Sun Yat-sen was right about the US constitution: three branches of government are not enough
We need a fourth branch — independent, not based on election and co-equal — to addess corruption and empeach officers and politicans in the other three branchs
Sun Yat-sen, Chinese nationalist leader (1866–1925), studied the American constitution. He thought the structure of checks and balances made sense but instead of three branches of government, he wanted five. In addition to the three American branches — executive, legislative, judicial — Sun Yat-sen added two from Chinese history, a civil service examination branch, and the “censorate.” The censorate, referendum and recall would allow people to check the power of the more professional politicians.
Recent events have shown how right he was about the US system in his design of a “censorate” that could control corruption in the other branches.
The FBI, the Justice Department, etc.: they are all in the executive branch. The congress and the executive branch are controlled by the same party. Thus, there is no way to stop corrupt politicians.
You need another branch with the sole job of overseeing the other three. In the constitution Sun Yat-sen proposed, still in operation in Taiwan, the censorate has the power to impeach.
Sun Yat-sen was concerned that a single faction or even a criminal gang could get control of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches and it would be hard to force them out. You need a fourth branch to kick out corrupt individuals in the other three branches.
The function of policing politicians should fall under the fourth branch, which I would call an ombudsman or oversight branch (as “censorship” has nothing to do with the function of this division and the world “censorate” sounds like it might have to do with censorship). In my conception, as with a grand jury, a small group of citizens would have the ultimate decision about whether to remove any officer from his or her position.
In ancient Athens citizens were given office by lottery, called sortition. Today, we trust juries with matters of life and death, literally in death penalty cases. We can trust the average citizen who has not run for office to decide arcane matters in civil lawsuits but we can’t trust these same citizens to decide if a politician has broken the law and should be removed from office?
A censorate based on sortition would do a better job of sorting out matters pertaining to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton than would this mess of overlapping authority we see operating today.
By picking citizens at random from a huge pool — potentially including all citizens — there would be no way to corrupt these individuals in advance, as lobbyist do now with elected legislators. If the fourth branch might also employ professional investigators and prosecutors, those professionals would ultimately present their evidence to the grand jury and those citizens would be able to impeach any official.
We can see that it doesn’t work to put the investigative function under the president. Likewise, the partisan nature of congress means that body simply doesn’t work in allegations of corruption.
Corruption investigation and prosecution requires its own independent branch, equal in stature to the judiciary, executive and legislative branches. Public integrity cannot be tucked into a corner of the FBI under the Justice Department, with the head appointed by the President.
