American Suburbs Are Still Stupid

 

A Policy Take On The "Big Beautiful Bill"

So, what is good or bad about the Trump 2.0 budget bill called the "Big Beautiful Bill."

1. The Medicaid and Food Stamps cuts are catastrophic and hurt the most needed in a bill that lavishes benefits on the rich and there are many other bad cuts to spending (and to the Obamacare health insurance tax credit):

Major Spending Cuts

. . . 

Changes to Medicaid and Health Insurance Marketplaces: The Energy and Commerce Committee’s proposal includes changes to major federal health programs. It would cut Medicaid spending by imposing work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents, increasing eligibility checks to twice a year, reducing the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) for states covering undocumented immigrants, introducing cost-sharing for Medicaid expansion enrollees, banning new or increased provider taxes used to draw federal funds, and capping provider payments at Medicare rates. It would also codify proposed changes to the federally subsidized Health Insurance Marketplaces that would reduce participation in the Marketplaces. These proposals would reduce the deficit by more than $900 billion over the budget window.

Changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP): The Agriculture Committee’s proposal would reduce spending on SNAP by more than $290 billion over ten years. The bill would shift a significant portion of SNAP benefit costs to states with a new cost-sharing formula linked to payment error rates. It would also create additional work documentation requirements, limit the growth of the Thrifty Food Plan, shift administrative costs to states, and make other changes to reduce federal SNAP costs.

Changes to student loans: The Education and Workforce Committee’s proposal would eliminate subsidized and income-driven loan repayment plans, impose new overall limitations on student borrowing, and tighten Pell Grant eligibility. Altogether, the Education and Workforce Committee’s proposal would reduce spending by $350 billion over the budget window. Under federal budget accounting rules, the lifetime subsidy costs of student loans are measured on an accrual basis and recorded up front. As a result, almost $200 billion of the Committee’s total savings are recorded in the budget immediately in Fiscal Year 2025.

3. The cuts to the Obamacare health insurance tax credit are very bad for middle class people, especially the self-employed, even though the original design of those tax credits is far too clunky and complicated.

4. Many of the extended provision of the Trump 2017 tax bill are bad, including:

* Lowering the corporate tax rate to 21%, which is bad tax policy.

* The pass through entity tax break (which is increased from 21% to 23%), which never made sense.

* Ending most casualty loss deductions.

* Ending most cost of earning income deductions.

* Severely curtailing the state and local tax deduction (although this is modestly relaxed increasing the cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction to $30,000 from $10,000 for taxpayers with income under $400,000, but limiting taxpayers’ ability to use state pass-through entity workarounds for the individual SALT cap).

* Opportunity Zones were a clunky and bureaucratic tax policy that was always a mechanically bad way to achieve the desirable end of encouraging economic development in depressed areas.

Broadly speaking, many of the revenue raisers in that bill abridged good tax policies, and the giveaways to the wealthy and publicly held companies were outrageous. We have a big budget deficit primarily because of these tax giveaways to the rich. One leading model summarizes the budget impacts as follows:

Some of the new tax provisions break down as follows (from the same source):

5. It makes the giveaway in gift and estate taxes worse, increasing the lifetime exemption for the estate, gift, and generation skipping transfer taxes to $15 million in 2026 (indexed to inflation thereafter). It is currently $13.99 million indexed for inflation, which is also too large. It would have fallen to about $7 million in 2026 without this bill.

6. A $4,000 tax deduction per person age 65 or older, simply because of their age, is bad policy. Excluding Social Security payments from income would have been a better policy and closer to the campaign rhetoric but more expensive. This would have cost a $1 trillion over ten years v. $200 billion if the bonus deduction for seniors were made permanent.

7. The new tax break for car loan interest probably violates our World Trade Organization treaty requirements and tax incentives to take out personal debt on depreciating personal assets. is bad tax policy. This is why Ronald Reagan eliminated them in the 1986 tax bill and why they haven't been reinstated. The $35 billion tax savings over four years doesn't justify it (and higher car prices due to tariffs undermine the policy).

8. The MAGA account $1,000 tax credit for newborns is clunky and bureaucratic and a political cheap shot, when it could have been a simple extra child tax credit.

9. The tip deduction, by continuing to make tips subject to payroll taxes and state and local income taxes, for a group that pays little or nothing in federal income taxes, is pretty meaningless. The extension of the employer payroll tax tip credit from the food and beverage business to the beauty services industry (hair car, manicures, etc.) is a step in the right direction. But the whole treatment of tipped income is clumsy and doesn't address the real concerns. Tips should be classified as self-employment income rather than as wages and salaries, and any tax break on tips should extent to self-employment taxation.

10. The tax plan for net investment income from large college endowments is politically presented as a way to punish higher education as part of a larger assault on higher education by Trump, also attacking foreign students and immigrant professors, trying to regulate DEI in higher education without legal authority to do so, doing serious harm to the military academies, and baselessly threatening university tax exemptions. Honestly, a tax on the net investment income all of non-profits (which already is in place for political organizations) wouldn't be a horrible thing. But singling out colleges and universities, which are less abusive than other kinds of non-profits, is problematic. A provision granting the President great freedom to revoke non-profit status based upon the policies and speech of the non-profit is also deeply problematic (and has been removed from the bill for now).

11. The bans on state and local regulation of AI for ten years is at a minimum over broad.

12. The phase out of the environmental tax credits of the Inflation Reduction Act aren't necessarily bad as a matter of tax policy but aren't good as a matter of environmental policy. Tax laws that pick winners and losers aren't a great idea and should be temporary. Tariffs on imports of electric vehicles and solar panels, especially from China, however, add insult to injury.

13. Proposed payments to farmers hurt by tariffs, while netting out the harm to farmers, is much worse than not imposing tariffs in the first place. It has left farmers irrevocably harmed as foreign buyers have found new suppliers, and hits Americans with not only tariffs paid but also with taxpayer funds to counteract them.

14. Imposing new reciprocal taxes for "unfair" foreign taxes sounds murky and like an invitation to horrible foreign policy.

Trump's Tax Proposals For Tips, Overtime, And Social Security Are Skimpy

Proposed tax breaks for tips, overtime pay, seniors, and car loan interest, are stingier than the rhetoric Republican politicians have made about them would imply.

The proposed tax breaks for tips, overtime, Social Security, and car loan interest are skimpier than the political rhetoric from Trump and the GOP would suggest. All would be from 2025 to 2028 only. All require the taxpayer to have a Social Security number (which is designed to impose a penalty tax on immigrants not authorized to work).

Tips and overtime would still be subject to payroll taxes and state and local income taxes. There would be an above the line tax deduction for them on federal income tax returns for tips and overtime. For overtime, it would only cover the 1/2 hour per hour worked of additional overtime pay rates, not the full 1 and 1/2 hours of overtime pay per hour worked. The tip and overtime deductions are not allowed for taxpayers with incomes over $160,000 in a "cliff rule" rather than with a phase out. 

The employer tip credit against certain payroll taxes is expanded from the food and beverage industry to the beauty services industry.

The Social Security tax break is actually unrelated to Social Security. It would be an up to $4,000 added to the standard deduction for those who use the additional standard deduction for older taxpayers (age 65+) per senior, or an itemized deduction of up to $4,000 for taxpayers of that age who itemize (which can't be refunded and carried over). It starts to phase out at $150,000 for married couples and $75,000 for other taxpayers.

The above the line deduction of up to $10,000 for car loan interest would apply only to cars whose assembly was completed in the U.S. on purchase money car loans for cars purchased in 2025 or later. It starts to phase out at $200,000 for married couples and $100,000 for other taxpayers.

The anticipated total revenue impact of these tax breaks is quite modest, because the limitations keep the budget cost of the tax cuts much lower than they would have been otherwise.

The Tax Foundation summarizes these tax breaks, and some others for individual taxpayers, as follows:

The standard deduction and child tax credit just tweak the usual moving parts of the tax code. The above the line deduction for charitable deductions is, needless to say, modest. The tax credit for contributions to scholarship granting organizations is an expensive back door national school voucher program. The MAGA accounts for newborns is a gimmicky and unnecessarily complicated way to provide an extra $1,000 on time tax credit for newborns.

Some of the harsh provisions of the 2017 tax bill, like the limitation on the state and local tax deduction and the near elimination of the casualty loss deduction, are extended.

No Tax On Tips 

Trump initially promised to end taxes on tips while campaigning in June in the swing state of Nevada. The hospitality industry is huge in Nevada, making up more than 20% of jobs in the state. The pledge didn't make it into the draft bill but did make it into the chairman's amendment, introduced on Monday.

As proposed, tip income would be temporarily deductible—only for tax years 2025 through 2028—for individuals who work in what are considered “traditionally and customarily tipped industries.” (According to the proposal, that would only include industries that accepted tips on or before December 31, 2024—Treasury is directed to make a list of those that qualify.)

Some media and social media reports I've seen say that this is not allowed for non-itemizers, but the bill language states that it is an "above the line deduction" available to non-itemizers. But many tipped workers only pay FICA payroll taxes and state income taxes on tips anyway (due to the large standard deduction and the fact that many tipped workers work part-time).

Self-employed persons, like Uber and Lyft drivers, would also qualify for the break as currently written.

Highly compensated employees (those who make over $160,000 in 2025) would be excluded. And, in a nod to concerns that all of the sudden, clever tax lawyers, business owners and others could wiggle their way into a no-tax-on-tips zone, Treasury is directed to craft regulations or other guidance to “prevent reclassification of income as qualified tips... to prevent abuse of the deduction.”

It's important to note that this is a federal income tax deduction, not an exclusion. That means that tips would still be reportable—and taxable at the state and local level. It also means that tips would remain subject to payroll taxes, including Social Security and Medicare, for employees.

Employers will get a break, however, via a tip credit. The deduction, which has been in place since 1993 for restaurants, is known as the 45B credit and allows for a rebate on the entire employer side of FICA taxes on tips. The instructions for claiming the 45B credit made clear it covers tips to employers involved in "providing, delivering, or serving food or beverages for consumption." The result is that tips provided elsewhere—like in salons—are subject to payroll taxes for both employees and employers, even though not a penny goes to the salon.

The most recent tax bill proposes to change that by extending the benefit to the beauty industry. Under the amendment, section 45B would be amended to include barbers and hair care, nail care, esthetics, and body and spa treatments. 

No Tax On Overtime

Trump also promised to eliminate taxes on overtime pay. That pledge was originally made in September 2024, during a speech in Tucson, Arizona. That break also didn't make it into the draft bill, but did make it into the chairman's amendment.

As proposed, workers who receive overtime would not have to pay taxes on that extra compensation. For purposes of the rule, overtime compensation is defined as the amount paid in excess of the employee’s regular rate—only the overtime compensation is part of the break. While taxpayers wouldn’t have to itemize to take advantage of the benefit, it would be temporary—only for tax years 2025 through 2028.

This tax break is also proposed as a deduction, not an exclusion. That means that overtime pay would still be reportable, and, as with tips, overtime pay would remain subject to payroll taxes, including Social Security and Medicare, for employees.

Quick Payroll Tax Primer

Confused about the employer versus employee sides of payroll taxes? For wage earners, Social Security and Medicare taxes are called FICA (Federal Insurance Contributions Act) and are taken out of your paycheck. Taxes on self-employment income are sometimes called SECA (Self-Employment Contributions Act) taxes since self-employed persons pay both the employee and employer contributions.

If you're employed, you pay Social Security tax at a rate of 6.2% as the employee, and your employer pays the same tax rate on your behalf. If you're self-employed, you are responsible for both parts.

Social Security taxes are subject to a wage cap. That means you pay Social Security taxes on your earnings until you hit the magic number. After that, your wages are no longer subject to Social Security taxes. For 2025, the magic number is $176,100. That means that whether you make $1,000 or $100,000, you will pay Social Security taxes on your income. But if you earn $176,101? You'll pay Social Security taxes on the first $176,100, but not on the extra dollar. And if you earn $1,176,100? Same result: you'll pay Social Security taxes on $176,100, but not on the extra million.

In contrast, all wages are subject to Medicare taxes. If you're employed, you pay Medicare tax of 1.45% as the employee, and your employer kicks in tax at the same rate. As before, if you're self-employed, you'll pay both portions, for a total tax rate of 2.9%.

High-income taxpayers are also subject to an additional Medicare tax of 0.9% tacked onto wages that exceed $200,000 for single filers—those thresholds are $125,000 for married taxpayers filing separately and $250,000 for married taxpayers filing jointly.

If you're a wage earner, your employer collects your Social Security and Medicare payments and remits both their portion and your share to the government. Self-employed persons pay the IRS directly. Retaining payroll taxes on tips and overtime may mean a bigger bite at tax time, but there is an upside: No matter who pays, these taxes are credited toward your retirement benefits. 

No Tax On Social Security

Last year, also on the campaign trail, Trump promised to exempt Social Security income from tax. The idea was popular, but likely because many people do not understand how Social Security income is taxed. The majority of people who get Social Security do not pay federal income tax on those benefits—according to the Social Security Administration, only about 48% of people pay federal income taxes on their benefits (though some studies suggest that the percentage is higher).

If your only source of income is your Social Security check, your benefits are generally not taxable. You may not even need to file a federal income tax return.

If you receive income from other sources, your benefits would not be taxed unless your combined income exceeds the base amount for your filing status, and then, the taxable amount is based on income. No one pays federal income tax on more than 85% of their Social Security benefits.

There is no language in the draft bill or the amendment that would further exempt Social Security from tax. However, the proposal does include a new—also temporary—deduction of $4,000 for the tax years 2025 through 2028.

The deduction would be available to taxpayers who itemize and those who claim the standard deduction. It would begin to phase out once income hits $150,000 for married taxpayers filing jointly and $75,000 for all other taxpayers (disappearing completely when modified adjusted income reaches $350,000 for married taxpayers and $175,000 for all other taxpayers).

To claim the deduction, you would have to have a Social Security number and, if married, your spouse would also have to have a Social Security number.

The deduction is not the same as a refundable credit. That means you will not receive a benefit if you have little to no taxable income—the case for most Social Security recipients. The deduction simply disappears. Realistically, the deduction won't help seniors with little to no other income sources outside of Social Security and will primarily benefit those with income in addition to Social Security. 

What Comes Next

You can see the original draft version of the bill before the markup here. The Smith amendment version is here.

The bill is still working its way through the House where Republicans hold a slim majority. Even if it's approved, the House bill must conform to the Senate version to be signed into law.

From Forbes.

The proposed car loan interest deduction (which Reagan eliminated in 1986) is explained, here, as follows (and may violate WTO rules):

Who could claim a $10,000 deduction on car-loan interest?

The bill also includes a deduction worth $10,000 on the interest on auto loans for vehicles, if that vehicle’s “final assembly” occurs in the United States. It’s a reflection of the Trump administration’s stated mission to nudge more manufacturing back to America — and then reward consumers for buying American-sourced products.

The deduction amount starts phasing out at the $100,000 mark for individuals and $200,000 for married couples filing jointly. It completely ends when modified adjusted gross income goes past $150,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples.

Cars are expensive, though. People paid more than $47,000 on average in March for a new vehicle, according to Cox Automotive. So buyers who want to take advantage of the potential break would have to start planning a major purchase.

If the bill became law, the deduction on car-loan interest would be in place from tax years 2025 to 2028.

The exact bill language is below the fold (and could change before the final bill is passed, if it is passed).

U.S. Apparently Ditching Robotic Combat Vehicle Program

The U.S. Army is apparently cancelling the Robotic Combat Vehicle program (RCV). Like the JTLV, this was one of the technologically and militarily more sound new programs in the Army, so I'm not really sure why this decision was made (which may very well be for unsound reasons, given the track record of the Trump administration). (The U.S. Marine Corps continues to support the JTLV and doesn't understand the Army's action on that program either.)

The RCV program put considerable firepower in a low weight, easy to deploy package, while reducing the extent to which soldiers are in harm's way. And, it did not appear to be facing significant cost overruns, delays, or strong technological challenges. Four working prototypes were competing and all of them functioned quite well. And, it isn't a terribly expensive program as major military procurement programs go.

The report is attributed to the Breaking Defense newsletter, apparently in reference to this story:

WASHINGTON — An Army two-star general has told staff that the service expects to halt work on its embattled Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) program and pause a new howitzer competition, according to several service and industry sources.

The news was delivered just hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and top Army leaders unveiled a massive service shake up that will combine Army Futures Command and Training and Doctrine Command, and stop production on the new light tank, the M10 Booker.

“Here’s what we believe is true of today, RCV will stop development. The future of the robotic software program is unknown,” Program Executive Officer for Ground Combat Systems Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean wrote in an internal Army email Thursday, according to one of the industry sources. Four other sources told Breaking Defense they were aware of or saw the email.

An Army spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about this letter or new details about expected program cuts. However, three Army sources confirmed that RCV would not move forward, despite a previously expected contract award.

In early March, Breaking Defense first reported that industry sources had been notified that Textron Systems’s Ripsaw 3 had won the RCV competition and the service was preparing to ink a deal with the victors. But around that same time, Army leaders identified RCV as one program to cut as part of the 8 percent budget drill to realign funding toward higher priorities, one service official told Breaking Defense.

“We need robotic combat vehicles, but we want a consortium of vendors to bring their robotics and the best software folk,” that first Army sources explained today. “We don’t want to downselect just to one vendor and pay almost $3 million per copy.”

A second Army source confirmed that rationale, noting that the idea is to select the “absolute best next-generation robotic for the warfighter,” and the decision was made to open it up industry again. (This was a second go around, of sorts, for the RCV program after the service revamped the acquisition strategy). 

Dean’s email also included a line saying that “Artillery modernization is still on ‘pause’ for the moment,” which appears to be a reference to a potential competition for a new self-propelled howitzer that has been closely watched by industry.

After cancelling work on its Extended Range Cannon Artillery (ERCA) platform last year, the Army started a globetrotting roadshow evaluating existing self-propelled howitzers. Service officials decided they wanted to forgo another foray into developing their own and will launch a full and open competition.

The plan had been to release a Phase I request for proposal in mid-February, Dean previously told Breaking Defense, but that document still has not been published. It is unclear if the Army will launch forward with the competition later than expected but clarity may only come once the fiscal 2026 budget request is released.

In addition to the RCV hit and howitzer still up in the air, the Army announced Thursday it will stop producing Humvees and Joint Light Tactical Vehicles.

In his email, Dean confirmed the fate of several other programs affected.

“M10 Booker will not move into full-rate reproduction, and it is unknown if the Army will field the systems currently in production or buy any additional [low-rate initial production] quantity,” he added. “AMPV [Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle] production will be reduced to minimum sustainment rate but mitigated by Ukraine buyback. Stryker will not award further production orders in accordance with the AROC [Army Requirements Oversight Council].

As Dean wrote in his email, it is not clear what the service will now do with the 80-plus Bookers it has acquired. They could be fielded in a limited quantity or even stripped of sensitive components and sold to foreign countries.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday, Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll called the Booker acquisition decision “a classic example of sunk cost fallacy, and the Army doing something wrong.”

“We wanted to develop a small tank that was agile and could be dropped into places our regular tanks can’t. We got a heavy tank,” he added.

While these are the programs negatively impacted, it’s not all bad for planned modernization programs, with Dean saying the service wants to “accelerate” development of the Bradley replacement — dubbed the XM30 — and development of the future M1E3 Abrams main battle tank.

Even before the Trump administration was sworn in, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George was outspoken about his desire to cut programs he viewed as ineffective or too costly.

“I’m tied to overall capability,” the four-star general told Breaking Defense during a March interview at Ft. Irwin, Calif. “How we do that is probably going to change … [and] with what equipment.”

“Look at how much has changed in technology just in the last couple years, it would make sense that we probably wouldn’t buy the same things that we’ve been buying for a long time,” George added. 

Defense contracts from all sectors have been bracing to see how this pans out with the ground vehicle sector preparing for the worst.

Buddhism And The State

China and Korea, at least, do not have a tradition of separation of church and state when it comes to Buddhism (which, notably arrived in this region long after Confucianism became a defining and state sponsored ideology). The Buddhist reliance on state support also helps to explain its fall in these places.

Again, as was also the case in so many Buddhist countries, the success of Buddhism relied heavily on its connections to the court. In Korea, the tradition of “state protection Buddhism” was inherited from China. Here, monarchs would build and support monasteries and temples, where monks would perform rituals and chant sutras intended to both secure the well-being of the royal family, in this life and the next, and protect the kingdom from danger, especially foreign invasion.

…As in China, the Korean sangha remained under the control of the state; offerings to monasteries could only be made with the approval of the throne; men could only become monks on “ordination platforms” approved by the throne; and an examination system was established that placed monks in the state bureaucracy. As in other Buddhist lands, monks were not those who had renounced the world but were vassals of the king, with monks sometimes dispatched to China by royal decree. With strong royal patronage, Buddhism continued to thrive through the Koryo period (935-1392), with monasteries being granted their own lands and serfs, accumulating great wealth in the process.

From Donald S. Lopez, Jr., "Buddhism: A Journey through History" (2025).

Education And Church Attendance In The U.S. And In Europe

The relationship between education and church attendance in the U.S. is the opposite of what you would expect in the U.S. according to data in this blog post. 

In the U.S., more education corresponds to more church attendance (New Hampshire, Maine, and Wyoming are exceptions to that trend and a number of states seem to be bimodal with the least and most educated people both attending church at higher rates), while in Europe (except for the formerly Communist Lithuania and Slovakia) more education corresponds to less church attendance (although the least religious countries like Finland, France, Germany,  Hungary and Iceland, are quite flat and the education-church attendance relationship basically breaks down).

I don't think that this means that more educated people in the U.S. are more religious, however.  

Rather, I think that it means that more educated people who are religious are much more diligent in attending church regularly as their religion dictates (in part because they have more time to devote to church attendance), than less educated people who are religious but not very diligent. As one comment to the post notes, free time to spend on anything but working, eating, sleeping, and the basic needs of your household is increasingly a luxury good.

There is solid evidence (for example from Pew) that more educated American are less religious in terms of belief and the importance of religion in their lives (although the magnitude of this difference isn't as big as one might intuitively expect), but this isn't necessarily inconsistent with higher religious attendance by more educated people, if more educated people who are religious attend church more regularly than less educated people who are religious.

Also, there is evidence that students and college graduates of more elite institutions are much more secular than college graduates of less elite institutions.

To the extent that Pew and the U.S. survey cited in the blog post are at odds, however, Pew is more credible and has a long track record of accurate data in this area. 

Also, it is worth noting that a variety of measures have shown that reported church attendance in the U.S. is much higher than the levels of actual church attendance. See, e.g., here and here. So, survey data on church attendance may not be the most accurate measure of actual behavior. 

I also don't give much credit to an anecdotal evidence based book pointing to a religious revival among Gen Z people in the U.K., which does more to capture the changing flavor of religiosity among the minority of young people there who are religious, than capture of growing rate of religious affiliation among British youth. 

I also suspect that there is a generational factor. The trend towards more secularism in Europe is 30-40 years older than it is in the U.S. So, older educated Europeans are much more secular than older educated Americans, an effect which may swamp differences in rates of secularization among younger people by level of education. Further, education levels rose sooner in the U.S. than they did in Europe, so in Europe, education level is a better proxy for age than in the U.S.

It is also worth noting that the European data breaks out far more detail among non-college graduates and among non-high school graduates. In part, this reflects larger numbers of immigrants to Europe with very low levels of formal education, and immigrants, in general, tend to be more religious (because religion thrives when it defends a threatened culture). Apart from people who didn't graduate from high school, the European data is quite flat.

U.S. Data

European Data

How Should The U.S. Military Be Organized?

Background

The U.S. military is primarily divided into five services: the Army, the Air Force (which was split off from the Army after World War II), the Space Force (which was split off from the Air Force during Trump's first term), the Navy, and the Marines (which are a separate military service within the Department of the Navy). 

Each of these services has (or will have once it is set up, in the case of the Space Force) a reserve component that consists mostly of recently retired active duty service members who train on a part-time basis and can be called up to serve if there is a shortage of active duty personnel.

In addition to the federally operated reserves for each service, each U.S. state has an Army National Guard and an Air Force National Guard, staffed mostly by part-time citizen soldiers (the normal obligation is one weekend a month and one week a year, when not called up for an emergency). Normally, these forces report to the state governor and are called up for disaster relief and to deal with potential "insurrections" and civil unrest, for example, to enforce court orders that local civilian law enforcement is disregarding in an organized resistance. The national guard can also be called up to serve by the President as basically temporary active duty military service members when needed.

In addition, a sixth service, the Coast Guard, which used to be part of the Department of Transportation and is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, is a civilian law enforcement and first responder organization in peace time, can be placed under the command of the Navy in wartime and is organized in a paramilitary fashion.

There are also several independent agencies, some within the Department of Defense, and some outside it, that have national security duties. These include the NSA (which handles electronic surveillance and code breaking), the NRO (which handles spy satellites), the CIA (which gathers and analyzes covert and open source intelligence for both foreign policy and military purposes and also conducts covert military-style operations), DARPA (which does bleeding edge research and development for the military that isn't immediately actionable in a specific procurement project), the Selective Service system (which keeps the infrastructure in place to conscript new soldiers if Congress decides to do so), and more.

Observations

One of the problems with the status quo is that coordination between military services has to be arranged at a very high level of the Department of Defense bureaucracy, which creates bureaucratic friction in arranging joint exercises that use the resources of multiple services acting together in the same military operation, and discourages individual services from prioritizing the support that they provide to other military services in their resource allocation and procurement and military equipment systems development.

For example, the Air Force is supposed to be in charge of providing air support and logistics support to the Army, but it tends to deprioritize these missions in favor of air to air fighters designed to secure air superiority and long range bombers. The Army meanwhile, since it is allowed to have helicopters, pushes helicopters into transport and close air support missions even when fixed wing aircraft would have been better suited to those missions, because it wants to control the air power upon which its units rely.

Similarly, the Navy is responsible for delivering Army soldiers to war on transport ships and for providing fire support for Army and Marine soldiers from sea. But it has tended to neglect these missions (and more generally littoral operations) in favor of building up its blue sea surface and submarine fleet. Unlike the Army, however, the Navy and Marine Corps have been allowed to have fixed wing aircraft under their own command and control, and have, as a result, keep their use of helicopters mostly restricted to missions where they are actually preferable to fixed wing aircraft.

The U.S. military has tended to treat the national guard is just a second layer of reserve military force rather than seeing it as its own division of the military with its own distinct purpose that calls for different kinds of training, military equipment, and tactics.

The current structure also creates an incentive for each of the military services to focus its force design on engaging with the most capable "peer" and "near peer" military adversaries that require the most advanced and powerful military weapons and vehicles without regard to cost-effectiveness, because these kinds of conflicts amount of existential threats in which money is no object.

As a result, the U.S. military is ill designed to engage military adversaries less capable than "near peers" in a way that isn't expensive overkill. It can win this engagements, but at a price that makes fighting them so unsustainable that it puts pressure on leaders to abandon them. 

Among the sub-near peer adversaries and missions that the U.S. military is ill suited to engage in a cost effectively are counter-insurgency missions where the insurgents have limited access to military grade weapons other than small arms, anti-piracy missions, interdiction and anti-smuggling missions, peace keeping, intercepting a handful of rogue aircraft (short of an invasion with large numbers of military aircraft) in U.S. airspace, and humanitarian relief missions following disasters. Yet, a significant share of the missions that the U.S. military has historically been called upon to perform fit in these categories.

Proposal

* The Army National Guard, Air Force National Guard, and Coast Guard should be recognized as a separate military service that is focused upon homeland defense and emergency response, and should be called up into active duty service abroad only when the capabilities developed for those roles are needed.

Thus, the Army National Guard should be weighted more heavily towards air defense and drone defense, should have specialized equipment tailored to emergency response in low to moderate threat environments, and should largely divest itself of tanks and artillery. The Air Force National Guard shouldn't have bomber aircraft that have no appropriate mission within the U.S., should have cost effective non-stealth, fast but sub-sonic, lightly armed fighters to intercept rogue aircraft, and should increase its investment in search and rescue and transport and fire fighting aircraft. The Coast Guard should have resources for defending the U.S. from a coastal invasion (including diesel-electric coastal submarines), and the Army and Air Force National Guards in border states should have resources calibrated to land invasions from Canada and Mexico.

The final tier of the missile defense "golden dome" system that has been proposed designed to intercept income missiles and drones once they have gotten close to U.S. territory should also be a national guard function.

The Army Corps of Engineers might also be fruitfully relocated to this service.

* The U.S. nuclear weapons force intended as a deterrent force, made up of U.S. ballistic missile submarines, U.S. nuclear weapon carrying aircraft, and ground based nuclear weapons, should be part of a separate "strategic defense service", which is also responsible for intercepting incoming long range missile attacks near the point of launch and in mid-flight.

The remainder of the U.S. military should be divided into two services. 

* One military service would be devoted to addressing military confrontations with "peer" and "near peer" countries like China and Russia and Iran and North Korea with advanced, expensive, military grade weapons, including surface combatant ships, attack submarines, advanced fighter and bomber aircraft, and heavy army weapons. 

This would allow better coordination of resources that is discouraged by inter-service rivalries and lack of communication, such as balancing anti-ship and anti-submarine warfare missions between fixed wing aircraft historically in the Air Force (which are currently under utilized for that mission), surface combatants, submarines, and intermediate and long range missiles deployed by ground forces in the Army and Marines. It would also elevate the importance of missions to transport troops and their supplies. 

* The other military service would be devoted to proportionately and efficiently addressing sub-near peer military conflicts like counterinsurgency missions, peace keeping, anti-piracy missions, anti-smuggling operations abroad interdicting merchant grade ships trying to bust embargoes and international sanctions, embassy defense, evacuations of U.S. nationals and allies from areas were warfare has broken out in which the U.S. is not a party, and wars with countries that lack advanced military capabilities (like many countries in Latin America and Africa). This force would have a very different set of aircraft, ships, military ground vehicles, force design, and training.

* There would also be a paramilitary service, perhaps officially housed in the Department of State rather than the Department of Defense, that would be in charge of international relief missions that might have units specialized in disaster response, search and rescue, oil spill response, providing relief aid, setting up emergency shelters, deploying mobile field hospitals, and so on.

Team Death

In the "they didn't teach us this in law school" department:

One of the things my job requires on a regular basis is talking with clients about death and grievous disabilities and injuries. This is something that makes most people uncomfortable and is very unfamiliar for people who aren't "Team Death" professionals (a group that includes estate planning and probate lawyers, funeral home directors, cemetery officials, clergy, grief counselors, hospice nurses, corners, bank trust department officers, life insurance sales people, financial planners, actuaries, Social Security bureaucrats, many florists, many kinds of doctors, and many CPAs).

It takes many years to find ways to do that which communicates to people what they need to hear and understand, without being too socially uncomfortable. Ordinary etiquette discourages discussing these possibilities at all. It can be depressing and many of us superstitiously just don't want to "tempt fate."

It is almost a whole philosophy and way of thinking, starting with recognizing that death will eventually happen to everyone, that most people experience serious disabilities and injuries at some point in their lives, and that life frequently presents people with surprising tragedies and unexpected triumphs of survival. Someone who seems fine and healthy today can die tomorrow, while someone who seemed to have only a few months to live can sometimes hold on for another decade or more.

Residential HVAC Economics And Environmental Considerations

I live in a 100 years old house in central Denver with natural gas boiler driven steam heat radiators (the steam heat boiler was originally coal fired, which is not an option now, then converted to gas, and then replaced) and a swamp cooler. (I'm looking at this now because my 24 year old swamp cooler is replaced for the first time today.)

Is this the best choice from a cost perspective? 

Yes.

Is this the best choice for the environment?

Probably, although a heat pump is quite competitive from an environmental perspective and will grow more attractive as the power grid in Colorado becomes greener over the next decade or two.

Cooling

In Denver, swamp coolers (a.k.a. evaporative coolers) generally cost less to operate than heat pumps, especially during the cooling season, in part, because Denver's humidity in the summer is low. Swamp coolers use significantly less electricity than air conditioners, often saving 60-80% on energy costs. Heat pumps are about 50% more efficient than central air conditioners, but swamp coolers still draw 20% to 40% less electricity than heat pumps. See here and here. All three cooling costs are powered by electricity, so the relative energy costs are indifferent to the price of electricity.

Swamp coolers do use some water than heat pumps and central AC systems don't use. But this is pretty negligible in terms of the cost of well under a dollar a month (you pay for tap water at prices on the order of a few dollars per 10,000 gallons, and a swamp cooler uses less than 900 gallons a month and is only operating about five months a year, so the water costs are less than $3 per year). This is also pretty negligible in terms of the swamp cooler's share of total water consumption. In contrast, water for landscaping uses about half of our water consumption despite the fact that we have only a couple hundred square feet of lawn.

The maintenance costs of a swamp cooler are a little bit greater than for central air conditioning and heat pumps, however, because they have to be started up every spring, and shut down every autumn (filter replacement costs are comparable for central air condition and swamp coolers), but this can be a DIY maintenance job if you are up for it, and the costs is significantly smaller than the energy cost savings involved.

Also, a swamp cooler is much simpler and less expensive to repair than an air conditioner or heat pump because it is mechanically simpler. A swamp cooler has one simple electric motor that runs a fan, and the water flow is controlled by a float system similar to one in a residential flush toilet. A broken swamp cooler take much less time, much less skill, and much less expensive parts to fix than a broken air conditioner or heat pump. Higher end and newer swamp coolers are also more resistant to rust than older models.

And, the up front installation cost of a swamp cooler is lower than the installation cost of an air conditioner or heat pump, even without utility or government incentives, although rebates from Xcel Energy to encourage swamp cooler use improve this comparison.

A heat pump or central AC can reduce temperatures a bit more than a swamp cooler does. But this only matters at all for maybe the ten or twelve hottest days each year, and even then, with a good quality swamp cooler like the one we are having installed, the difference is tolerable and isn't huge. And, the humidifying effects of a swamp cooler also make a home more comfortable in the very dry, almost high desert conditions of Denver summers, relative to air conditioning or a heat pump, once you get used to it. Both a swamp cooler and central air conditioning do suck in the sometimes polluted outdoor air into the house on low air quality days which we get plenty of in Denver in the summer. But a swamp cooler does a better job of filtering that air than a typical central air conditioning filter does.

Environmentally, apart from energy costs, swamp coolers are also better, because they don't need the chemical fluids required for heat pumps or central AC to move heat outdoors (or to suck subsurface cool temperatures into your home).

Heating

In Denver, a gas boiler steam heat system is about 25% cheaper in fuel costs (at current natural gas and electrical prices from Xcel Energy which is about $1.26 per therm for natural gas and 20 centers per KwH for electricity) than a geothermal heat pump. See this calculator. In fact, this is the least expensive heating option of all of the possible alternatives, including gas forced air furnaces, wood stoves, pellet stoves, heat pumps, heating oil, kerosene, propane, or electric baseboard heating.

A couple of years ago, we replaced our old natural gas boiler (which had been converted from the original one hundred year old coal fired boiler), which is much smaller, is easier to operate and maintain, and is slightly more efficient, than our old one. It is much less expensive to replace a natural gas boiler for an existing steam heat system than it is to install a new heat pump system of any kind in a building that previously had a steam heat radiator system. I suspect that it would also be cheaper in new construction, but the installation cost advantage in new construction would be much less decisive.

Heat pump installation costs also have to be compared to the combined installation cost of both the cooling system and the heating system, because it does both jobs. And, in new construction for a new subdivision, using a heat pump and an electric water heater, instead of natural gas heat and other natural gas appliances and water heaters, avoids the substantial costs of building a subdivision with deeply buried natural gas pipelines serving each home. So, again, when building new construction homes in new subdivisions, the installation cost economics for heat pumps v. natural gas heating are much different than they are with existing construction in which every home is already served by natural gas pipelines.

The steam heat boiler does consume water that the heat pump or a gas forced air furnace would not (although many gas forced air furnaces have a humidifier built in that uses considerably more water than a steam heat boiler per year), but this too is negligible in both cost (less than a dollar per year) and the amount of tap water used (probably less than 90 gallons a year), since it is an almost closed system that recycles the water and only loses a little bit each cycle to evaporation at the boiler point. Our steam heat boiler has a water filter that needs to be replaced twice a year (because a lot of our pipes are old and made of galvanized steel and have some rust in them) at a price comparable to the cost of an air filter for a gas forced air furnace (which is not necessary in a heat pump) but this is also negligible compared to the differences in energy costs.

In terms of the in home results, radiator based steam heat is much nicer than gas forced air heat, because it doesn't dry out the air (an issue that a built in humidifier only partially addresses) and doesn't drag polluted outdoor air into the house on poor air quality days which Denver has plenty of, even in the winter.

Historically, heat pumps have been used primarily in the South in the U.S., where high humidity during long hot summers makes evaporative coolers useless in the summer so homes need either air conditioning or a heat pump to be comfortable in the summer, where it doesn't get that cold in the winter so the amount of heating needed is modest enough that infrastructure costs necessary for natural gas or heating oil based heating systems didn't make sense, and when heat pumps were less effective than they are today at heating homes in the winter. Since the infrastructure and installation costs of central air conditioning and a heat pump are similar (although geothermal heat pumps are a bit more expensive to install than central air conditioning), the marginal cost of a heat pump over the central air conditioning that you would otherwise need in the South was modest (technologically a heat pump is basically an air conditioner that you can run backwards), it made sense there to heat homes with a heat pump. Also, since the amount of heating degree days per year in the South is pretty modest, the greater summer cooling efficiency of a heat pump relative to central air conditioning pretty much pays for the energy costs of providing heat on infrequent and mild winter days in the South. And, since the amount of energy needed for fuel for the winter for a heat pump in the winter in the South is pretty modest, saving a little money with a cheaper fuel was relatively less important than saving money by reducing the installation costs and having more energy efficient summer cooling.

Modern heat pumps, especially geothermal heat pumps, that are well suited to colder climates and designed for them, are now widely available. But this wasn't the cost effective option when Northeastern homes overwhelmingly were heated with heating oil, and Midwestern homes and western homes in places with cooler climates were overwhelmingly heated with natural gas. And, as noted above, the economics of heat pumps are a lot more favorable in new build construction, especially in new subdivisions that dispense with creating natural gas pipelines to every home, than they are in homes where the old heating and cooling system needs to be torn out and replaced by a new heat pump (especially in homes with boiler based heat rather than forced air heating and cooling ducts).

Environmentally, at this point, it is a bit of a wash.

Natural gas in a home boiler burns almost as efficiently and cleanly as in a utility scale natural gas power plant (and is more efficient and less polluting at turning natural gas into heat because it doesn't lose energy by converting heat to electricity, losing electricity in transmission lines, and converting electricity back to heat again). And, natural gas creates much less air pollution than coal or firewood or pellets or propane or kerosene or heating oil in a home boiler, and creates less air pollution per unit of energy used than a utility scale coal fired electrical power plant.

But the air pollution caused by generating the electricity in the grid, in part from coal, and less efficient (for heat production) natural gas, is offset by the fact that about 45% of the electricity in the grid comes from hydroelectric, solar, and wind power in Colorado.

Natural gas also creates toxic pollution in the ground in the extraction process (a significant share of which comes from fracking), and that toxic extraction process is used to provide 100% of the fuel for a home natural gas boiler, but only less than half of the fuel for the power grid. But, the mining done to extract the coal that is the source of a still significant share of the electricity in the Colorado power grid, is much more toxic and creates far more harms to workers and the public from the extraction process alone (ignoring the air pollution) than natural gas extraction does (even considering the harms of fracking).

As more of Colorado's power grid comes from renewables, and less of it comes from natural gas, and coal is eventually virtually eliminated as a source of electricity for the Colorado power grid, electricity will eventually be greener than natural gas, but this will still be partially offset because a home boiler still generates heat with less energy than the power plant generating the energy needed for a heat pump does. So, even as the grid gets cleaner and tilts a little more in favor of heat pumps relative to a natural gas boiler, the environmental difference is still going to be pretty modest.

Home Based Solar Power Considered

Last year we got a detailed bid for the solar power system that our particular home could support in terms of power generation capacity and cost.

In terms of the cost of the electricity, it could have met almost 100% of our current electrical demand at a cost that would be about the same as buying electricity from Xcel Energy at the prices we are paying for electricity now, over the next twenty years (with substantial Xcel energy rebates and government tax credits). So, this wouldn't have changed the cost calculus discussed above, although having our own solar power with some sort of battery storage would have given us a hedge against rising electricity prices from Xcel over time.

But, given the rapid rate at which solar panel prices are falling, and the rapid improvements that are in the works in battery technology, it might be cheaper to get a solar power/battery system and the product might have better quality a decade or so from now, even without rebates and tax credits.

And, the fact that our house is a hundred years old and has roof framing that is almost surely not up to current building code standards was also a consideration. The rooftop solar power installation might have disturbed that by putting more of a burden on the roof or just damaging the existing roof framing in the process in a manner that in a worse case scenario might have required a major structural repair job to bring our roof framing up to current building code standards, in a half duplex where that kind of repair would also have to involve the owner of the other half of the duplex.

Solar power would have insulated us from temporary disruptions in our electrical service from Xcel (which typically range from a few minutes to a couple of hours and happen at most two or three times a year, with outages of more than a couple of minutes only once every few years).

It would have been environmentally cleaner, of course to get 100% of our electricity (on average) from solar power, although the environmental benefit of this would be reduced over the next couple of decades as the Colorado power grid gets greener.

If we were building this home new at this time, we would probably have opted for solar power, particularly if it was in a new subdivision that didn't have natural gas pipelines in place to every home. But as this stand, the benefit of getting rooftop solar power was not decisive enough for us to justify the time, trouble, and disruption to our lives in connection with the installation work and any possible follow roof repair work that might be needed, to justify making the change now.

Sanctioning And Preventing Federal Government Corruption

Emoluments And Other Standing Problems

The law is very clear. And, it is the highest possible law - a part of the United States Constitution. But, enforcing it, particularly in the case of a President who violates it, by any means short of an impeachment, which can be circumvented by 34 Senators of the President's political party, is another thing.

The U.S. Supreme Court's rules on standing to sue takes the position that you can't have standing to sue as a taxpayer, as a U.S. citizen, or as a voter, on a wrong that affects everyone in the same way.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently held that the President is immune from criminal liability for his official acts, no matter how egregious (in a stark deviation from the widespread understanding at the time it ruled this way), in addition to being immune from lawsuits seeking money damages for his official acts.

Justice Department policy, and the structure of the Executive Branch also prevent federal prosecutors from prosecuting a sitting President, and the President's authority over the Justice Department, together with his pardon power, allows the President to shield anyone he favors from federal criminal prosecutions.

The U.S. Supreme Court hasn't directly ruled on the issue, but at least one lower court (in the criminal case against Trump involving his refusal to turn over documents with government nuclear secrets which he kept in his residence after he left office and refused to return upon demand) has held that special prosecutor statutes are unconstitutional, in an extension of the (until recently fringe) "unitary executive theory."

The same problem does not arise to nearly the same extent in state government. Almost every U.S. state has an independently elected state attorney general who can prosecute misconduct in other parts of the state government, and the federal government can also step in to prosecute state and local government corruption and violations of civil rights as a federal offense. The subject-matter jurisdiction of state courts is also not subject to the same level of strict limitations as the federal courts are by Article III of the U.S. Constitution.

This problem isn't unique to the Emoluments clause either. It comes up frequently in Establishment clause violations of the First Amendment. It can come up when one part of the federal government illegally shares confidential information with another part of the federal government. It comes up when the executive branch spends federal government money without a Congressional appropriation to support it. It comes up when a President orders a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act and then pardons anyone who was involved in it. And, there are many other contexts where serious violations of the law within the executive branch have no viable remedy.

In some cases, an entire house of Congress can, by majority vote, authorize a lawsuit against the Executive Branch in federal court, but this is cumbersome and rendered frequently ineffectual by partisan politics. In some cases, a federal government chartered corporation, like the Public Broadcasting Corporation, can have independent standing to sue and by sued under a statutory grant of federal authority.

But, there is no systemic solution to this problem in existing federal law. Mostly, we just have to trust the President to do the right thing, but not all Presidents have earned this trust, and certainly, our current President has not. This is a glaring flaw in American Public Law.

Solutions

There are plausible solutions which could be imagined that would set aside the usual rules of standing on the grounds of necessity. We could grant the federal courts the authority to deputize a special prosecutor to pursue these issues. We could grant standing to pursue these issues to state attorneys-general. We could allow Congress to create an independent agency (perhaps one located in the judicial or the legislative branch with no Presidentially appointed directors or board members from an organizational chart and constitutional perspective) to pursue these claims. We could vest this authority in former U.S. Presidents who are still living, or the candidate that was the runner up in the last Presidential election.

Possible Constitutional Amendments

Perhaps we need an "anti-corruption" constitutional amendment, although conceptually, maybe this could be broken into several components. Consider this package to six constitutional amendments (and to be clear, some of those could also be accomplished without constitutional amendments):

Anti-Corruption And Standing Amendment

* Create an agency that has standing to take criminal, and civil legal action with national effect), to enforce federal law, to render advisory ethics opinions, and to protect the rule of law within the federal government (perhaps with a director appointed by a governing board made up of federal judges chosen at random),

* Prohibit federal elected officials from having a role in, or knowledge of, the management of private businesses or investments while in office,

* Prohibit self-dealing and conflicts of interest by federal officials including the President,

* Prohibit felons from serving as President unless that disability is removed by the same means as an insurrection disability is removed,

* Prohibit members of Congress from serving while serving a sentence for a felony,

* Authorize removal of members of Congress without being formally expelled from office by the House where someone is a member by the courts for various grounds established by law constituting good cause,

* Expressly authorize the appointment of special prosecutors by a three U.S. District Court judge panel, where the Justice Department is conflicted, or where the federal government fails to prosecute a crime when a preponderance of evidence, beyond mere probable cause, shows that it was committed by the proposed defendant,

* Authorize facial challenges to the constitutionality of legislation and regulations by the anti-corruption agency and by state attorneys-general, even in the absence of a case or controversy or other proof of standing,

* Create standing to enforce the establishment clause by any person who resides in, or is detained by, the territory of a government that is alleged to have violated it,

* Expand the scope of grounds for impeachment to include a willful and persistent failure to faithfully execute the laws in violation of one's oath of office, or a willful defiance of a court order.

* Try impeachments before a panel of judges rather than by the U.S. Senate,

* Prohibit judges appointed by a President from serving as a judge in any court proceeding in which the appointing President is a party in a non-official capacity (including any criminal prosecution),

* Mandate that Congress pass appropriate legislation to thwart judge shopping,

* Create binding ethics rules for the U.S. Supreme Court and lower courts that can be enforced without utilizing the impeachment power by state attorneys-general, but some minority percentage of Senators, or by an anti-corruption agency, and

* Provide additional remedies for courts when federal government officials disobey court orders (including the permanent removal of an official from office, and the appointment of a special master to carry out the duties of the defiant official).

Immunity Amendment

* Overrule the U.S. Supreme Court's recent Presidential immunity ruling creating blanket immunity from criminal prosecution for a President's official acts,

* Forfeit immunity from civil lawsuits for money damages for acts that an official has been legally adjudicated to have committed in a criminal case or civil proceeding,

* Allow immunity from civil or criminal liability for federal government officials exclusively when Congress authorizes it by law, including, but not limited to Presidential immunity and qualified immunity for law enforcement,

* Prohibit stripping all courts of the authority to consider any matter,

* Narrow the political questions doctrine, and

* Make clear that there is no immunity from contempt of court liability.

Anti-Tyranny Amendment

* Impose limitations on the prosecution of state and local government officials by federal officials while they are performing their official duties (perhaps limiting such prosecutions to the anti-corruption agency),

* Make the Posse Comitatus Act a matter of self-executing constitutional law and to allow its enforcement in civil actions as well as by criminal prosecutions,

* Provide a self-executing, federal, private cause of action for compensatory, economic and non-economic damages including litigation costs and attorneys fees and/or injunctive relief, for any deprivation of federal rights constitutional or statutory, under color of state or federal law, against the government under whose authority or actions or inactions the deprivation was made, on a strict liability basis without regard to the intent of the government or governmental agents or employees doing so, and with no form of immunity (in a matter akin to the takings clause),

* Provide an absolute right to have criminal convictions vacated upon a showing of actual innocence by a preponderance of the evidence,

* Create a right to counsel in deportation actions and to bring habeas corpus petitions,

* Remove the "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" (which applies only to a handful of children of diplomats anyway) and "Indians not taxed" provision (which was legislatively mooted in 1924) from the grant of birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment,

* Prohibit criminal defamation laws,

* Prohibit laws barring travel from one state to another in order for the person doing so to avail themselves of another state's law,

* Prohibit laws barring interstate communications about a matter that is legal to communicate about in either state,

* Prohibit revocation of immigration status based upon speech which would be protected by the First Amendment for a U.S. citizen,

* Prohibit involuntary denaturalization under any circumstances (even in the naturalization was secured by fraud which could be prosecuted but could not result in loss of U.S. citizenship), and

* Expressly include the limitation on the suspension of habeas corpus to places where the federal courts are not open established by Ex Parte Milligan and to clarify that the writ of habeas corpus is available to person detained outside the territory of the United States by the federal government or its agents or contractors.

Election Law Amendment

* Make Section 3 of the 14th Amendment (the insurrection clause) self-executing in any local, state, or federal tribunal with jurisdiction over qualifications to hold public offices or elections for those offices,

* Create eligible voter standing to enforce election laws including campaign finance laws, and constitutional provisions related to elections in jurisdictions where the voter has a right to vote,

* Remove the authority of Congress to resolve disputes over the election or qualifications of their members or the validity of duly certified state elections for federal offices, vesting that authority, instead, in the courts,

* Invalidate all statutory confidentiality rights other than attorney-client privilege and religious confession privilege for anyone running for, or holding, a federal elective office,

* Remove the authority of state legislatures to appoint electors for the President by any means other than a vote of the people,

* Require federal elections be administered at the state and local level by officials who are not partisan elected officials or appointees of partisan elected officials,

* Authorize non-criminal remedies for false statements of presently existing facts, or false statements related to voting, made with actual malice, in connection with political speech, and

* Constitutionally overrule Citizens United which constitutionally prohibits any rigorous campaign finance regulation.

Pardon Power Amendment

* Expressly prohibit the President from pardoning himself, or members of his family, or a President who appointed the current President to the office that put him in the line of succession to be President,

* Prohibit pardons from contempt of court sanctions whether civil or criminal, 

* Invalidate pardons for criminal conduct taken in reliance on a promise from the President that it would be pardoned, or issued in exchange for any consideration,

* Require notice of all pardons and commutation (other than a stay of execution) to be transmitted to Congress to be effective, and to subject them to a legislative veto in the same way as a veto override that must be acted upon with a certain period of time (perhaps 35 days) after it is transmitted to Congress.

Congressional Supremacy Amendment

* Clarify that Congress has plenary authority over the operations and organization of the Executive branch, and over how the President exercises his discretion in any matter whatsoever of which the constitution or statutes grants him authority, which the President has no authority to contradict,

* Require all Executive Orders purporting to impact anyone outside of the Executive branch of the federal government to be transmitted to Congress and paused until ratified by both houses of Congress, or until three weeks have elapsed, before taking effect, and to allow either house of Congress alone, by majority vote, to repeal any Executive Order,

* Legalize legislative veto legislation (retroactively),

* Confirm the authority of Congress to pass anti-impoundment legislation,

* Confirm the validity of civil service protections for public servants,

* Confirm the validity of government contracting rules established by Congress,

* Constitutionally disavow the "unitary executive" theory by expressly allowing Congress to create independent agencies whose directors, boards, and staff cannot be dismissed or directed by the President,

* Validate the constitutionality of laws such as the Administrative Procedures Act which governs how executive branch discretion may be exercised,

* Provide that Congress has the authority to waive any claim of executive privilege made by the President, and

* Constitutionally ratify the authority of Congress to pass legislation like the War Powers Act.