How to Fix the US Federal Problem

by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ January 7, 2020

We cannot afford psychotics, buffoons, or incompetents as the supreme executive of the United States. This is crystal clear in the current situation as we managed to get all three, in the bloated body of Donald Trump, on an accelerating descent into hell.

Logically it is unreasonable to expect any individual to handle leadership in a nation representing a significant planetary region with the antiquated and failing organizational structure. This will only be exacerbated by global political decline and the increasing chaos of the climate crisis.

Assuming Trump’s removal, by whatever means and there are a growing range of interested parties, we need to move expeditiously to prevent future such disasters. If we have not learned the hard lessons of a too powerful executive position and the types of riffraff that can end up in those positions, we might as well break up the country and save the grief of total collapse and potential damage to the planet.

Attempting to salvage the US as a centralized union is not, in my opinion, a good solution given the rapid failure of the old nation state system, but recognizing that a significant part of the population will want to hold onto the USA for nostalgia, what do we do?

Why not remove Trump and eliminate the presidency at the same time? As everyone is intimately aware one of the major problems with removing Trump from office is the unfortunate presence of yet another snake in the form of Mike Pence as successor. As a religious wing nut he probably wouldn’t politely resign as happened with Spiro Agnew under Nixon. He wasn’t polite either but he was indicted and shame was till a thing in those days.

We are now three years into a number of desperate governmental change projects from eliminating the Electoral College, a manipulated cause for Trump, to blocking all gerrymandering, another cause as well as the means by which a shrinking and failing party has held onto unjustified political authority, to voting changes replacing first past the post elections, but these are very difficult to explain and more difficult to implement.

These are all ‘reasonable’ solutions that are probably impossible given the levels of current corruption at both the Congressional and state legislative levels. The problem is that even if they were achieved the current mess would almost certainly be grandfathered in leaving dysfunctional and diseased political systems in place. Even if they were fully implemented at all state levels what is preventing another television personality with delusions of grandeur wanting to be another incompetent god-king? Just look at Great Britain. Not an encouraging sight.

Many large enterprises have moved to Executive Committees or an Office of the President with several members because of the difficulty and risks of finding someone, who isn’t crazy, to run things. As an example, three strong and capable people representing different aspects of the nation would probably not agree on acts of war without a lot of careful checking and long discussion. As we all know, with three people there will alway be one who refuses to agree. Obviously we would need consensu for decisions at this new level.

This also assumes that Congress, in its present form, continues to be completely dysfunctional other than for periodic performances of dumb and dumber. In fact, we might want to restructure Congress as a a type of vaudeville with the sale of tickets for performances to help defray the cost of maintaining otherwise useless people. Their salaries could be tied to ticket sales so that should at least keep things interesting.

Perhaps this complete dysfunctionality is not a bad thing with replacement of the Presidency with an Executive Committee. Most of the decisions are already in the Office of the President if that Committee was truly representative. Congress could be allowed to atrophy, if it’s entertainment value declined, with responsibility moving down to local representative bodies by default. Hmm, on second thought, maybe not. That would be Dumb, Dumber, and Gibbering Idiot? Oops, we have had enough of that already at the top.

Seriously now, removing the presidency from the federal government could solve a far larger set of problems than lower level process changes that leave the failed units intact. The Executive process would need to be completely open and policy discussion and decisions would be scheduled events streamed to the world. Everyone could then watch the Executive Members of the new US Office of the Presidency review issues and argue on what they should do.

This could go a long way toward assuring the world that the US is back and over its stupidity. No more secret shit. That, in fact, is exactly what will be needed as we struggle with planetary solutions on climate disaster, resource allocation, and refugee resettlement. Live big data analysis of both US citizen opinions and world citizen’s thoughts could be consolidated as a dynamic display for our new leadership. Real time and live decision making affecting the planet, what a concept.

Stupid and ignorant actions could be avoided but important, urgent issues could be decided. After all, they would have to dispense with pointless pontificating or the action may get heated and very interesting with a brawl in the Oval Office. That actually sounds like a good title for the daily streamed work sessions! “The Brawl from the Oval Office”, has a ring to it that could draw a demographic not normally interested in national policy decisions.

There is the question of how to make this change without falling into the current vile and disgusting political swamp. Given the current shifting power structure maybe we compose the initial Executive Committee in the new Office of the Presidency using the current Presidential succession order. In this case we take the Speaker of the House, the Vice President, and President.

That would be Nancy Pelosi, we leave Pence in as replacing Trump, and then a new Vice President to be appointed. Pence is a snake but I’m sure Pelosi could handle him, probably, with a just a weekly smackdown. Pence could hide in the corner as he is deathly frightened of women. Problem solved.

As this is really just a process change with adjustments of responsibility for the existing positions we could just have Nancy Pelosi, as Speaker of the House declare it done. With another election we could formalize things and be on the road to recovery with restored international credibility in no time.

Who knew the solution was so close?