A Modest Proposal for Ending Gridlock in Washington

I have a proposal to vastly improve politics in Washington, and it should have bipartisan appeal—or, at least, it should appeal to one party this year and to the other party 2 or 4 years from now. Given the new practical reality that it takes 60 votes to get anything done in Washington, and that there are never 60 votes for anything useful, it seems like a perfect time to consider a new amendment to the Constitution. It would need to be proposed by a convention called for by 2/3 of the states, as the other method probably wouldn’t work:

RESOLUTION

Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States
relating to the legislative power.

Resolved by this Constitutional Convention assembled (a majority of the delegates concurring therein), That the following article is proposed as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of the Constitution when ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several States:

Article —

Section 1. All legislative powers granted by this Constitution shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist solely of a House of Representatives.

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Writing Is The Right Way To Go

Professor Fallone left a thoughtful comment on my last post, pointing out that Marquette goes farther in emphasizing practical lawyering skills than many of its peer institutions. I agree with him, and from my experience, one of the most important practical “lawyering skills” that is emphasized here at Marquette is legal writing and research. I consider myself fortunate to have been assigned to Professor Julien’s section of LAWR I my 1L year. Even though I still have nightmares about losing that Writing Bee shirt in the final round (thanks to the space I should have put between So. and 2d), in the end, I gained much more from her class than I lost.

We learned the basics — pronoun-antecedent agreement (her pet peeve), citation, punctuation, and CREAC. But we were taught something more that I will never be able to put a value on. Professor Julien helped us to become passionate about writing.  

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What I Wish I Had Known When I Started Law School, Part VI

Classes were cancelled on my first day of law school at Tulane due to the feared imminent arrival of Hurricane Andrew.  I had fled New Orleans the previous day in response to a plea from the city’s mayor, having seen the destruction that Andrew left behind in South Florida.  Since I hail from Wisconsin, land of sometimes tornadoes and many times blizzards — storms that could certainly be serious but had never required flight — initially I wasn’t sure how to respond to the mayor’s plea.  I knew the phone number of one person in New Orleans, a classmate I had met during orientation.  Her father found the closest hotel vacancy: a room in a B&B in Meridian, Mississippi.  So I shoved my Macintosh Plus desktop computer into a closet (we didn’t use laptops yet), grabbed my cat, and got in the car.  My cat, my new friend, and I watched a TV screen in a Meridian tavern as the Hurricane first strengthened, then moved farther west than the original projections had shown until it weakened and made landfall again far enough west of New Orleans to cause relatively minor damage there.  The city of New Orleans was spared (that time).

I arrived late to my first Civil Procedure class a day and a half later, after driving into the city through heavy welcome home traffic.  Civil procedure was as strange as the hurricane, with all of its foreign terminology, rules, and standards that seemed to have no place to sit in my prior learning of English and French literature, fiction writing, or environmental science.  I had made it back to New Orleans, but now I was really lost. 

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