511–520 of 747 posts
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What do you mean office? The voters elect senators, who nominate candidates and then vote.
The President nominates and the Senate vets/confirms them. https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/faq_general.aspx
The senate judiciary committee will vote, then the candidate is voted on by the entire senate.
Regardless, the confirmation process is conducted by elected representatives. There is no "this party chose them".
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The US Constitution is still the best one in the world. The 18th Amendment (Prohibition) is an example of what can go wrong with amendments.
Actually it's not. Constitution design is an academic field, a very niche area of political science, and nobody would ever implement anything like the US Constitution today. It would be like using ALGOL for a new project today instead of Python or Java. The US Constitution was very much a version 1.0 project, written before people even knew political parties would be a design constraint. Constitutions are on like ver…
Most that seek to change the constitution want to take away rights or add new ones. It is good it is hard to change, especially when many of the change seekers can’t even get the popular support to get a law passed or a veto overridden.
It's an interesting article and if you bounced off it because you had a visceral reaction to the premise, like I did at first, I'd recommend taking another whack at it. Jill Lepore, if you're not familiar with her work, is a historian with a reputation as a more rigorous version of people like Howard Zinn. I don't think it's a good article though. In particular, I don't think it coheres. It's about how the modern Con…
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There's a few reasons this broke down... 1. The 17th amendment (1912) - Electing senators by popular vote broke the state representation in the federal government. States no longer had representation to protect their sovereignty. 2. The federal reserve act (1913) - enables government to self-fund by printing money and enforces everyone onto a single, centrally controlled bank. 3. The 16th amendment (1913) - Federal i…
> States no longer had representation to protect their sovereignty. Huh? Previously, state representatives elected senators; after the 17th, the voters did. How does either of these things end "state representation" ? You're insisting that "state representation" can only mean "representation of the people already elected by the voters", which is unjustifiably narrow. > enforces everyone onto a single, centrally contr…
Who’s their boss? At the moment senators answer to the people of a state, previously they answered to state government.
This changes the reasoning of why we have laws at the federal level. The senators representing a state would be fired for giving up sovereignty; not so for those elected via popular vote. Those elected by popular vote are incentivized to give out goodies to the masses.
State legislators could easily fire and switch senators. Public opinion on the senators didn’t matter nearly as much. If a person of a state wanted influence over the senators they had to focus on local elections.
There’s a whole lot of changes, not really sure what’s being missed?
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I thought the USSR went through famines because of the natural conditions, (drought and unusual coldness).
3 to 5 million Ukrainians starved to death because the USSR deliberately cut off their food supplies in a targeted attempt to kill them.
To put it simply, the famine was primarily impacting Cossacks, which were throughout southern Russia at the time. You can look up the famines and see it’s not specifically targeted.
Though I do grant you, collective farming was the issue and it did have an undue impact in Ukraine.
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If the newer versions are better why do they end up being so short-lived?
This is a good question that motivated a feature-length article published in The Economist this summer (which I've also referenced elsewhere in this comment section) [1]. The article argues that newer versions of constitutions are often overly lengthy due to attempting to include too many laws within the constitution, which can cause problems. The article argues: "Overly long constitutions often create conflicts betw…
It's an interesting article and if you bounced off it because you had a visceral reaction to the premise, like I did at first, I'd recommend taking another whack at it. Jill Lepore, if you're not familiar with her work, is a historian with a reputation as a more rigorous version of people like Howard Zinn. I don't think it's a good article though. In particular, I don't think it coheres. It's about how the modern Con…
Correct. If you make it easier to amend in order to assail your current grievance, it won’t be long before someone else gets into power in order to assail their current grievance, which may be free speech, or worse.
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The US Constitution is still the best one in the world. The 18th Amendment (Prohibition) is an example of what can go wrong with amendments.
Actually it's not. Constitution design is an academic field, a very niche area of political science, and nobody would ever implement anything like the US Constitution today. It would be like using ALGOL for a new project today instead of Python or Java. The US Constitution was very much a version 1.0 project, written before people even knew political parties would be a design constraint. Constitutions are on like ver…
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Amazing how California shifted from reliable Red (Ronald Reagan era) to reliable blue. What was the factor in this seemingly quick shift - population shifts ???.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...