Jackson Reintroduces Eight Constitutional Amendments

[Kevin Spidel]

For Immediate Release

Monday, March 7, 2005



Jackson Reintroduces Eight Constitutional Amendments
Rep. Stark Takes The Lead On Health Care Amendment


Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr., on last week, in addition to introducing his Voting Rights Amendment - which had 54 original co-sponsors and now has a total of 56 co-sponsors - reintroduced eight other amendments pertaining to: the right to a public education of equal high quality (H.J. Res. 29) - which had 31 original co-sponsors and now has 32 co-sponsors; the right to health care of equal high quality (H.J. Res. 30) - which had 28 original co-sponsors and now has 30 co-sponsors; equal rights for women (H.J. Res. 31); the right to decent, safe, sanitary, and affordable housing (H.J. Res. 32); the right to a clean, safe, and sustainable environment (H.J. Res. 33); taxing the people of the United States progressively (H.J. Res. 34); the right to full employment and balanced economic growth (H.J. Res. 35); and an amendment to eliminate the Electoral College and elect our President and Vice President through the direct vote of a majority of the American people (H.J. Res. 36).



"H. J. Res. 30 is getting a big boost this Congress because the distinguished Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA-13) has agreed to 'take the bull by the horns' with regard to the health care amendment. As the ranking Democrat of the Subcommittee on Health of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Stark is strongly identified with high quality health care for all Americans and was eager to lead a campaign to add co-sponsors to the bill.



"We are concentrating on building support among members of Congress for three of the nine amendments introduced - the right to vote (H.J. Res. 28), and the right to a public education (H.J. Res. 29) and health care (H.J. Res. 30) of equal high quality.



"I believe most Americans think they either already have some or all of these rights or think they should have these rights in their Constitution - but they don't! So we will continue to educate the American people as to why it is important to put these rights in the Constitution, and continue to build support for them among members of Congress," Jackson concluded.

[beyurslf]

1. I don't want our party to become like the Republicans.... amending the

consitution for every thing we don't like. Sure, all of those are important and right and should be considered "rights." This doesn't mean that they have to be consitutional rights though.

The VRA seems like the most important one--because it is a constitutional issue already.

[sacxtra]

2. Jackson means well, but he don't get it

He does NOT UNDERSTAND DIGITIZED DATA!

Therefore the bills, acts, and legislation regarding electronic voting
all ignore this simple fact.

[brindis_desala]

3. Torture is banned by Article 8 but that hasn't stopped it.

All of these proposals fall under the preamble clause of "providing for the general welfare" except the issue of the Electoral College which I agree is arcane and anti-democratic and needs to be abolished.
We don't need a better Constitution we need an enlightened electorate, checks and balances and finally, real enforcement.

[BigBearJohn]

4. Sounds like a great "wish list" to me. At least I can dream, can't I?

[hughee99]

5. I have a few concerns about these ammendments...

The voting rights amendment shouldn't be necessary, the rights are already there, if they were only to enforce the existing laws and fix the current voting issues.

Public education is already a right, but how do you determine that the quality of all public schools is equal? Along these lines what is the standard for "decent, safe, sanitary and affordable housing" and a "clean, safe and sustainable environment"?

Although I support equal rights for women, I'm not aware of any "rights" a man has that a woman does not. I know that there are currently situations where woman are discriminate against, but there are already laws on the books that are being ignored.

How can you declare a right to full employment unless you start either mandating that companies hire people or have the federal government start hiring workers that it may not need to do it's job? How can one legislate "balanced economic growth"?

As to the electoral college, I do have some concerns with this as well. I don't necessarily want to keep it, but I do wonder how many people outside of major cities and large population states would even hear from an elected official since their area would not be of enough concern to elected officials to bother with. My other concern is voter fraud. Right now, although we can see that voter fraud is rampant, it is at least limited to the state. If you pick up an extra 100-200K votes in a state, you're gains are only limited to that state, whereas if we did this based on popular vote, one or two corrupt local election boards in large population centers could theoretically swing an entire national election. This can still happen under the current system, but in a close election, the number of cities that you could perform this kind of fraud in is relatively limited and therefore can be watched closely (although that doesn't seem to be happening now). For example, if the repukes in the last election were to manufacture an extra 500K votes in Texas, it would only affect the Texas results and not cancel out democratic gains in other states. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, but I would like to see the voting process fixed before we go to the next step.

I guess for many of the other issues, I would need to read the actual text of the amendments to get some of the answers that I am looking for.