End the power to impeach (and lots else beside)

[Donald Ian Rankin]

I do not think that elected officials (or, more precisely, officials who will someday stand for election again) should have any power to interfere in the administration of justice. Laws should be made by people answerable to the electorate, but they should be enforced by people answerable only to the law.

Here in the UK we used to be close to a separation of legal and political systems, but over the last decade and a bit the Home Secretary has gained increased powers to interfere in sentencing. I think this is a very bad thing indeed.

In an American context

:-Judges, prosecutors, police officers and the like should be appointed by independent bodies, not elected.

:-The president should not have the power to issue pardons; if anyone should it should be the Supreme Court, and probably no-one should.

:-Congress, instead of the power to impeach the president for crimes, should have (if anything) the power to remove him from office for political reasons. Now, actually, this is what it currently has, but it's always presented as being a criminal rather than a political power, which causes all sorts of confusion; this should be made clear.

:-Congressional districting and the like should be determined by a non-partisan body with a clear set of guidelines, not of politicians horse-trading.

:-Anyone who has served as a judge or prosecutor within the last N years, for some fairly high value of N, should be barred from running for elected office.

:-The arbiter of what happens to the Guantanamo detainees should be the courts, not the government.

And, to offset all the things I am complaining about, I will point out that the Supreme Court justices not being answerable to any politician is an excellent thing.

[Orrex]

1. You're about 222 years too late on some of those suggestoins

Where were these across-the-pond suggestions when they were drafting the thing in the first place? After all, the DoI isn't a document of law, but 1787's Constitution spells out a number of the issues that you're addressing.


This post was totally not edited to correct any stupid math errors

[Donald Ian Rankin]

2. Are you sure you mean 122?

If your hand were one space further to the right, you'd have gotten 233, which I could understand...

[Orrex]

3. Uh...

I have no idea what you're talking about. Nope. Not me...

[ThomWV]

4. How about making each (individual) Pardon subject to 50%+1 vote in the House?

That way the majority of "the people" will have given their consent to the pardon by proxy.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

5. It's still a political, not a legal process, though.

And has no business in the legal system.

Even "pardon by referendum" has the same flaw.