Letter to the editor: What does it take to wake a sleeping giant?

Coming into the new era of President Biden, I had great hopes. But virtually nothing of the so-called "progressive" agenda is what I wanted. Even as Democrats call themselves "woke," the political side opposite Trump seems to be more like a sleeping giant, living in an other-worldly dream state.

I am sure there are many Democrats like me who would like to turn back the clock about a dozen years, while many Republicans seem to want to turn back the clock about 100 years.

My hope focuses on the constitutional amendment process to restore stability, but this would take a big change in state legislatures. The only way to guarantee the right to terminate a pregnancy, or the power to limit guns, is to put it into the Constitution.

After the Trump presidency, the most important thing to me is to permanently weaken the powers of the office, so any slide toward dictatorship becomes impossible. The power of presidential pardons should be eliminated completely. A legal structure where a president could say, "Go out and commit crimes for me, and I will pardon you," is just insane.

I would change the presidential term to only two years. Neither president nor vice president should be able to run for election while in office. After leaving office, the vice president could start running for president. Two years later, the former president would be eligible to run again.

This means that one person could hold the presidential office for no more than two years out of every six. Both parties would have to continuously develop new lists of candidates.

I believe that the presidential office is far more powerful than it should be, or needs to be. In other words, no one person should have that much power.

Eric Haubert, Massillon

This article originally appeared on The Repository: Letter to the editor: What does it take to wake a sleeping giant?