Eleven Ways I Would Change Our Constitution

It's my own strongly-held personal belief that the time has come for us Americans to convene a new constitutional convention to replace the 18th century constitution with one that is better suited to the 21st century, while maintaining the fundamental principles elaborated in 1787 such as strict and absolute separation of church and state.

Below is a list of eleven changes I would make to improve our Constitution.

1. Add more seats to the House of Representatives to conform to the intention of the Framers of our Constituion, who stipulated that "The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand" persons. Currently it's around 800,000 persons for each Representative. With the current population of the United States estimated at 313 million people, if we followed the intent of the Constitution, the House of Representatives would have over 6,000 members.
2. Retrocede the current District of Columbia back to Maryland. Originally, Washington, DC, consisted of two parts, the Virginia part and the Maryland part. The Virginia portion of the District of Columbia was retroceded in 1847, and the Maryland portion should also be retroceded.  Currently, citizens of Washngton, DC, pay Federal taxes but can elect no Senators--only a non-voting delegate in the House. That's known as "taxation without representation."
3. Change Election Day from "the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November" [which isn't in the Constitution] to the Fourth of July or hold all Federal elections on Sunday, as in most other democracies, or make Election Day an official, paid holiday, so that citizens would have plenty of time to vote.  At the same time, abolish all electronic or mail-in ballots except for the military, diplomats and expatriat citizens living abroad, and require each eligible voter to appear in person at the polls just as every senator and representative must appear in person on the floor of the chamber to vote.
4. The president should be innaugurated as soon as the voting is finished, as in all other democracies, instead of waiting during a two month-long "lame duck" interregnum until January 20 of the year following the election.
5. Prevent any president from becoming a tyrant, a dictator or a caudillo by replacing the system of one president and one vice-president with a rotating presidency in which each cabinet member would serve a one-year term as president. This is the system used in the other great federal democracy, Switzerland.
6. To eliminate gerrymandering once and for all, abolish all congressional districts [the Constittuion does not require that states be divided up into congressional districdts], and elect all members of the House of Representatives at large.
7. Repeal the first sentence of Article One of the 14th Amendment.  The 14th Amendment was enacted specifically and unequivocally to grant citizenship to former slaves and not to grant citizenship to the offspring of illegal immigrants.
8. Repeal the 17th Amendment and return to the wishes of the Founding Fathers by once again empowering state legislatures to select their state's two senators.
9. Prohibit any sitting senator or representative from running for the office of president or vice-president.  This would have excluded Senators Obama, Biden, McCain and Clinton as well as Congressmen Paul and Kucinich and opened the playing field for candidates such as governors or big-city mayors, who possess the exective-branch experience required to be Chief Executive of the United States. Twenty of our 44 presidents--including Jefferson, Monroe, and both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt--were formerly governors. Only three sitting senators have been elected president: Harding, Kennedy and Obama.
10. Follow the example of John Quincy Adams and require the president and all other elected federal officials to take the oath of office by swearing on the Constitution of the United States of America instead of the Bible, the Qoran or any other religious book.
11. Enact the 28th Amendment Overturning the Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission decision of the Supreme Court.  Some have described this as the worst Supreme Court decision since the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857 that legalized slavery. Five right-wing activist Republican justices [Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy] overruled the four constitutional justices [Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan] thereby opening the floodgates to a tsunami of corporate political contributions to electoral campaigns under the preposterous theory that "money is speech." Republicans and Democrats agree that those millions of dollars are corruping the electoral process in America.