You had me already with this. Boy howdy, do we need to federalize some shit.
THE STATES, for example. Talk about leaving broken shit to the dustbin of history…. But you’ve heard me go on about that.
I’ve been thinking overtime about both these points lately: turns out the anti-Federalists were right: we *DO* need to have our rights laid out, explained and affirmed…and who knows, even THAT might not be enough to preserve them. Historical note: the “anti-Federalists” were not in opposition to a federal government, they were in disagreement with the authors of the Federalist papers on a few points, not the least of which was the matter of expressly and explicitly enshrining rights *as* ‘unalienable’. The Federalists were of course Hamilton, Madison and some few others explaining *why* it was designed this way, and how it was - and is - supposed to work.
To make it stick, it would need to be a second bill of rights, adopted and ratified to amend - can’t just be a law, we’ve seen what happens to them. Maybe set it up as a schedule, a la the drug schedules, let it be added to without amendment, same as?
Some other thoughts:
- revamp & expand the USPS, give it control of the net backbone, the responsibility to roll out net service to all @ highest speed & lowest cost, oversee net security & defense - the internet. Give them that. Get the Free Software Foundation and the EFF involved. Task them to develop a genuinely secure and anonymized yet traceable/verifiable/credible online voting system by 2030, a legit FB/social media replacement platform by 2035. This will shut down ISPs & ‘algorithm wizards’, sure, but there’s nothing wrong with honest work, I’m sure they’ll do fine.
- National service. Unemployment is down in some ways, not in others, and a common problem is lack of jobs & opportunities for young people starting out. A national not-draft of volunteer socially useful workers, doing everything from running the Senate mail room to keeping national parks in good repair to clerking for & assisting representatives in Congress to historic-site maintenance and upkeep to running public defender offices to serving in the military in times of war to building libraries to repairing bridges to census-taking to research. House them in barracks, feed them in mess halls, get them and keep them healthy, get them thru high school, give them more and more responsibility & opportunity. Expose them to people from all across the nation, like the draft in WW2 did to break down barriers and mindsets thru close-company exposure to other religions, other cultures, other ‘races’ they didn’t feel at home with at first, either.