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IMPROVING THE CONSTITUTIONMathis found that Lincoln's assassination was faked in order to get sympathy for a new president, as Lincoln was on his deathbed anyway and likely died naturally a few weeks to months later. See
http://mileswmathis.com/lincoln.pdfAt the end of that paper Mathis added the following comments about how such fraud, as well as vote fraud etc, could have been prevented by better wording in the Constitution. Following are Mathis' comments.
For some this essay has likely been overly long already, but for those whose eyes are still in their
heads, I have a few more comments. I will remove the investigator's cap and change my tone a bit for
this. I still won't act the historian, since I was never interested in straight reportage. I will put on the
cap of the philosopher or legislator. After discovering what I have discovered, it occurred to me that I
wasn't feeling the disgust I might be expected to feel from this whole charade. In fact, I found I was
more offended by the vote stealing in the election of 1864—what with the requirement of oaths and so
on—than I was by the faked assassination. With the faked murder, I felt I could understand the need
for it, due to circumstances. It was a magnificent fraud assuredly, and I would never defend fraud.
And yet, I could see so clearly why and how it happened, that I was tempted to pass part of the blame
to the framers of the Constitution, who—through sheer negligence, one supposes—allowed it to occur.
It was a disaster waiting to happen, and in fact this wasn't the only time it happened. As we have seen
above, the vague wording of Article 1 set this whole thing up. So let us study the problem and the
solution.
It appears the authors of the Constitution didn't wish to allow a President to resign due to ill health or
other reasons. They appeared to have assumed—for reasons that aren't really clear—that no President
would simply wish to quit. They wrote Article 1 assuming ill health would either lead to a cure or to
death, and they included language to cover both possibilities. But they didn't foresee a third possibility:
lingering ill health that would not lead to death, but that would lead to the permanent inability to
govern. They also didn't foresee that even ill health lingering for a short time could cause a crisis in
times of emergency, since an Acting President would not have the authority of a full President.
And they clearly didn't foresee how loopholes in the rules of Article 1 would lead to exploitation of
those loopholes, which is precisely what happened in 1865. It appears they didn't want a President just
passing the ball to the Vice-President for no reason, since that would have allowed a candidate to get
into office on false pretenses, by a sort of Cyrano gambit. But the only thing they did to prevent that
was make it impossible for a President to just retire (without scandal). Under the current language and
customs, any retirement not due to ill health would be seen as scandalous, and would negatively affect
the Vice-President as he became the President. We saw that with Ford, as he succeeded Nixon.
Therefore, to successfully run a Cyrano gambit (pretending you are running one candidate while really
running the other), they have to fake the death of the President. That allows the new President to
govern with augmented authority, rather than diminished authority. That is what we just saw in the
above analysis.
Now, the Constitution is a wonderful document in many ways, but in other ways it is a terrible
document. Its vagueness on many issues is sold to us as a strength, but in most cases it is nothing but a
weakness. The Constitution is mainly a piece of legislation, and vagueness in legislation is never a
plus. The brevity of the Constitution is admirable, but it could be almost as brief and ten times as
powerful, with the right wording.
The authors of the Constitution did not take full account of human nature, by which any loophole is
sure to be exploited. Admitting that, vague language should be avoided at all cost, and any loophole
discovered later should be immediately filled. This has simply not happened. The loopholes have been
exploited with ever more fantastic gambits.
To prevent this Cyrano gambit, you could do one of two things. Most instances would be stopped by
adding a clause to the effect that any President who dies or quits for any reason not due to scandal in
the first year of office will NOT be succeeded by the Vice-President. The Vice-President will become
Acting President only while a special election is called. This special election must be called
immediately, and in fact no one has to call it. As soon as the President dies or resigns, the election is
understood to be called already, by the Constitution itself. The actual voting should take place within
six weeks; in times of war, three weeks. All instances of the gambit could be prevented by extending
the clause over all four years, instead of just the first year.
If I have still missed something, what I missed should also be filled with precise language.
I will be told that these quick special elections don't allow time for the public to learn about candidates,
but that argument is mostly a diversion. The public now has two years of campaigning to endure, and
at the end learns almost nothing of value. If campaigns were honest, you could learn everything you
needed to know about candidates in a matter of weeks. In dishonest campaigns, you will be prevented
from learning anything to the point regardless. Short campaigns therefore limit the amount of possible
propaganda, and are to be preferred for that alone.
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Topic: Improve Local Government (like Police Reform) (Read 18535 times)