of you who don't have them memorized, respectively that's the right to vote for former Negro slaves, women, and 18-year-olds, and the one that says you can't be blocked from voting because you can't pay a poll tax.

The new one is a tad more comprehensive.  It starts out by saying that the rights of US citizens cannot be denied or abridged based on race, sex, age, sexual orientation, disability, religious belief, or country of origin.  (And in case you didn't notice, that "sex" part means that the old Equal Rights Amendment is tucked right in here.)

"Wait," I hear you saying, "where's the part about voting?"  That comes next.  The wording of the 15th 19th, and 26th Amendments is combined into one statement.  And that's followed by the wording about poll taxes from the 24th Amendment.  It's all there.  Nothing's been left out, and in a couple of places it's been expanded a bit.

30th Amendment:  Did you know the Constitution originally forbid any direct taxes unless they were proportionally based on the Census?  The federal government ran along just fine until 1913 without an income tax (a direct tax not proportionally based on population figures).  Granted, the government didn't do as much in 1913 as it does in 2010, but still the founders knew the temptation to go spending money and pay for it by taking it away from people based on, oh, any formula or theory you could think up.  And unlike things like, say, tariffs on imports, when you can run an income tax you don't have to worry about the consequences on things like manufacturing or wages or costs.

So we grumble, and we fill out forms every April.  Why?  Because Woodrow Wilson could see the war clouds gathering over Europe (and they broke in 1914), knew the US would most likely be drawn into it sooner or later, and also knew he'd need money to build up the armed forces, with both men and materiel.  And what a coincidence!  The 16th Amendment was passed in 1913 to allow a fast and easy way to raise large amounts of money!  Well, World War I ended in 1918, World War II ended some 30 years later, and after lovely tours of such places as Korea, Vietnam, Granada, Iraq, and Afghanistan, I think we don't need an income tax to help fight a world war.  Who knows?  Maybe politicians, deprived of their fix, will actually sit down and give serious consideration to what the federal government needs to spend money on, what it really doesn't need to spend money on, will finally cut the size of the bureaucracy.

To sum up:  Repeal the 16th Amendment by passing the 30th Amendment.

31st Amendment:  Ever hear of the New Jersey Compromise?  This goes back to the writing of the Constitution, where large states wanted a legislature whose membership was based on population, while small states wanted a legislature whose membership would give each state an equal number of votes.  New Jersey came up with the solution:  one house based on population (the House of Representatives), and one where each state had the same number of votes (the Senate).  The House represented the people, while the Senate represented the states.  State legislatures appointed Senators; the people voted for Representatives; and everyone was sort of fine with that.

Until 1913.  Then it was thought shameful that Senators were appointed by state legislatures (whose members were, after all, voted into office by the people).  Thus came the process whereby Senators were elected by the people, too.  So, instead of having a great deliberative body, able to coolly assess legislation created by the House (whose members were subject to the shifting political opinions of their constituents) because they were appointed and not elected, you now have two houses both subject to those shifting political opinions.

I say, time to bring that nonsense to a halt.  Repeal the 17th Amendment, which called for the direct election of Senators, by means of passing the 31st Amendment.

(By the way:  Do you get the feeling that amendments passed in 1913 were, by and large, not really thought through?  Me too.)

32nd Amendment:  There's two ways to go with this one, which limits Presidents to two consecutive terms and no more.  The Republican Congress, unhappy with watching FDR win third and fourth terms, decided to put a stop to it, and so we got the 22nd Amendment.

One way to go is to repeal the 22nd Amendment.  This would allow more than two terms (like FDR) for any one person, or multiple non-consecutive terms (like Grover Cleveland).

The other way to go is to keep the presidential term limits, but add limits for Senators and Representatives.  I'm suggesting two consecutive terms (or twelve years) for Senators and three consecutive terms (or six years) for Representatives, while keeping the two consecutive term rule (eight years) for Presidents.  But I would remove the ban against non-consecutive terms.

Because if it's necessary and proper for the President to have term limits, it's only fair that Senators and Representatives have term limits as well.  One thing it's safe to say about the Founding Fathers is that they never envisioned the day when there would be a professional class office-holders in the Executive and Legislative branches.

33rd Amendment:  This is not original with me (probably none of these Amendment proposals is totally original with me, but especially this one).  It stems in part from the fact that Congress is exempt from laws in regard of its members as employers.  So it's pretty simple:  Ban Congress from making any law from which its members are exempt; and ban Congress from making any laws that apply to its members alone.  Again, it's only fair.  And maybe Congress will think twice about some regulatory legislation if they realize that they'd be subject to it themselves.