The Constitution should be Enforceable by Citizens
A suggestion for aMending America
My vision of the constitution of a democratic country is a contract. It is firstly a contract between the citizens of that country to grant to each other certain rights in return for surrendering certain of what might be considered rights. It is secondly a contract between the citizens of the country, on the one hand, and the government of that country, and those persons who make up the government. The first contract is even-handed and symmetric; each citizens gives to every other citizen what he gets back from every other citizen. The second part is asymmetric; it is an employment contract in which the people as a whole chose to employ a much smaller number of people as their government. The government has no rights and no power except that which the people choose to give it and only for as long as the people choose to give it.
Therefore the paramount requirement, without which nothing else in the constitution has any value, is that the contract is enforceable. Always and without exception. And it enforceable by the people who agreed to it – the people.
In the past decade, legal tricks have been used to prevent citizens from holding the government accountable to the constitution. For example, even though everyone knew that the government were holding people without trial, you cannot bring suit against the government because, according current jurisprudence, you don’t have standing. You don’t have the right to prevent the government from unconstitutionally harming other citizens. Another example was unconstitutional warrantless wire-tapping. Even though it has (eventually) openly admitted that it was happening, nobody had standing to complain as long as the government kept it secret exactly who was being wire. The government can spy upon everyone in the country, but no one can bring action in court unless they can prove that they are being spied upon. Unlike normal civil cases where a plaintiff can engage in discovery to establish proof of what they suspect to be true, the plaintiff against the government in this particular was required to prove before discovery that they were the target of illegal government spying. These are end-runs around the enforceability of the constitution. I believe it should be the right, and possibly the duty, of citizens to hold the government accountability even if, and perhaps, especially if it is other persons being harmed.
Because each and every citizen is harmed and government for the people endangered when the government or anyone acting as an agent for the government fails to act in accordance with the constitution, each citizen of the United States shall have the right to sue the government for failure to act clearly within the limitations and powers granted by the constitution, without regard to their personal injury or otherwise as a result of the unconstitutional action or inaction.