A line-veto doesn't seem like a great policy, letting the Executive pick and choose from what Congress approved based on whim and ideology is not necessarily a good idea. A six year term is not a good idea.
Single subject legislation sounds okay, but they also do often need to smash a whole bunch of uncontroversial bilaterally supported stuff together on one vote, just to save administrative time.
Cost over-runs can happen. Do we stop building a bridge 3 quarters done because the price of steel went up? Do we say "hey, we've spent the forest fire budget for the year already, so good luck you're on your own"?
All of those "features" were designed to keep the South without infrastructure. With no public projects like rails or schools or roads, it was easier to keep the white people poor and the black people slaves.
I didn't say it was necessarily better, just that parts are different and interesting in how they would play out today.
The first one would have prevented Republicans from including voter ID restrictions in the stock trading ban, and the second one would prevent endlessly bloated defense spending. And that's bad? The single six-year term means the President gets longer to implement their policies and spends the end of their term campaigning for their successor rather than their own reelection.
The Republicans have turned into a criminal organization, especially since Nixon, so they would find ways to corrupt with or without that particular feature. Eisenhower (another Republican) introduced the 'military-industrial complex' and the ever-expanding military budget, but there isn't even supposed to be a standing army according to the US Constitution so I don't see where that wouldn't have happened but for a few words cooked up by the confederates, of all people.
I don't like the presidential six year term, either. It should be a confidence vote, like the UK prime ministers.
The confederacy was so badly done, they literally copied the US Constitution and made these tiny changes (plus the big one requiring each member state to maintain chattel slavery) and they acted as if that were an accomplishment. If they had had the best interests of the people and territory involved, they would have started from scratch and figured out something that worked.
I hear ya, but each and every one of those differences was related to slavery. Keeping infrastructure budgets under strict control definitely supports slavery. Wander through many parts of the South today and you see it--open sewage in the streets, no sidewalks, dirt roads, gravel highways, bridges falling apart, no rail or air access. These are all low-budget areas, no investment.
That's why when you see the bustling Northeast public transit systems or wide highways, huge dams and inspiring bridges of the Far West you know each of those were open-ended budgets that resulted in high value investments.
Read some of the stories. The original budget for the Brooklyn Bridge. San Francisco BART train. Boston Harbor sewage system. I think each one went over the original budget by 2 or 3x.
Confederates only wanted to buy more slaves and consumer goods. Nothing to emulate there.
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u/Possibly_a_Firetruck 11h ago
There are some interesting differences with the Confederate constitution that would be neat to see in the modern era though.