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The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

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Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#111

Post by prottog »

ausbah wrote: post #106
prottog wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a constitutional amendment -- just pass a law. If they're so broadly accepted, it shouldn't be difficult. > the right to birth control You mean the right to contraceptives paid for by the public, covered by insurance, or administered by people who may have sincerely-held religious beliefs against contraception? No state, Supreme Court judgments aside, forbids an adult from paying for birth control pill…

inalienable rights shouldn't be subject to the whims of what most people want. sure that kicks the fan down the road by having to define what is an "inalienable right", but "mob rulel, "tyranny of the majority" whatever you like to call it shouldn't be a basis to deprive certain peoples of basic rights

I agree, inalienable rights shouldn't depend on what other people think or want. That's why basic rights should only be negative rights; in the classical formulation, your rights to be free from the government depriving you of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".

Increasingly, "basic rights" are being morphed into positive rights that require other people supporting (whether in though, speech, or action) said right. Right to birth control? Someone needs to make and administer those pills. Right to housing? Someone needs to build and maintain the houses. I'm afraid that such rights will always depend on the whims of those around you, and hence cannot be truly basic.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#112

Post by prottog »

jfengel wrote: post #109
prottog wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need a constitutional amendment -- just pass a law. If they're so broadly accepted, it shouldn't be difficult. > the right to birth control You mean the right to contraceptives paid for by the public, covered by insurance, or administered by people who may have sincerely-held religious beliefs against contraception? No state, Supreme Court judgments aside, forbids an adult from paying for birth control pill…

Thomas didn't just single out Obergefell. He also mentioned Lawrence v Texas, which overturned sodomy laws. And Griswold, which lets you pay for birth control with your own money. It says nothing about the public paying for it.

> Griswold

You're right -- I was thinking of more recent cases that expanded upon Griswold. Thank you for reminding me.

As I understand it, Justice Thomas's mentioning of Lawrence v. Texas and other laws "to be revisited", so to speak, were limited to the application of substantive due process in arriving at those judgments, and not necessarily to reverse the outcome of those judgments.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#113

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46
johnthuss wrote: post #15

"Seventy-two per cent of Republicans think that the Constitution is basically fine as is; seventy-two per cent of Democrats disagree." Of course this has nothing to do the actual Constitution. It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. The optimist in me wants to believe that even in this polarized culture politicians could compromise and find a middle ground on man…

> It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. This requires clarification. If our government was elected based on a "one person one vote" principle, Republicans would be nearly guaranteed to lose the presidency and Congress. Since 1992 there have been 8 presidential elections. Republicans only won the popular vote once (2004) but also won the presidency in 2000 and 2…

[deleted]

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#114

Post by dragonwriter »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #46
johnthuss wrote: post #15

"Seventy-two per cent of Republicans think that the Constitution is basically fine as is; seventy-two per cent of Democrats disagree." Of course this has nothing to do the actual Constitution. It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. The optimist in me wants to believe that even in this polarized culture politicians could compromise and find a middle ground on man…

> It's a statement about each party's (dis)satisfaction with the current success of their party. This requires clarification. If our government was elected based on a "one person one vote" principle, Republicans would be nearly guaranteed to lose the presidency and Congress. Since 1992 there have been 8 presidential elections. Republicans only won the popular vote once (2004) but also won the presidency in 2000 and 2…

> One other note, the equal-number-of-senators-per-state is the one thing that the Constitution explicitly forbids changing by amendment, the last clause of Article V.

It doesn't forbid it, it just requires states losing equal representation to consent to the change.

Of course, it also doesn’t limit, say, reducing the powers of the Senate, including transferring them entirely to either the House of Representatives or a new third house of Congress, leaving Senators as purely decorative fixtures.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#115

Post by tastyfreeze »

colinmhayes wrote: post #103
tastyfreeze wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senators were meant to represent each state's government not the people directly. The Senate, by being once removed from the people, was supposed to take a longer more measured view on issues. The 17th Amendment[1] broke that and made senators elected by the people. The people have the House. The House has also been broken over time. In 1929 the House was capped at 435 members. Since then the number of people that a…

literally no one is suggesting a direct democracy. The question is whether the constituents of this country are people or states, and I suppose the answer probably depends on whether you live in a populated or unpopulated state.

The Constitution is an agreement between the states, not individuals. When ratifying the Constitution the people of a state voted to join the union as the unit of a state not as individuals. That makes the states the constituents not the people.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#116

Post by [deleted] »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #115
colinmhayes wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

literally no one is suggesting a direct democracy. The question is whether the constituents of this country are people or states, and I suppose the answer probably depends on whether you live in a populated or unpopulated state.

The Constitution is an agreement between the states, not individuals. When ratifying the Constitution the people of a state voted to join the union as the unit of a state not as individuals. That makes the states the constituents not the people.

[deleted]

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#117

Post by nathanaldensr »

prottog wrote: post #82
jfengel wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our Federal constitution is fairly concise Concise to the point of vacuous. It says practically nothing. It describes only the barest outlines of government, and effectively all of the actual implementation has been a matter of legislation, judicial decisions, and tradition. Individual words are scrutinized as if they will somehow be unambiguous if we stare at them long enough, or bring in enough cherry-picked outsid…

> It says practically nothing. Is that not the whole point? "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

This basic fact eludes the intelligentsia who all assume that federal power is The Way Things Are (or Should Be). They assume it's the default position, when in fact the Framers intended it to be a bare-bones fallback for only basic things like the national defense.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#118

Post by nathanaldensr »

colinmhayes wrote: post #105
prottog wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cap on the size of the House should be lifted, so that an approximately equal number of people are represented by each representative, no matter what state you live in. I don't see the problem in both California and Wyoming getting two senators, since that's (as you mention) precisely the point of the Senate. It's very deliberately built in to the American political system that the will of the half-plus-one major…

Quoted post unavailable.

Let's just admit that you have no idea what Mississippians want or would do.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#119

Post by nathanaldensr »

bena wrote: post #42
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #21

I propose a constitutional amendment to ban political parties. ;) But seriously, that would be interesting. Our Founding Fathers never intended there to be this entrenchment of two parties. It would make polarization harder because, well... what are the sides? It would also force greater civic participation to know what candidates actually stand for, and not just at the federal level.

George Washington intended that. But realistically, it's the nature of the beast. Call it whatever you want, you're going to get people with roughly aligned goals exercising their Constitutional right to peaceably assemble to pool their resources to enact legislation they want. "Ban political parties" is about as much of a thought out solution as "fix problems".

Exactly. It essentially amounts to "ban people from talking to one another" in the end.

Re: The United States’ Unamendable Constitution

#120

Post by nathanaldensr »

woodruffw wrote: post #23
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #2

At this point, is the difficulty in amending the Constitution actually a bug? Seeing the polarization, I could see our Founding Fathers deciding that's actually a feature right now because it prevents one side from getting the upper hand and telling the rest to stuff it.

Some difficulty is not a bug, but the current amount of difficulty was probably not intended. Most of the drafters understood that it was important for a government's founding document to strike a balance between two unsustainable positions: immutability (leading to a sort of tyranny of the old and dead) and excessive mutability (leading to short-term thinking and political instability). Our current approach to amend…

How?
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