It’s sometimes said that the ethics of practicing medicine all flow from four simple words: First, do no harm. Those words aren’t actually in the famous Hippocratic oath.
But they are good words to live by. Not sufficient for every situation, but a good place to start. You could translate that into a modern street version, something to the effect of: “Don’t screw with it unless you can fix it, with its corollary, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
Well, enough semantics – you get the idea. Some might say that I shouldn’t go expressing an opinion about what the City of Detroit should do about its charter, since I don’t live there. Indeed, I don’t have the right to vote in Detroit.
And nobody has to listen to anything I say. But the First Amendment means we all have the right to express our feelings about everything, and I do care about Detroit.
And what I think about the revision of the city charter is this: It is really too soon to do this all over again. The city had a major charter revision less than seven years ago. Someday, Detroit will probably need to revise the charter again in a major way. But it is too soon.
Political scientists tell us that the reason the U.S. Constitution has lasted so long is that it is “elastic,” meaning we can amend it. That’s true, but an equally important reason is that it is hard to amend. It has only been amended 17 times in the last 227 years, and two of those amendments – the ones establishing and then repealing Prohibition –canceled each other out.
I think the charter did need to be revised a few years ago, and I think the commission made some good decisions then, such as providing for some council members to be elected by district. Normally, the voters are supposed to be asked every 16 years if they want to revise the charter. That’s the same frequency as we are asked whether to reopen Michigan’s Constitution.
But because the revisions occurred out of sequence, they had to ask again now, and by a margin of less than three-tenths of one percent, the voters opted to spend more than a million dollars to have a new charter revision committee. By the way, the number of those voting to do this was less than five percent of the population of Detroit.
That’s why turnout matters. Now, there’s two things to keep in mind: First, there’s no reason those elected to the commission next week need to justify their existence by overhauling a charter than doesn’t need to be overhauled. Second, and we need to remember this –they don’t get to make automatic changes. Detroiters get to vote on what they propose.
And if they don’t like it, they can and should just vote no. Now, there may indeed be minor tweaks that need to be made to improve the charter.
But the only two ideas I have heard so far strike me as wrong-headed. One was to impose a limit of two terms on any mayor, and one would change the residency requirement for running for mayor from one year to four. You might refer to these as the “we can’t beat Mike Duggan, so we will prevent him from happening again” amendments.
If there’s anything we should know by now, it is that term limits are a bad idea. Actually, I have a lot of faith in Detroiters to do the right thing.
As long as they remember that first rule, “first, do no harm.”
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