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Proposed Amendments · Draft for discussion

Articles XXVIII through XXXVIII of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

Ten new articles of amendment and one repeal. Each article is followed by a note explaining the reasoning behind it. The last time this country proposed and ratified an amendment in one go was 1971, when it lowered the voting age to eighteen. We're overdue.

Bracketed figures, such as [two] years, are placeholders still under discussion. Links open the current text of the Constitution at the Library of Congress.

Article XXVIIIDirect election of the President

Section 1. The President and Vice President shall be elected jointly by the direct vote of the people of the several States, of the District constituting the seat of Government of the United States, and of such territories as the Congress shall by law provide, qualified as provided in the thirty-seventh article of amendment. Each vote shall have equal weight.

Section 2. The pair of candidates receiving a majority of the votes cast shall be elected. If no pair receives a majority, the President and Vice President shall be chosen, in such manner as the Congress shall by law provide, either by a second election between the two pairs receiving the greatest numbers of votes or by the ranked tabulation of the preferences expressed by the voters.

Section 3. No person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice President.

Section 4. The second and third clauses of Section 1 of Article II, and the twelfth and twenty-third articles of amendment to this Constitution, are hereby repealed.

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation, and shall provide funds to the several States for its implementation.

Article XXIXCongressional districts

Section 1. Representatives in Congress shall be chosen from single-member districts. Each district shall consist of contiguous territory, be bounded by not more than six straight lines except where a State boundary or shoreline intervenes, and contain as nearly as practicable an equal number of persons.

Section 2. No district shall be drawn with regard to the party affiliation, party registration, or voting history of its inhabitants, or the residence of any incumbent or candidate, except as the Congress may by law require to secure to racial and language minorities an equal opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.

Section 3. The districts of each State shall be drawn once after each decennial census, by a commission independent of its legislature, constituted as the Congress shall by law provide. They shall not otherwise be altered before the next census, except as a court may order to remedy a violation of this article.

Section 4. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation, and to provide funds for such commissions.

Article XXXBeginning of personhood

Section 1. For all purposes under this Constitution and the laws of the United States and of the several States, a human being becomes a person upon complete separation from the body of the mother, and not before.

Section 2. Before such separation, the unborn is part of the body of the mother, and no right shall be ascribed to it that abridges any right of the mother.

Section 3. Nothing in this article shall prevent the punishment of any injury to a pregnant woman, including an injury causing the loss of her pregnancy.

Article XXXIHealth care

Section 1. Every person residing in the United States shall be entitled to comprehensive health care, preventive and acute, without condition and without charge at the point of service. Such care shall include dental, vision, hearing, and mental health care, and long-term care as provided in Section 4.

Section 2. The United States, through the Department of Health and Human Services or such successor department as the Congress may establish, shall be the sole payer for such care.

Section 3. Such care shall meet the prevailing standard of medical practice, and shall be provided within such maximum waiting times as the Congress shall by law establish. Where care is not so provided, the United States shall pay for it from any qualified provider the patient chooses.

Section 4. Every person who, by reason of age, illness, or disability, cannot perform the activities of daily living without assistance shall be entitled to long-term care: in the home and community wherever practicable, including payment to family members who provide such care, and in a residential facility where necessary. The Congress may require persons in residential care to contribute from their income toward the cost of room and board. But no person shall be required to exhaust savings, to sell a home occupied by a spouse or dependent, or otherwise to impoverish themselves as a condition of such care.

Section 5. Nothing in this article shall prevent any person from purchasing health care privately. But no provider paid by the United States under this article shall accept private payment for any service covered by it, and no deduction or credit against any tax shall be allowed for private payment for such services.

Section 6. The Congress shall have power to lay and collect progressive taxes to provide for such care, and to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Article XXXIIInternet carriage and diversity of the press

Section 1. Providers of Internet access and other telecommunications, wired and wireless, are common carriers. They shall transmit all lawful data with equal priority, without discrimination by source, destination, content, or ownership.

Section 2. No person or entity shall own or control, directly, through common control, or by agreement, more than one-fifth of any market for news or entertainment, as such markets shall be defined by law.

Section 3. Holdings in excess of the limit in Section 2 shall be divested within [two] years of the ratification of this article.

Section 4. The ultimate owners of every enterprise engaged in the publication or distribution of news shall be disclosed to the public. Every service that selects or ranks news for more than [ten million] users in the United States shall publish the principles by which it does so; shall disclose to each user, on request, why an item was selected for that user; and shall offer each user, at the user's choice, a selection not tailored to that user's personal data or past behavior.

Section 5. The Congress shall establish a public service for news and public affairs, which may incorporate or support existing public broadcasters and shall support local public stations throughout the United States. It shall be funded by a dedicated revenue not subject to annual appropriation or to rescission, and governed by a board whose members serve fixed, staggered terms and are removable only for cause. No officer of the United States shall direct its content.

Section 6. This article shall be enforced notwithstanding the first article of amendment as to ownership, carriage, and disclosure; but nothing in it shall authorize any law regulating the viewpoint of any speaker or publisher.

Section 7. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Article XXXIIITaxation of business income and estates

Section 1. No tax shall be laid upon the income of any corporation, company, partnership, trust, or other business entity as such.

Section 2. The income of every such entity, whether distributed or retained, and wherever the entity is organized, shall be attributed to its owners who are citizens or residents of the United States in proportion to their interests, through any intervening entity, and taxed as their income. The Congress may require such entities to withhold the tax on behalf of their owners, to be credited to them.

Section 3. The share of foreign persons, who are not subject to income tax by the United States upon their whole incomes, in the income of any such entity from sources within the United States shall be taxed at the rate of [fifteen] per centum, withheld by the entity.

Section 4. Income attributed to funds held for the payment of pensions shall not be taxed until paid to their beneficiaries, and then as their income. Income attributed to organizations operated exclusively for charitable, religious, educational, scientific, or artistic purposes shall be exempt, under such conditions as the Congress shall prescribe to prevent their use for the avoidance of tax.

Section 5. Taxes on the incomes of natural persons shall be laid at graduated rates, the highest of which shall be ninety per centum. Gains from the sale or exchange of property shall be taxed as other income.

Section 6. Transfers of property at death, by gift, or in trust, in excess of two million dollars over the lifetime of the transferor, shall be taxed at graduated rates, the highest of which shall be ninety per centum. This amount shall be adjusted annually according to the consumer price index.

Section 7. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Article XXXIVLimit on military spending

Section 1. Outlays of the United States for military purposes, including the armed forces, nuclear weapons programs, intelligence activities of a military character, and military aid to foreign governments, but excluding pay and benefits of veterans, shall not in the first full fiscal year after the ratification of this article exceed [three] per centum of the gross domestic product of the United States.

Section 2. In each fiscal year thereafter, the limit shall be reduced by [one-tenth] of one per centum of the gross domestic product, until it reaches [two] per centum, where it shall remain.

Section 3. The limit may be exceeded only in time of war declared by the Congress, or by a vote of two-thirds of each House, and in either case for not more than one fiscal year at a time.

Section 4. The United States shall not develop, manufacture, acquire, possess, or use chemical or biological weapons, land mines, or naval mines. All existing stocks shall be destroyed within [ten] years of the ratification of this article.

Section 5. The nuclear arsenal of the United States shall not exceed the largest arsenal possessed by any other nation. The United States shall not be the first to use nuclear weapons. It shall seek verifiable agreements with all nations possessing nuclear weapons for their mutual reduction and elimination, and shall reduce its own arsenal in step with the reductions of other nations until all such weapons are eliminated.

Article XXXVConditions on foreign aid

No aid, funds, arms, or other support shall be given by the United States to any foreign government that practices systematic racial or ethnic discrimination, commits genocide, occupies or annexes territory by force, or wages aggressive war against another nation. The Congress shall by law provide the manner of making such determinations.

Article XXXVIEnvironment

Section 1. The air, waters, oceans, forests, and plant and animal life of the United States are held in trust for the people and for generations to come. The United States shall protect and restore them.

Section 2. There shall be a Department of the Environment, with such powers and funds as the Congress shall by law provide to carry out this article.

Section 3. The Congress shall lay a fee on the emission of greenhouse gases, collected at their source and rising each year on a schedule fixed by law, until the net emissions of the United States reach a level the Department finds sustainable.

Section 4. The revenue from such fee shall be used to relieve households of low and moderate income from the resulting increase in costs; to assist workers and communities dependent on the industries affected; and to fund incentives for sustainable energy and practices.

Section 5. Where a practicable sustainable alternative exists, the continued use of any practice or technology that emits greenhouse gases or otherwise degrades the environment shall be subject to such further penalties as the Congress shall by law provide. No such penalty shall be imposed on a natural person for the use of a residence or vehicle where transition would impose undue hardship, as defined by law.

Section 6. An alternative is practicable when it is commercially available at the scale required, and its cost over its useful life, including any fee laid under Section 3, does not exceed the cost of the practice it would replace by more than [ten] per centum. The Department shall determine practicability upon the best available scientific and economic evidence; its determinations shall be published and shall be subject to judicial review.

Section 7. No primary forest within the United States shall be cleared or burned, except by fire management under the direction of the Department. Such forests as have been destroyed shall be restored where practicable.

Section 8. The Department shall limit fishing in waters under the jurisdiction of the United States so as to restore and sustain their stocks. No fish or other marine life taken in violation of such limits, or of comparable limits abroad, shall be imported into the United States.

Section 9. The United States shall encourage, by voluntary means only, the reduction of human population to sustainable levels. No law shall limit any person's choice to bear or not to bear children.

Section 10. Any person may sue in the courts of the United States to compel compliance with the substantive requirements of this article, and of the laws made under it, by any officer, agency, or other person. No such suit shall be brought to delay or prevent a project on procedural grounds alone, or more than [ninety] days after the project is approved, and every such suit shall be decided within [one] year of its filing.

Section 11. Every permit required by the United States, by any State, or by any political subdivision thereof for a project of sustainable energy, electric transmission, public transit, or housing shall be granted or denied within [one] year of a complete application; an application not so decided shall be deemed granted. The standards for granting such permits shall remain those prescribed by the authority that issues them, and no such project that meets those standards shall be denied or delayed by reason of this article.

Section 12. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Article XXXVIICampaign finance and the right to vote

Section 1. Contributions to any candidate for elective federal office, including the offices of President, Vice President, Senator, and Representative, and to any committee supporting or opposing such a candidate, shall be made only by natural persons. The contributions of any person to any candidate, and to committees supporting or opposing that candidate, shall not exceed one hundred dollars in total for any election. This amount shall be adjusted annually according to the consumer price index.

Section 2. No corporation, union, or other artificial entity shall make any expenditure to influence the election of a candidate for federal office. The Congress may limit expenditures by natural persons for that purpose. This section shall be enforced notwithstanding the first article of amendment.

Section 3. Every citizen of the United States eighteen years of age or older shall have the right to vote in every public election held where the citizen resides. This right shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State, except by reason of [imprisonment for felony, and only during such imprisonment]. Every citizen shall be registered to vote automatically upon becoming eligible and upon every change of residence, unless the citizen declines. No State shall require, as a condition of voting, any proof of identity that is not provided free of charge.

Section 4. The right to vote is fundamental. The day fixed for the election of federal officers shall be a legal holiday, and employees shall be paid for that day.

Section 5. Every State shall provide a secure mail ballot to each registered voter. Each State shall also provide polling places that meet all of the following conditions:

  • they are open not fewer than three days in each of the two weeks preceding the election;
  • they are open not fewer than twelve hours on each such day;
  • they are located so as to afford equitable geographic access to all voters.

Section 6. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Article XXXVIIIRepeal of the Second Amendment; firearms

Section 1. The second article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States is hereby repealed.

Section 2. No firearm shall be manufactured, sold, or possessed within the United States by any person, or by any officer, agency, or armed force of the United States or of any State, except as provided in Section 3.

Section 3. The armed forces of the United States may possess firearms outside the United States. Within the United States they may manufacture, store, test, and transport firearms, and train their members in their use, solely for that purpose and under such regulations as the Congress shall prescribe.

Section 4. The Congress shall provide for the collection and destruction of all other firearms within [five] years of the ratification of this article, shall appropriate the funds necessary for that purpose, and shall pay just compensation to their owners.

Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

RationaleArticle XXVIII

Under the Electoral College, your vote for President counts for less if you live in California than if you live in Wyoming. A candidate can lose the popular vote yet still win the presidency. True democracy demands one person, one vote, and the most votes win. The Electoral College must go!

Requiring a majority, with a runoff or ranked tabulation as backup, prevents a candidate from winning with a small plurality in a crowded field. Section 3 restores a rule from the Twelfth Amendment, which this article otherwise repeals, so that the Vice President must be eligible to become President. Without that, an unqualified person could still get the job.

The States will need to rework their voting systems. Section 5 has Congress pay for that, not the States.

RationaleArticle XXIX

Gerrymandering is a travesty. It lets politicians pick their voters, when you're supposed to be the one picking them. Limiting each district to six straight edges makes gerrymandering's contorted shapes impossible, even with squiggly State borders and coastlines.

District sizes are based on population alone; no partisan factors apply. They are drawn independently of the legislatures that might otherwise benefit from the maps, and only once each decade, after the census. No party that wins power mid-decade may redraw the map to entrench itself. The one permitted exception preserves the protections of the Voting Rights Act, which can require districts that give minority communities a fair chance to elect their own representatives.

RationaleArticle XXX

Keep your laws off women's bodies! Until birth, a pregnancy is part of the mother's body, and decisions about it are hers. This article fixes that principle in the Constitution, so that the rights of women no longer depend on which party controls a statehouse or a court.

For fifty years, abortion rights rested on a "right to privacy" the Supreme Court found in the 14th Amendment's word "liberty" (Roe v. Wade, 1973; Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 1992). Even some supporters, like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, thought that foundation was shaky, and in 2022 the Court knocked it out (Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization). This article builds a new foundation, in plain words that no court can explain away. The Constitution already says that citizens are "all persons born" here. This article simply says what that has always implied: your life as a legal person begins at birth, and until then, the decision belongs to the woman carrying the pregnancy.

Section 3 makes clear that an attacker who harms a pregnant woman or ends her pregnancy can still be punished.

RationaleArticle XXXI

Every other wealthy nation guarantees health care to its people, and spends far less per person than we do. Single-payer will bring these costs way down. No more insurers' overhead and profit, no more onerous paperwork for providers, and the nation can bargain for fair prices.

Care is guaranteed to everyone who lives here, not only citizens, because illness does not check papers, and untreated illness costs everyone more in the end. A progressive tax pays for it, replacing the premiums, deductibles, and co-pays that you and your employer pay now.

Health insurance tied to your job makes no sense. Employers shouldn't have to provide health insurance for their workers or their retirees. It's a large and unpredictable cost of doing business in America, and it's an unnecessary cost. And you should be able to change jobs or start a business without fear of losing your coverage.

"Comprehensive" means what it says: teeth, eyes, ears, and the mind are part of the body and should be covered no differently than the other parts. Yet dental, vision, hearing, and mental health care are most often left out of insurance, including traditional Medicare. Section 1 covers them all.

Long-term care is the largest gap of all. Medicare pays for only a short stay in a skilled nursing facility after a hospitalization (Medicare.gov), and nothing for the help with the ADLs (activities of daily living): bathing, dressing, and eating that most frail and disabled people actually need. Today, Americans get that help from the public system mainly through Medicaid, and only after spending down nearly everything they own. Your lifetime of savings can vanish in a year or two of nursing-home bills. It can be terrifying, and drives bad choices.

Section 4 guarantees long-term care to everyone who needs it and prefers care at home, including paying the family members who so often provide it. As in Germany and Japan, which have had public long-term care insurance for decades, residents of care facilities may be asked to contribute from their income toward room and board, since they no longer pay for housing and food at home. But no one will ever again have to impoverish themselves, or force a spouse from the family home, to get care.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which already runs Medicare and Medicaid, becomes the single payer. The article also names "such successor department as the Congress may establish," so that a future reorganization of the government does not leave the Constitution pointing at an agency that no longer exists.

Some nations forbid private medical care altogether, to prevent a two-tier system in which the wealthy buy better care and lose interest in the public system. That approach is hard to defend when public waiting lists grow long; Canada's Supreme Court struck down part of Quebec's ban for exactly that reason in Chaoulli v. Quebec (2005). Here, we take a middle path. You may buy private care, but the public system makes that unnecessary:

A floor on quality and timeliness. Public care must meet the prevailing standard of practice and be delivered within maximum waiting times set by law. If it does not, the public system pays for the patient to be treated elsewhere. You are never forced to pay privately because the public system failed you.

No mixing of tiers. A provider paid by the public system may not also sell the same services privately, so doctors cannot steer patients toward paid queue-jumping. Medicare applies a similar rule today to doctors who opt out of it.

No public subsidy of private care. Private health insurance and private medical bills earn no tax break. If you want a private tier, you pay for it entirely yourself.

RationaleArticle XXXII

This says that no single owner or political viewpoint can dominate what Americans read, watch, and hear.

An earlier approach, requiring balanced coverage, has been tried and does not work. The FCC's fairness doctrine required it of broadcasters until 1987. It asked the government to judge what counts as balanced, which invites abuse by whoever holds power. Worse yet, it didn't apply to newspapers or the Internet. This article does not regulate what anyone says. Instead, it works on structure, in four ways:

Neutral carriage. Internet providers must deliver every site equally. They cannot favor their own content or their friends'. This principle is known as net neutrality. The FCC adopted it in 2015, repealed it in 2017, and restored it in 2024, only to see a federal court strike it down in January 2025 for lack of authority from Congress (Congressional Research Service). Written into the Constitution, it can no longer change with each administration.

Ownership limits. No owner may control more than a fifth of any news or entertainment market. Large holdings must be broken up, as the Bell System was in the 1980s.

Transparency and choice. We can see who owns our news sources. And the algorithms can no longer wall you off in an echo chamber without your knowing it. Today, Facebook, Google and others quietly tailor what each of us sees according to our past clicks. Here, we do not forbid algorithms, we just make them visible. The largest services must explain how they rank the news and why a given story was shown, and let every user choose a feed that is not tailored to them.

A public alternative. We had one, sort of. Since 1967 the Corporation for Public Broadcasting passed federal money to PBS, NPR, and some 1,500 local stations. But its funding had to be approved by Congress every year, so it was always one vote from the chopping block. In 2025 that vote came: Congress clawed back its funding, and the CPB shut down. Section 5 makes sure that can't happen again. The new public service gets a dedicated source of money that Congress can't cut off year to year or take back after the fact, and a board that no President can fire for airing news he doesn't like. The article doesn't name PBS or NPR, since they're private nonprofits and names change, but the new service can build on them, and it must support your local station, which is often the only local news left in town.

Section 6 permits these structural rules despite the First Amendment, while expressly forbidding any law that regulates a speaker's viewpoint.

RationaleArticle XXXIII

Ending the corporate income tax makes the United States the most attractive place in the world to headquarter a real business. Tax havens such as the Cayman Islands draw mostly paper profits: companies book income there without building much of anything. This article offers foreign firms something no haven can: a single, low rate of tax combined with the world's largest market, deep capital markets, and the rule of law. They will come for the offices, factories, and jobs, not only the mailing address.

For Americans, it ends the reason to go offshore at all. Their share of a business's income is taxed to them wherever that business is organized, so parking profits in a Cayman subsidiary saves nothing.

The government does not lose revenue, because the tax moves from the business to its owners. Every dollar a business earns, whether paid out or kept, is taxed as its owners' income, at their own graduated rates. That closes the loophole that would have let the wealthy simply leave their income inside a corporation, untaxed. The rule covers every form of business, including limited liability companies, partnerships, and trusts, and it follows income through chains of holding companies to the people who ultimately own them.

Two kinds of owners need special treatment. The United States cannot apply graduated rates to foreign investors, because it does not tax, or even see, their whole incomes. Section 3 therefore taxes their share of American profits at a single rate of fifteen per cent, withheld at the source. That is well below the combined corporate and dividend taxes foreign investors pay today. It also matches the global minimum tax agreed by more than 130 countries, under which a foreign company's home country may collect any shortfall below fifteen per cent itself. A lower American rate would simply hand that revenue to other governments without making the United States any more attractive. Pension funds, on the other hand, pay no tax on their share, because the money is taxed later, at graduated rates, when retirees receive it. Charities, churches, schools, universities, museums, and arts organizations are exempt, under safeguards that keep them from becoming tax shelters for the wealthy.

Section 5 taxes investment gains ("capital gains") as ordinary income, so that someone living off investments pays the same rates you pay on your wages. Section 6 closes the gift loophole by taxing lifetime gifts along with estates. Today's estate tax exempts the first $15 million per person in 2026. This article lowers the exemption to $2 million, indexed to inflation. Unless your estate, counting your lifetime gifts, tops that figure, your heirs owe nothing.

RationaleArticle XXXIV

The United States spent $954 billion on its military in 2025. That is a third of all military spending on Earth, and more than the next six countries combined (SIPRI; Peter G. Peterson Foundation).

This article ratchets that spending down gradually, from about three per cent of the national economy to two per cent over ten years, and then holds it there. Calibrating it to the size of the economy, rather than other measures such as the federal budget, keeps the limit stable when other spending rises or falls. At two per cent, the United States would still outspend China and Russia combined.

The limit counts all military spending, including nuclear weapons programs run outside the Pentagon and military aid to other countries, so it cannot be evaded by moving money between agencies. Veterans' pay and benefits are excluded, so the savings never come from people who have already served. In a genuine emergency, Congress may exceed the limit by declaring war or by a two-thirds vote, one year at a time.

Chemical and biological weapons have no legitimate use, and the United States has already renounced them by treaty; it finished destroying its declared chemical weapons in 2023. Land mines and naval mines kill and maim civilians for decades after a war ends. More than 150 nations have banned anti-personnel land mines under the Ottawa Treaty; the United States has not. Let's ban them outright.

Nuclear weapons are different, because giving them up unilaterally could leave us vulnerable to nations who keep theirs. This article therefore caps our arsenal at the size of the largest held by any other nation. Thus, we never lead the arms race. It also commits us to no-first-use. The United States must negotiate verifiable reductions with every nuclear power, and reduce step by step with them until no nation has any.

RationaleArticle XXXV

American taxpayers should not finance governments that practice racism or genocide, seize territory by force, or attack their neighbors.

This applies equally to present and future offenders. It limits aid to governments only. Humanitarian relief delivered to civilians through NGOs is unaffected.

RationaleArticle XXXVI

The land, air, and water are held in trust for our children. Section 1 makes that duty part of the Constitution, and Section 2 creates a department to carry it out.

Ending fossil fuels overnight would cause real hardship, so this article does not ban them. It makes pollution cost more every year, and returns that money to the people:

A rising fee. Greenhouse gas emissions pay a fee that increases on a published schedule, so businesses and households can plan the transition.

Protection from hardship. Fee revenue protects lower- and middle-income families from higher prices, helps coal and oil communities and their workers, and provides clean-energy incentives.

Penalties where change is practical. Further penalties apply only where a clean alternative is practicable. It must be commercially available, and cost no more than about ten per cent above the polluting option over its lifetime, once the emissions fee is counted. And you won't be penalized over your home or your car when switching would be a genuine hardship.

The article also protects the remaining primary forests while allowing controlled burns to prevent wildfires. Fish stocks are protected with catch limits in American waters, and imported fish caught in violation of such limits are banned.

And perhaps our greatest threat is hiding in plain sight: there are simply more of us than the planet can comfortably support. Every one of us needs food, water, shelter, and energy, and every problem this article tackles gets harder as our numbers grow. It's way past time we talked about it.

So this article asks the nation to encourage smaller families, but only by choice, never by force. That means free birth control and family planning for everyone who wants them, good schools, and the security in old age that Article XXXI provides, so that no one needs a big family to be cared for when they're old. Education matters most of all. Around the world, the more schooling women have, the fewer children they tend to have, and studies of countries that lengthened compulsory schooling show that the extra years in school themselves lead to smaller families (IZA World of Labor). Section 9 also says, in so many words, that no law may ever limit your choice to have children or not. The decision stays yours. And where our own population grows, let it grow by welcoming immigrants, who have always made this country stronger.

Environmental laws often fail because no one enforces them. Section 10 lets any citizen go to court to compel compliance, by a polluter or by a government agency that looks the other way.

The same tool can be abused. In California, lawsuits under environmental-review laws have often been used to stop apartment buildings, bike lanes, and even solar farms, with no environmental benefit at all. This article draws the line in three ways. Citizen suits may enforce real standards, such as emission limits, catch limits, and forest protections, but may not stall a project through paperwork alone. Suits must be filed promptly and decided within a year, so delay cannot become a weapon. And Section 11 guarantees that clean energy, transmission lines, transit, and housing that meet the law get a yes or no within a year.

Most of those permits come from cities, counties, and States, not Washington, and this article respects that. Your town still writes its own zoning and building rules. The Constitution only sets the clock: if an application sits undecided for a year, it's approved. Federal law already puts local governments on a deadline like this for cell-tower permits.

RationaleArticle XXXVII

Elections belong to voters, not to donors. Limiting contributions to $100 per person, from people only, for every federal office, means a candidate must win the support of many citizens, not just a few wealthy ones. It also means our airwaves are not swamped with electioneering, since candidates' budgets are likely to be much smaller.

Contribution limits alone are not enough. Since the infamous Citizens United v. FEC (2010) ruling, unlimited sums flow through "independent" spending and super PACs. We must get the dark money out of our elections. Section 2 closes that channel by barring corporations and unions from election spending, and allowing Congress to limit spending by individuals.

Surprisingly, the Constitution today grants no affirmative right to vote. It leaves voter qualifications to the States (Article I, Section 2) and only forbids denying the vote on account of race (Fifteenth Amendment), sex (Nineteenth), failure to pay a poll tax (Twenty-fourth), or age for those eighteen or older (Twenty-sixth). Everything else, from registration deadlines to ID rules to the permanent disenfranchisement of people with old convictions, varies from State to State. Section 3 guarantees you the right to vote once you turn eighteen, registers you automatically, and forbids any ID requirement that costs you money.

Voting is the foundation of democracy, and you shouldn't lose a day's pay to exercise it. Election Day becomes a paid holiday, you get a ballot in the mail, and if you'd rather vote in person, you can do it on at least six days over the two weeks before Election Day, at a polling place near you.

RationaleArticle XXXVIII

Firearms kill tens of thousands of Americans every year, at rates far beyond those of other wealthy nations. This article repeals the Second Amendment and ends the possession of firearms within the United States, by civilians, police, and the military alike.

Our armed forces serving abroad keep their weapons, and may make, store, and ship them at home, and train with them, but only for that purpose. All other firearms will be collected and destroyed within five years. Congress must pay for all of it, including fair compensation to the owners, so the job can't be left to die of neglect.

Police in a nation without guns can keep the peace as most British officers still do, armed with a baton rather than a pistol.

ReferencesSources

The Constitution

Elections and districts

Reproductive rights

Health care

Media and the Internet

Taxation

Military spending and weapons

Environment and population