Several years ago, the blatant falsification of financial records lead to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which required CEOs to sign and accept responsibility for the accuracy of their corporation’s financial statements. It is time we required the same level of accountability of our representatives in government.

“I didn’t know that…” sounds cute from my four year old niece. Not so cute when it comes from a Senator claiming ignorance as an excuse for how he voted.

This clause would also require legislators to certify in writing that they have read completely and understand fully the legislation they are voting on.

4. Bills shall be known and recorded by numerical identifier only. No titles may be used.

This is the “Marketing and Spin Doctors Need Not Apply” clause. Oops, clause #4.

Legislators should not have to face sound bite attacks about voting against something called the “Patriot Act” (possibly the most unpatriotic law ever passed) or “No Child Left Behind” (which should actually have been called the “Dumbing Down of America Act”).

I’d really like to see this applied everywhere, but until enough people realize that the media companies and search engines are NOT in the business of providing information, but rather the business of selling advertising…

Education should not stop at graduation.

2. The first paragraph of each law passed by Congress, up to a maximum of one hundred words, shall state the purpose of the law.

3. No Court having jurisdiction within the United States may interpret any portion of the law to contravene the express purpose of the law as stated in its first paragraph.

These two clauses are to keep the “side effects” of legislation to a minimum. They are designed to reduce the wiggle room lawyers use to keep themselves in business while producing nothing of actual economic value to anyone but themselves.

Clause #3 also serves to reduce the judiciary from legislating from the bench. They don’t have to guess or infer what a statute is about – it’s purpose is clearly stated.

For this and my next few posts I will discuss the purposes and reasons behind each clause of the proposed Amendment. While I am writing this up at the federal level, I would also like to see this enacted by each state as well.

1. Congress shall pass no law which exceeds in length two 8.5” x 11” pages of Courier 10-point font.

The purpose of this clause is to prevent the bundling of multiple issues into one law. It particularly goes after pork being tacked on to bills that perform otherwise necessary functions. By limiting the length, we force the bill to one thing only, and make it live or die on that one thing.

It also should force bills to be written in plain English. If “ignorance of the law is no excuse”, then there is no excuse for having laws that require post-graduate degrees and professional certification to understand.

This also takes care of the debate about the pros and cons of a line item veto power for the executive branch – Congress gets it laws signed either intact or not at all, and the President doesn’t have to sign or veto something he approves of only part of.

All the candidates for President talk about change.  The trouble is, no matter who wins, there are still 500+ obstacles to any substantial change sitting in Congress, and all the current candidates are currently members of that obstacle course.

What we need is a way to make Congress represent “We the People” as opposed to CorporationsRUS.  We can no longer afford a government that mortgages our future and our children’s future in order to collect this quarter’s campaign contributions.

The phrase “legislative accountability” came to me several years ago. I was quite frustrated with the members of Congress who way too late said of the Patriot Act that they did not realize everything that was in it when they voted.

If corporate officers need to sign and take responsibility for their company’s financial statements, shouldn’t our legislators be held to at least that much responsibility?

Of course, the excuse was that no one could be expected to read and understand all of the clauses in a bill that runs to hundreds of pages. So let’s remove that excuse as well.

I came up with the Legislative Accountability Amendment.

This year, with all the presidential candidates talking about change, I decided it was time to make my idea more public – to see if anyone was interested in real change. Thus begins this blog, in the hopes of building a community that can push for something more than campaign promises out of our next President.

Let’s put “We the People”, and our Constitution, back in charge of our country.