>
So, what changed in next 50 years to completely change the attitudes? The answer is that the American system of law and government has been slowly but steadily destroyed, and replaced with a related, but ultimately different legal and political regime.What you describe is a consequence of another, more-nuanced phenomenon at work: Over time, the population of the U.S. has increased, and the political demographics have changed. But ruthless partisan gerrymandering — plus the massive overrepresentation of small, rural, and conservative states in Congress — have given a minority of the voting population an effective veto over what would be salutary constitutional amendments.
As a result, we're stuck with a system of government that in many ways is creaky, outdated, and undemocratic. People wanting to implement the aforesaid salutary changes are forced to work within the existing system — essentially, hacking it — instead of the more straightforward approach of a constitutional amendment, because entrenched interests don't WANT such changes.
Want examples? Here are a few, off the top of my head:
• Gerrymandering allows a political party with a bare majority in a state's legislatures to create congressional- and legislative districts whose borders are just bat-shit crazy. But the nakedly-partisan "advantage" of such districts is that they give the party in power the ability to carve up the state in a way that gives that party a number of legislative seats that are far, FAR out of proportion to the party's actual voting strength. That, in turn, makes it almost impossible for the other party to take control, even when the other party has a majority of voters.
• Under the "Hastert Rule" in the House of Representatives — named after disgraced and imprisoned former House speaker Dennis Hastert, and applied by every GOP speaker since: When the GOP is in the majority in the House, no bill is brought to the floor for a vote, even if it would have the votes to pass, unless a majority of House Republicans support the bill.
So: No constitutional amendment reflecting any kind of Democratic policy preference would ever get past a GOP-controlled House. And thanks to gerrymandering, even in a Dem-controlled House, no Dem-supported amendment would likely ever get the constitutionally-required 2/3 vote in the House.
Incidentally, discharge petitions don't work to force a floor vote in the House: Any House member who signs a discharge petition is vulnerable to being punished by party leadership (because the names of signers are known). Moreover, House members in "safe" districts — which is most of the districts — are afraid of being "primaried" by the radical nut-jobs in "the base" of their party, who [again due to gerrymandering] wield undue influence in the primary election process. We saw several examples of that in the 2020 and 2022 elections.
• The Senate's filibuster rule requires 60 votes to move any kind of controversial bill — even though (as is well known) the small states already have massively more power per citizen in the Senate than do the large states. Example: Wyoming, population 583,000 and change, has the same number of votes in the Senate as California, population 39 million, or Texas, population 30 million.
So: Senators representing a decided minority of U.S. citizens can blockade a constitutional amendment.
• Still another gerrymandering effect: Constitutional amendments by one party are unlikely to be approved by the constitutionally-required number of state legislatures.
I could go on.