1. Change the country’s name
In 1866, Missouri Representative George Washington Anderson proposed dropping “United States” from the country’s name and simply calling it “America.” The current name was “not sufficiently comprehensive and significant to indicate the real unity and destiny of the American people as the eventual, paramount power of this hemisphere,” he argued, albeit unsuccessfully.
Weighing in from across the Atlantic, the Illustrated London News mocked the proposal as the “verbal appropriation of a hemisphere.”
Just one hemisphere wasn’t enough for Lucas Miller, a first-term representative from Wisconsin. On a single February day in 1893, he introduced 46 bills, one of which would have changed the country’s name to the “United States of the Earth.”
Miller’s rationale, in his own words, was that “it is possible for the republic to grow through the admission of new states into the union, until every nation on earth has become part of it.” Another source suggests that he might also have settled for the “United States of the World.” Miller’s proposal was widely ridiculed at the time, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the congressman didn’t return for a second term.
2. Abolish the presidency
In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, Missouri Representative John William Noell suggested abolishing the office of president and replacing it with a three-person executive council elected by separate regions of the country. The proposal would have given each member veto power over the other two.
Even after the Civil War, proposals to abolish the presidency arose from time to time. In 1878, Ohio Representative Milton Isaiah Southard introduced a resolution much like Noell’s, to create a three-person executive council, with one president each for the Western states, the Southern states, and the combined “Eastern and Middle” states. Southard argued that “the people of this country are opposed to monarchy, or the ‘one-man power’ created by the accumulation of regal power in the hands of one person in the control and direction of their public affairs.”