US Dictator - For One Week

If we have learned anything from the last 20 years of American politics, it is that the American political system is broken and unable to fix itself. Politicians are ill-equipped to deal with anything more important than how to create another committee to investigate the seating at the next lunch paid for by me, the American Taxpayer. Compound their ineptitude by elections with a voting public that can’t properly push out a perforated dot and you get where we are now.
Whether you are Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or any other party doesn’t matter. Your guy/girl, is powerless to address the real issues confronting our nation. The truly sad part is that if you asked the leaders of each of the parties to name the top 10 most pressing issues in our nation, the list would only vary by an item or two. They agree on the problems, but solutions are conspicuously absent in any meaningful debate.
If the American people would allow me to be dictator for a week, we can actually implement common sense solutions that govern our nation as intended by the founding fathers and tweaked by time and culture. Gone would be the red tape and the endless party line votes that seem to kill any truly helpful legislation. Gone would be the billions of dollars of pork that gets attached to even the simplest of bills.
My first action as dictator would be to establish ground rules for reversing any action that I implement. No action can be reversed without a supermajority of both houses, a signature of agreement by the President and immediate constitutional review by the Supreme Court. Upon agreement by all three branches, my decisions can be overturned.
First of all, the supermajority requires people to work together and not just vote along party lines. We have had enough of partisan politics in this country and not enough of what is good for our country. JFK said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Too many politicians ask what our country can do to get them elected. Politics has always been about political parties, but we have taken it too far in this country and it needs to cease.
The President is the leader in our government. In this day, he is the most powerful person in the world. He is commander in chief of one of the greatest military forces ever assembled and the largest economy in the world, and in fact, the world economy hangs on his every word. Our founding fathers were wise enough to temper his power with oversight by the other two branches of government, but no legislation should be enacted without his approval.
It has been said that laws are not laws until they are challenged in court. It was probably said by a lawyer earning his new BMW at the expense of me, the American Taxpayer. To reduce court costs, why not make the Supreme Court review all new laws before they are officially enacted for constitutionality. If they pass muster and all have agreed, so be it.
Now that we have established the ground rules of my short dictatorship, let’s get to work solving the problems of our age. The problems we have in this country are complex. They are so interconnected within our society that even when one is losing, one is benefiting. It has been my experience that the more complex the problem, the more simple the solutions have to be. First, implementing a complex solution seldom works right the first time and always frustrates the users. Second, often the problem is the complexity itself and a simple solution has to address the complexity.
It is for this reason alone that as dictator I would start with the complex issues of the day and work toward simpler issues. The most complex issue confronting our society today is the single largest entity, the US Federal Government.