Article II, Section 2
This section deals with the ethics of Congress. According to a YouGov study published in January of 2025, 49 percent of Americans surveyed view corruption by members of Congress as a “very serious problem.” Another 31 percent view it as “a somewhat serious problem.”[1] That means that, in that study, at least 80 percent of those surveyed considered congressional corruption a problem. That’s unfathomable—eighty percent. When broken down by party, it was still 77 percent (among Republicans) vs. 82 percent (among Democrats). That’s probably the most bipartisan consensus Americans hold on any subject.
There is no way to shade this. No way to make it polite or easy to take. The American people think members of Congress are crooks.
That means faith in our government isn’t just weak. It means the American people don’t think their representative government represents them, period. If you don’t hear that as an alarm bell, I’m not sure what you would hear that way.
This section is devoted to attacking that problem. It won’t fix everything. Some of that will be left to the citizens working through other means in this Charter. Still, there are significant problems that this section addresses head-on.
[1] YouGov, Most Americans See Corruption Among Politicians, Judges, and Executives as Serious Problems, YouGov (Jan. 17, 2025), https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/51398-most-americans-see-corruption-as-serious-problem.
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